As many of you know I'm a big fan of Critical Role, the long running DnD let's play stream. Each thursday, a group of nerdy-ass voice actors got together and played Dungeons and Dragons. Currently, they are in their second Campaign. And in the past several episodes, suffered the first permanent death of one of the Player Characters. A lot has happened that I want to wrap my head around, and this post is my attempt to do so.
Spoilers abound after this. You've been warned.
Episode 26 of the new campaign saw the death of Mollymauk Tealeaf, the Tiefling Blood Hunter (a special class created by DM Matt Mercer), was killed in combat by the slaver Lorenzo as one half of the party was trying to liberate the other half from the slave cages. Molly's death is the first non-plot related death in Critical Role, the first to die on screen from battle wounds.
I remember watching the combat unfold live, and watching the community promptly and expectantly lose composure. And I wanted to break down and unwrap a few thoughts. Almost immediately, people were calling for rules questions and getting angry at Matt the DM and the guest player Ashly Burch. A lot of rage and denial got thrown out at them, which is uncalled for.
Here are a few things I noticed during the episode. The first: the slavers were originally placed under a slow spell, and one of them dispelled it. People immediately cried foul that Matt fudged with the rules. He didn't, and he cited the actual rule. You can dispel a person, creature, or effect within range. Matt cited and openly declared against the Slowed effect. He was within the rules.
Second, many people gave Ashly Burch, the guest character, a hard time for her character freezing up and purposefully giving herself disadvantageous rolls throughout the combat scene. It's a roleplaying game, she played the character's reactions. Liam would often do similar as Caleb and as Vax. Ashly is guilty of good roleplay.
Third, there were a lot of clues thrown that the fight was outclassed. Keg's (Ashly's PC) intelligence on the slavers was wrong. I have a lot of opinions on information gathering, and one of them is that information SHOULD be wrong at times. They were not all the same class, there were more of them than expected. The leader, Lorenzo, was using abilities that placed him at a far higher class than the PCs (or was not playing a standard human character which was implied in later episodes).
By the time of Molly's death, Matt was all but screaming at them without breaking the scene to concede the fight. DnD makes it really easy for people not to concede a fight. Some systems do, like 7th Sea or Fate Core. With Keg conceding, Ashly most likely averted a potential Total Party Kill.
Four, there were a lot of bad rolls made by the players. Nature of gaming. Matt is not the type of DM to ignore bad rolls.
Finally, death is a very real risk to Blood Hunters. Their powers derive from their Hit Points. Molly was knocked unconscious not by the attack, but by using his powers. The leader of the antagonist group is right over him, weapon in hand. Cages were full, and Lorenzo decided to make an example of Molly. Taliesin Jaffe, Molly's player, was the first to immediately call out that his powers would knock him out. He didn't recant it. He knew what Molly would do and knew that it would cost him that. He narrated his death, spitting blood at Lorenzo and never closing his eyes.
Death is on the table in a role-playing game like DnD. Death happens. If it didn't happen, what's the point of combat scenes? PCs are not immortal, and you know its time to wrap up the campaign when the party starts to think like that. Death happens, and there are many different ways to mitigate that. None of which were present at the time of the game. And with Matt's DnD games, Death is not always a matter of having a Cleric and a few diamonds on hand to make death cheap. Each time someone is brought back is more difficult with the costs raising or the ritual having to be more elaborate. Death is not a slap on the wrist, its a moment to decide the fate of the game.
Of course, a lot of this all came to me after the fact. Watching the game live was exhausting and shocking and the very nature of gaming. If the cast and crew of Critical Role ever feel like they don't have an immersed audience, the sheer amount of emotion pouring out for Molly-both good and bad-should show that they have an audience with them every step of the way.
The problem with that is, that audience isn't used to death being doing so suddenly. I think people forget some times that these Let's Plays are, by and large, unscripted save for the DM's plots and even then he's improving. Especially in a game where death has been relatively light and everything is kept in a cinematic narrative, its never been felt that Death is present. But there it is.
After Molly's death, I did some thinking, and maybe even a little bit of grieving. Taliesin Jaffe is the player I'd want to be in games. The one who rolls with things and changes it up, who gives his GMs enough backstory to give him something to come up later while leaving so many holes to be opened. He embodies his characters, from Percy's Traumatic Stress to Molly's blase' swish. I began to think of the positive things this had for the narrative of the whole game.
For starters, the campaign needed an on-the-ground Villain. The current setting is set at the dawn of war between two Empires. Which is great, but the players are running low-levelled no ones for now. So most of their quests have been jobs they've landed themselves during the time with the War being the backdrop. There has been no external factor that we know of trying to push the event. Lorenzo gave us that, here we have a dangerous villain who has proven to be the most dangerous physical presence in the game. With his murder of Molly, he has become the most hated character since Ripley (my favorite villain from the previous campaign) by both fans and players. This is good, having an immediate threat and focus is good. Otherwise it just gives the PCs some aimless goals until Something Else Happens. Now they are pushing forward on a task with more than avarice in mind.
Another reason is for character development. The party was already on the road to becoming more than just a band of adventurers working together for fun and profit. We were getting that in the later episodes with the raising of the Kenku child and their adventures in the party city of Hupperdook. They were getting to know each other and like each other, and let down their hair around each other long enough for foibles to be set aside. Molly's death, sadly, has become a glue to keep them all united. Beau and Caleb both seemed to resolve themselves to being better, or at least begin to acknowledge that they aren't and can't be as big a pair of assholes as they thought they were.
Also, to put it bluntly, Molly's death has made them cautious and set the tension at the game high. For story purposes this makes sense. Now, who knows what could happen? It's made the setting less formulaic and less complacent. Stephen King did something similar in The Stand. All he had to do was plant a bomb and decide who survived. The difference of course being that the bomb was planned but Molly's death wasn't. Sometimes, tragedy makes things move.
And roleplay is all about seeing the characters react. Watching the party, what left of it remains, grieve over Molly's body and perform an ad hoc funeral is painful in all the right ways to watch. But nothing more painful and beautiful to watch than to meet Taliesin's new character: the firbolg cleric Caduceus. He's of the Grave Domain, and sees death as a natural part of life. And while there have already been overtures both in game and the fandom to use his Cleric to bring back Molly, I think Clay's very presence tells you why this isn't going to happen: Death is part of the game. We fight liches in this world.
I look forward to seeing what the crew of Critical Role will come up with next. And of course, is it Thursday yet?
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