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look at this video of a mouse eating soup and bread and butter

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Weighing in on metroidvania definitions: A metroidvania MUST HAVE a long vertical shaft filled with enemies. I call them "bastard tubes" and they're mandatory

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I need to know what overtook Brennan and Vic to make the most confusing and compelling piece of art i have ever watched at 1 am

I truly have no clue what happened but i feel like ive elevated to a higher plane

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Oxventure - Portal Combat and Final Final Campaign Thoughts

This is gonna be a bit of an essay, but I have had a lot of thoughts over the years.

Honestly, in the end, Oxventure just managed to stick the landing for me. My one major ask with my complex relationship with this D&D show, and the reason that I stopped watching it, is that I wanted to be told a good story. I feel like sometimes when I talk to people about this, I get given the excuse that "it's just a comedy" and that you don't need to follow the rules to have a good time, neither of which is at all where my complaints lie. Don't get me wrong, I'm a massive nerd for the mechanical minutiae of 5E and love to minmax and roleplay using my character's stats and abilities, but the rules don't automatically equal a good story. It certainly can help to create a story with dramatic tension if the rules carry with them the possibility of death and failure, you only need to listen to The Adventure Zone: Balance to see that you can tell a good D&D story that follows the rules as little as it feels like, and have an overtly comedic tone, while also telling a really strong, effective story with a realised world, an escalation in dramatic tension and three dimensional characters.

I love Critical Role, Dimension 20 and that first arc of TAZ, but my personal favourite Dungeons and Dragons actual-play is Not Another D&D Podcast, which is basically the platonic idea of Oxventure (and also is more consistent and a better told story than TAZ in my opinion). The setting and characters are explicitly comedic archetypes, and they can spend half an episode riffing, but they're much more competent at keeping the story on track, which is after all, part of the reason I invest in this game. When I say that Oxventure started to get boring and receptive around Season Two, that I think they mess around riffing with each other too much, which saps time away that they could've spent developing their characters or fleshing out the world in any conceivable manner, and that they don't follow the rules enough for the game to have any tension, I want you all to bear in mind that my favourite D&D show is one that starts with a five minute conversation about dragon pussies before introducing any of the PCs, and that one PC has a possum who has the ability to scribe letters and act as a lawyer, purely because she joked about it so often the DM was forced to canonise it.

I thoroughly enjoy Johnny and the Oxboxtra crew, and I've always thought that they had it in them to tell great stories, and I was proven to be correct when their Deadlands and Blades in the Dark campaigns concluded and told amazingly compelling, dramatic stories without losing their comedy edge, and that encouraged me to give the main campaign another shot. For the most part, this final arc has been more of the same kind that I got bored by and stopped watching, but these last two episodes managed to pull through for me. The story and everything the story has ultimately been about came to head afterward the main fight with the post-climax confrontation with Lilliana.

I love the bold choices that Luke, Andy and Ellen made, technically none of those spells should have worked the way they did, but for the purpose of the story it worked. Corazon's big sacrifice was a great story beat to end on, it was a bit of a cliche, but cliches are used for a reason. What I like about Corazon and Dob's big sacrifices is that Corazon would never have done that in episode one, wheras Dob was always this good and always would have done, and his choice affirms what we love about him. Ellen acted the hell out of that scene too, I'm glad that she got a big moment as well.

This campaign is the one that got me into the TTRPG hobby, it was bittersweet to see it end after all this time. Inspired by Dob, I ended up playing my own Half-Orc Bard in a weekly campaign that lasted five real years, it's not an exaggeration to see that that was a whole and significant period of my recent life that Oxventure kicked off. Knowing now what they know about the way Oxventure turned out, I'm genuinely curious to see what they'll all do differently, since obviously they won't want it to just be the same kind of campaign a second time. I personally hope for a story that sticks the middle, as well as the landing and takeoff, but we'll see!

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It's Lizard Fashion Day!

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Oxventure Sequel, More Thoughts

Following on from a thought I had in this post, I've been wondering what I'd want from a future campaign that would fix my personal issues with the direction that this original campaign took, without fundamentally changing the nature of what Oxventure is supposed to be about.

I said in that post that one of my issues with Oxventure is that there is absolutely no worldbuilding, everything is just a vehicles for improv comedy, which is a problem in that it prevents them from doing compelling drama, but crucially it also limits their comedy potential somewhat. Oxventure fans will say that the focus of the series is comedy, so it doesn't matter if there's not much to the combat, or the puzzles are not fleshed out, or the story doesn't make sense or the settings are vapid.

First of all, I don't agree that Oxventure only exists to do comedy, I could point to a lot of examples of the players doing dramatic acting amongst themselves. Secondly, if I pretend that that's true and that Oxventure is just there for comedy, I can point to other comedy podcasts that have fleshed out worlds that remain internally consistent when the story needs to be dramatic, I could mention A Crown of Candy from Dimension 20 where Brennan wrote an elaborate world mythology about the royal families of a kingdom where everybody is anthropomorphic foodstuffs, but the main thing I have in mind is Not Another D&D Podcast.

NADDPOD's first campaign has a great comedy world, the first arc is about rescuing paladin boy scouts from frogs, the typical in-tune-with-nature druidic community common to D&D settings is instead a redneck swamp village where everybody has southern US accents, the halfling community is less The Shire and instead of a city state ruled by a Boy King and so on. Honestly, this first campaign is my number one favourite actual-play series despite being a very straightforward story played by a smaller than average group, despite being the usual kind of improv. The banter doesn't drag on for too long like I admit even Critical Role does so much that they're releasing an edited down version of the current campaign, it's genuinely extremely funny and isn't in any way limited by the fact that Murph is very strict about rule adjudication.

So my dream Oxventure sequel campaign would be as follows, it'd take place in one location, a single city like Waterdeep or Baldur's Gate, this would mean Johnny and the players would have time to flesh out the world of the campaign and allow us to get attached to it, but also means that Johnny isn't beholden to a format of constantly coming up with new locations in a very short timespan, which is clearly not a strength or interest of theirs. I've been reading the City Watch Collection from the Discworld saga recently, and I would love to play in a comedic fantasy city like that.

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Oxventure - Prism Break, Stray Thoughts

I liked this one! I think this is the closest Oxventure has done to having a downtime session, everybody giving speeches about their values reminds me of the finales of BitD and Deadlands where Luke and Andy invited the player characters to disprove the worldview of the final antagonist. Everything was amazingly in character, especially Corazon and Prudence, and more proof as a "Oxventure should do more drama" truther that they are very good at dramatic roleplay acting when they get the chance.

My usual issue is that the format demands that each episode they go to a new location, but Johnny doesn't really do the legwork of fleshing out locations beyond "forest" or "town", since they have to be in and out and complete a three-arc story in a very tight time limit. This is a problem that I've had for a while since I stopped regularly tuning in, and this issue is finally coming home to roost in this final arc, where it's clear Johnny is trying to do a farewell tour of the notable locations and NPCs, but nowhere is fleshed out, because every location is in a quantum state of only being defined when they need a joke, and has no details set in stone.

I get the subtle impression that there's a bit of metaphor going on in this arc, the NPC they met in this episode seems to represent Johnny, and the world of Geth represents Oxventure itself, something born out of a purpose that spiralled chaotically out beyond the intention of its creator, "they" asking the Oxventurers if Geth deserves to be saved is really Johnny asking the players what they value about the story of the campaign as a whole, and I think the answers they all gave were brilliant. The player characters have really been the strength of this campaign, I honestly don't think there are other actual-play characters quite like them.

[tarakaybee]

i love a pastel/goth

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I have no strong opinions regarding the correct length for spaghetti, but I can't help but feel that folks who insist they have to break their spaghetti because otherwise it won't fit in the pot are fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of pasta.

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I haven't kept quite up to date with Critical Role, but I'm watching the return of the Crown Keepers in this new edition of their side campaign. Morrigan being a paladin of the Raven Queen is another point to this theory, I'm certain of it.

Critical Role Theory

So just to reiterate from this post, I am a “Fearne’s Grandmother Morrighan is the Raven Queen through Dumanancy or the Feywild’s Time Dilation” truther, you all heard it here first so everybody credit me when I definitely end up being right.

Keep reading

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With all the revelations from episode fourteen of FH: JR, there's one question that looms large in my mind. How to we reconcile the relationship between Ankarna and Cassandra with the relationship between The Nightmare King and Kalvaxus? I can't recall any explanation of how Kalvaxus, who was in the end just a regular dragon, ended up making a minion out of a local god? I mean one of them is a red conquerer who wielded fire and had a close relationship with Cassandra and the other is Kalvaxus.

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Everyone else has already made great posts about all the other reasons why they hope FCG’s death is permanent, which I agree with, but here’s my additional two cents. I hope their death is permanent because you loose all semblance of stakes if you never have any permanent deaths. Dnd is designed for people to come back from the dead sometimes, but there are mechanisms to make sure that sometimes is not all the time. Death as a possibility anchors the stakes of the game, the risk that it *could* happen, even if there’s a bigger chance it won’t, is necessary for anything else to feel real. If there’s no worry of permanent death, why are we doing anything at all? Where are the walls of this story, what’s at stake, why do we even care about rushing into danger anymore if we can all just come back? There’s no emotional weight. We’ve already had Laudna come back even though by many accounts she should’ve permanently died in that situation, and while I don’t think it was bad she was able to be brought back, I think there was narrative groundwork that made her coming back make sense (and I think a permanent death from that specific fight would’ve been… not a very fun move from a DMing perspective but that’s a different post). But if FCG comes back too, it means the precedent is now that there is always a way to skirt death. I think that precedent would make the story a lot less fun, and I think Sam understands that, and I don’t think FCG will or should come back. That death was really emotionally weighty and I don’t want to lose that, or the chance of that in the future.

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Just got home from a London trip to watch the Dimension 20 live show. It was the most incoherently chaotic D&D session ever played by man, it was so fun to be there with two of my friends and three thousand nerds. Absolutely immaculate energy at the actual live event but I could go either way on whether the VOD version will be remotely watchable, and that is absolutely a complement.

[tarakaybee]

if you told vin diesel fast and the furious you were gay he'd be like "Some people like driving stick…some people like driving automatic…what matters is you cross the finish line.." and then he'd rev up a dodge challenger and drive through a building and kill 16 people

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What level of nerd am I operating on that I paused Dungeons and Dragons to solve a maths problem

If anybody is wondering how to solve the math puzzle at around the one hour mark in episode fifteen, here's how it goes. No, I did not solve this mid-session, the high school maths required has left my brain in the fifteen years I've been out of school, so I spent an exciting (because I genuinely enjoy maths) little while reverse-engineering the result given in the episode.

If you were trying to figure out how long it takes for one train to reach its destination, you'd just use the time = distance / speed formula (that much I did remember), but since it's two trains at different times you have to tweak it a bit. I'm not sure the "correct" way to do this, but the way I did it was calculate where the Elmville train was when the Bastion City train was. 60 mph is equal to 1 mile per minute, so twenty five minutes later when the other train takes off, it has travelled twenty five miles, meaning the distance between the two trains is 110 miles. So now you can use time = distance / speed, the combined speed of both trains is 130 mph, so distance (110) / speed (130) = 0.846. To turn a fraction into minutes, you just multiply it by sixty, so 0.8 x 60 = 50.76. So that's fifty minutes and then another fraction, so 0.76 x 60 is equal to 45.6, so that's 45 seconds and then another fraction, so 0.6 * 60 is equal to 36, so the precise time is 50m 45s 36ms, but the production obviously rounded off the miliseconds, so the time taken is 50m 46s, so if you add that to 5:30, you get 6:20:46.