Thinking Critically

 Like a lot of gamers and gaming fans, I've been watching the Critical Role animated series The Legend of Vox Machina (or as I like to call it "The Knights Who Say F*ck!"). Unlike a number of you, I didn't start out as a fan of the Critical Role Actual Play show. I've actually never listened to an episode. Mostly because these young whippersnappers need to get off my lawn.

The first 3 episodes that were released for it almost made me not want to keep watching. The first 2 episode story arc felt weak. While the introductory tavern brawl sequence is very traditional in concept, the execution of it was so over the top that it stopped being funny. It would be fine if this was a Looney Tunes cartoon and that was the whole of the work, but they had to go somewhere from there and the transition was not smooth in the slightest.

Because in spite of the earth-shattering kabooms that they used in the tavern brawl, they're actually just a bunch of down-on-their-luck adventurers looking to score some gold. And when the characters are stunned by the devastation that the dragon has wrought, I can't help but think "Didn't you guys do the same thing 10 minutes ago? Why was that funny and this isn't? Or vice versa? And why is fighting a dragon so daunting if you can destroy a tavern and the neighborhood it was in and laugh it off?"

(More on the dragon fight later)

The third episode, however, was simply atrocious. Mostly because it felt like a type of RPG session that I deeply dislike. The sort of session where the players are supposed to get up to dumb nonsense because the GM has carefully constructed the scenario such that either A) your dumb nonsense is siloed off from anything that matters or B) your dumb nonsense is required to set off some piece of plot. This was clearly a Type B situation, with the shenanigans calculated to offend the vampiric nobles in attendance.

Once the season's main arc got started, I managed to enjoy it by not thinking about it as Actual Play, but a normally scripted fantasy comedy/action show.

Then I realized that the dragon fight that closed out season 2 made an interesting bookend to the one that opened season 1.

Because those 2 opening episodes were written specifically for the show, as an introduction to the characters and the world before the story proper begins. So the dragon fight from season 1 was written as a scripted narrative, while the dragon fight from season 2 was a result of Actual Play.

Scripted fights typically rely on what I'm going to call the "master stroke." If there's an actual term for this, I'd be interested in learning it. The master stroke is the move or action that shifts the balance of the fight in the hero's favor. If the villain has revealed a weakness, the master stroke is when the hero is poised to exploit it. If there's a lesson that a mentor has been teaching the hero, the master stroke is when he finally internalizes the lesson and uses it to defeat the villain.

In the case of the season 1 dragon fight, the master stroke is when Vax identifies and targets the blue dragon's weak point just as it's about to breathe lightning.

In the season 2 dragon fight, we don't see those sorts of master strokes. Because in a D&D Actual Play fight, the villain falls when they've run out of hit points. And since a dragon is a huge and powerful monster, it's got tons of hit points, which makes the fight feel really long. And it also means that there are things that feel like they should be master strokes (like the bit where they go inside the dragon) that ultimately aren't because they don't do enough damage to take away all of the dragon's hit points.

Ultimately, I think the second season dragon fight went a bit too long and felt anticlimactic as all the things that felt like master strokes didn't really land and the actual master stroke was simply the attack that took away the last of the creatures hit points.

 A slightly more personal post this time around.

Probably the biggest thing to happen for me is that I finally attended my first Super Bowl party.

I was never much for sports in my youth. I did a couple of years of Little League baseball, but was generally nonathletic. The one time they let me pitch during a game, I couldn't get the ball over the plate and was replaced in mid-inning by a girl. She was one of our regular pitchers and really quite good.

And sports on TV was a sign that my beloved Saturday morning cartoons were over. That or the westerns that my dad liked to watch. So no real love there.

The only time I particularly cared about sports was when I worked at a pizza joint. Sports, especially football, were strongly correlated with pizza. Learning the home teams and the big games helped me prepare for what business would be like on those days. Super Bowl Sunday, of course, was a madhouse. The Black Friday of the pizza business.

When I left that job over 3 years ago, I was determined to blissfully ignore the Super Bowl. I did try out a season of Fantasy Football, just because of all of the jokes about how fantasy football is like D&D for sports people. (For the record, it's very different. There's a minimum of agency once you've picked your team and you have to wait for the results of each player's performance over the week.)

When a friend of mine invited me to his Super Bowl party this year, I was very interested. For one thing, I make a point of going to as many of his parties as I can. He's one of the first people to welcome me to San Diego when I moved here. Also I know he doesn't care that much about sports either, so this wasn't going to be about the game. Just an excuse to have a party. I also thought it would be an interesting opportunity to enjoy Super Bowl Sunday, rather than dreading or avoiding it.

Things went pretty well. I brought some of my famous Four Food Group Mac & Cheese. I say "Famous," but this was the first time I made it for someone other than my wife. It's still darn good and I think the people who tried it liked it. But it was competing with a lot of other things that other people had brought, so I wound up with plenty of leftovers. More for me!

Since I knew that there would only be a modicum of attention paid to the football game itself, I thought I would bring some other light games that people might want to play. The one that got some play is Zombie Dice from Steve Jackson Games. It doesn't require a lot of space to play and the rules are simple enough that you can teach it to drunk people. I actually played it with the host and he enjoyed it enough that he got his own set. Maybe next time, I'll get to throw down one of the Fluxx games.