#CR Discourse

[araviir]

Labelling bh as a party of ~misunderstood heroes~ is literally so funny because i watched that whole thing and understood it perfectly well, and i STILL think they suck lmao

[septembermonologues]

i love when i fall behind on bell's hells, see people being incredibly angry at orym with no context, and then when i catch up i find out it's over something like him (33 passive perception) overhearing a conversation that was happening out loud in the same room that he (33 passive perception) was in and him (33 passive perception) finding comfort in his friends (a normal thing for people to do) before he (33 passive perception) tuned out and away from them because he (33 passive perception) wasn't eavesdropping on purpose (he has a 33 passive perception and the conversation was happening in the same room)

[someoneoffthestreet]

I really wish Matt hadn’t made the Ludinus/Thanos parallel himself because now I’m thinking about how hollow this Kill Ludinus plot rings to me but to explain it I would have to explain the writing of Infinity War/Endgame and I don’t think anybody’s interested in that

[everypigeondeserveslove]

This is what CR discourse, specifically Bells Hells & Ludinus Da’leth, that comes from Twitter genuinely sounds like some times

[unhookedchalk48]

Might chug some haterade and write about how a lot of the CR fandom fails to understand mechanics as a form of storytelling and how that's part of what makes TTRPGs a unique medium.

[yoursdearlyeve]

I've read some of the latest "discourse" about Fearne on Xitter...

Yeah, now I can believe some of dem kids are too puritanical

[imperial-cat]

Matt explaining why Beau and Caleb (from a DM's perspective) are the perfect characters for a campaign validates my feelings why c3 wasn't working as well as c2. You just need characters with high INT who investigate, who are interested in the world and their surroundings and who drive the party.

[tanely]

Watching the session zero for Age of Umbra, i wonder if some issue of C3 was also due to lack of wanting to disrupt the already established world making the players have indecision.

watching them do session zeros for the daggerheart campaigns is 1000 more engaging then what they put into C3

[wardensantoineandevka]

genuinely, no criticism I have about Campaign 3 will ever be as harsh and insulting as people who keep trying to defend it by saying "why do you want coherence or stakes or narrative follow through from an actual play? it's a ttrpg game, you can't expect it to have these things. also, the ending being happy is more important than any of those things."

like, that is the meanest thing you can say about this campaign, the storytelling ability of the cast, and actual play as a narrative form. that you can't expect coherence and stakes and narrative follow through from any of it and that personal wish fulfillment is more important to the work than telling a good story.

that "defense" is perhaps the most belittling and demeaning of the show as an artwork and of the cast as storytellers and of the form as a medium I've seen in a while. genuinely meaner and more dismissive than any criticisms of this campaign I've seen.

"it's fine and good because you can't expect it to make sense or be anything other than self-indulgence" Jesus Christ. if a significant number of people tried to defend MY work like this, I'd spend the next several months doing some serious soul searching.

[isuara-ez]

One of the small things I’m grateful for, is that the song “Good luck babe” didn’t come out until after campaign 2 finished airing. #ThoseShippers would’ve been even more insufferable. (Fantastic song though)

[burr-ell]

My biggest problem with campaign 3 as someone who fell off around episode 80 is that none of the characters seem to want anything. None of them really have a goal they're working towards nor do they have any strong opinions about the MAIN PLOT of the campaign.

To be honest, the first thing I thought of when I read this ask was the C3 defenders who have been insisting that so much criticism of the finale comes from people who dropped off a while ago and therefore wouldn't know. But what you're saying here points to the actual problem behind why the final episodes of the campaign were such a mess. If it's episode 80 of 121 and there's only a perfunctory sense of motivation from the characters? That's a problem, and it's going to make it nearly impossible for the finale to stick the landing. To quote @wardensantoineandevka, it's an Act 2 problem, not an Act 3 problem.

I've heard more than once that "nuh-uh, Bell's Hells does have motivation, it's called altruism", and I'm going to take a detour to explain why that's not enough. If you've followed me long enough to know the deep lore, you know I used to be a fan of Voltron: Legendary Defender, whose final seasons were notoriously disastrous. Many fans hated it (for different reasons), while general audiences mainly thought it was mid. Deeper research into the production history nets inconsistent results; a lot of unsourced rumors and "common knowledge" got spread around Twitter and Tumblr about why the show fell off the rails so hard, and it's difficult to parse what feels true from what actually happened.

What I do know, however, is what I actually saw in the show, where the main cast feels as if their motivation to be there is "we're the protagonists". There's very little development of emotional connection between the characters beyond a surface level, and the characters don't have a personal investment in what they're doing. (And no, "they're just altruists" is not sufficient motivation. The altruism, like the characters, is pretend.) They're there because they got to the giant robots first. So at the end of the show, where they've escalated the stakes to "the whole MULTIVERSE is going to be destroyed", it lacks weight because none of the work has been done throughout the show to make it feel like that matters to the characters. Act 1 was promising if a bit shaky, but Act 2 is a mess, and it turned Act 3 into sludge.

To bring it back to better stories: why is it Vox Machina dealing with the Chroma Conclave? Because it's the right thing to do and because their city and home that they had invested themselves in got suddenly and violently attacked, and by a group associated with a dragon they previously killed, and they picked up more reasons along the way. Why is it the Mighty Nein dealing with Cognouza? Because it's the right thing to do and because the major player involved was piloting the body of their friend who died in an incredibly traumatic and game-changing moment, and they picked up more reasons along the way.

Why is it the Hells dealing with Ruidus? Because it's the right thing to do and...because Imogen had moon dreams and Orym's family was killed and everyone else is sort of there. Why is it Team Voltron dealing with the multiverse problem? Because it's the right thing to do and...because they're the ones with the giant robot. More than one person has described the vibe as "we met during freshman orientation and talking to anyone else would be scary".

The Hells are not played with the level of intentionality that this plot requires—but ultimately, as many people have pointed out, most of the burden of this falls not on the players but on Matt. Being so hands-off during character creation meant that he allowed the cast to make characters better suited to a completely different story than what he wanted, and was either unable or unwilling to pivot to accommodate. ("Pulpier and deadlier" is getting passed around and dunked on for a reason.) The cast was mainly trying to thread the needle of playing true to their characters while also trying to meet the needs of Matt's story when he was frequently keeping them in the dark about what he wanted for the sake of surprising them.

When the big setpiece moment of episode 51 came and went, the campaign became so focused on getting everybody through plot points that the only conversations they had were the seemingly endless circular god debates that went nowhere. It's not really a "nuanced morally gray story" as its defenders claim; it's the DM seeing the party go in a direction and then throwing something else at them to "complicate" things in a way that either gets forgotten about entirely (Hearthdell) or just grinds the story to a screeching halt for no payoff (Feywild trust exercises). These problems are most noticeable in the final arcs (particularly with the Arch Heart appearance—not giving Abu any direction and just letting him improv was a very poor decision), but the feeling that Bell's Hells are just a ping-pong ball bouncing from fetch quest to vaguely-related fetch quest, rather than active agents in their own story, was present well before that.

Campaign 3 probably won't be remembered as bad. At the end of the day, I think it's just mid. And honestly? That might be worse.

[luckthebard]

Will probably expand on this at some point but I want to choose violence now and really quickly fire off the opinion that:

The fact that a large chunk of people vilify imperfect mother Marion Lavorre but excuse and coddle actual violent cult leader Liliana Temult is a fundamentally conservative position which is quick to forgive a woman they can decide is manipulated and childlike and without agency while finding fault with everything another woman does because she’s a sex worker.

[kerosene-in-a-blender]

I think my biggest issue with a lot of the storytelling decisions in C3's finale is that it seems like the story prioritized being nice over being interesting.

It's nice that ultimately the gods-become-mortal plan went off without a hitch and Predathos left without complications, but it would have been more interesting to see one or two gods be uninterested in it and get consumed or flee. It's nice that Ashton choosing to allow the Matron to use them to catalyze the ritual didn't permanently kill him, but it would have been more interesting as a character beat if it did (or as per this previous post a resurrection skill challenge occurred). It's nice that serving as the Vessel of Predathos didn't permanently change or kill Imogen, but it would have been interesting for all the unknowns about what serving as the Vessel means to come to something other than "not much as it turns out". It's nice that Opal is not longer obligated to serve Lolth, but it would have been more interesting if her obligations as a Champion stood (and she got to attempt to reform Lolth's image by influencing her from infancy). It's nice that the leadership of Vasselheim is mostly understanding of the Hells and bares them no ill will, but it would have been more interesting to see the Hells held to account for betraying the Accord. It's nice that Orym is not (and indeed never was) bound to serve Nana Morri, but it would have been more interesting for him to have to grapple with paying that debt now that the threat has passed and he's also starting a romantic relationship with Dorian. It's nice for Keyleth that divinity being reorganized means Vax can exist on the mortal plane now and they can start a new relationship, but it would have been more interesting to see her have to come to terms with the fact that with the Matron gone from her realm into that of mortals, it is not her, but rather Vax and his choices, that is keeping them separated.

[utilitycaster]

I haven't started this weekend's Nein Again episode but I am just thinking about how both the Mighty Nein and Vox Machina had some fascinating relatively long-term disagreements or conflicts and even some blow-ups that ultimately provided so much space for character development. The scene with Caleb telling Fjord that some degree of risk is good only hits the way it does because Fjord had previously held him at swordpoint and Molly and Beau had laid into Nott (and that conversation in turn is how we found out about Nott's feelings about Caleb as someone to protect). Imagine if Scanlan yelled at Vox Machina like that and you didn't get Percy yelling back at him to actually treat his daughter like a person rather than some idealized concept he had to be perfect for! Like, Bells Hells' refusal to ever let arguments actually happen feels like...well, like you're playing an RPG and keep picking the most dead end option for the conversation every single time, and I still wish they like...didn't plaster over every negative feeling almost immediately because it's genuinely wild how like...every single little thing that could have transformed this campaign into something better didn't happen.

[milquetoad]

actually i still think it’s crazy that orym just said “no one here can guarantee that the actions they are proposing will not cause devastation on a cosmic scale, until we can then i am not interested in entertaining said proposals at all” and a lot of people went ohhhh my god. this guy is so annoying

[undead-knick-knack]

You know what, I think enough time has passed and the fandom has calmed down enough, I can finally give my genuine thoughts and feelings about Imogen and Laudna as a ship.

I put it below a keep reading because it got kind of long, and also I'm not super confident about writing meta