Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
Sign in- Marketplace
Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
Sign in
i watched this fight for the first time tonight and did not agree with the metagaming
hitting fearne with dagger not sword for 4th attack to break concentration? how did they know what spell it was or that it was concentration. no arcana roll and not a caster so i call bull on that. imo vs a baddie with legendary resistances the player should say im casting a spell not what it is. if the baddie is a caster then arcana / counterspell whether to use resistance or not. if a tank then why should they know whether or not its dangerous or what the v s m components are. i felt they were forced into this fight all along and frankly it was mismanaged. matt is a great dm but he made mistakes we wll do but going exalted despite ashton's damage should have been first. very unsatisfactory fight all over imo.
I point you to The Monsters Know What They're Doing for explanations on how and why the monsters know, do, and justify these things.
Honestly I don't know what happened. Woke up with 10 int.
Just your friendly awakened tree.
Totally not an ancient nature god in disguise.
That would be absurd.
Right...?
Matt is an amazing world builder and great storytelling DM, but he can be pretty problematic when it comes to combat. I've noticed he often has his monsters act on meta knowledge he as the DM has but they shouldn't have, especially when it comes to boss fights. Other times he cheeses fights by overpowering his bad guys, actively negates things the players try to do, or he just doesn't let them do things they should be able to do. I like him and he's super entertaining, but I'm honestly really happy he's playing as a player in campaign 4 while Brennan Lee Mulligan takes over DM duties.
The two Otohan Thule fights (C3 E33 and C3 E91) were both really egregious. He massively overpowered Otohan for both fights, giving her an absurd action economy compared to the party. It felt obvious that he wanted both fights to go a certain way and he made it happen by making Otohan powerful enough to effortlessly steamroll the party both times. Which would be fine if he had allowed the party to flee either fight, but he didn't. The second Otohan fight was worse than the first, with the way he essentially made her go super-saiyan and become resistant to all damage and deal more damage when the party was doing too good at surviving the fight. And when that wasn't enough he had her chug a custom health potion that never existed before and was impossible for the players to acquire, and which undid most of the work they'd done in that fight. During that fight Matt also had Otohan attack players who were down and feigning dead because he knew the players were faking, and he had Otohan attack Fearne to break concentration on her healing aura even though she was focusing on other characters when Fearne cast it and she had no knowledge or reason to suspect Fearne was doing anything that would heal the party (or even concentrating on a spell). Just watching that fight was a slog, and by the end it was pretty clear Matt was the only one at the table having fun.
The Lorenzo fight in C2 E26 should probably have gone at least a little better for the party, but Molly getting downed stemmed from Taliesin taking a gamble on blood hunter abilities. Still don't blame him for getting frustrated and leaving the table though. But the temple fight irked me because of the way Matt shut down what Liam said he was doing with Caleb's slow spell. That may have also been one of the times Fjord got targeted after casting Hungry Hungry Hadar even though the targets, being in darkness, would have no way to know who cast it, where they were, or that they would need to hurt that person to trigger them to stop concentrating on the spell.
Again, Matt is wicked talented and creative. I just think he has some bad habits when he sets up a combat encounter and has his mind made up on how he thinks it should go. I also think he has a hard time balancing combat encounters for the size of the party when he sets up boss fights because he beefs the bosses up too much to compensate for having 7+ players. With a properly balanced combat encounter, lots of weak enemies are more threatening but still able to be beaten in a fair fight compared to one supercharged boss.
I think the balance gets hard as well when you consider the purpose of Critical Role is to entertain. Watching combat can be a real slog but it would also get pretty boring if they brought out a cool terrain model, every one oooos and ahhhs, and then it's over in a round and a half which lets face it is how most home games go. They need to beef up the encounter so that it's long enough to justify having a combat and that must be really hard to balance for
This is an old thread, but I'll offer my thoughts. The C2E26 fight was not metagaming, a PC made an extremely reckless decision to charge into the face of a bad guy when they literally had something like 4 HP left. When the bad guy attacked them, they used their reaction to try and give disadvantage to the attacks, using an ability which damaged themself. They went out cold because they took enough damage to go to 0. However, because the bad guy was already attacking, Matt felt it didn't make sense for him to stop attacking, so he did two attacks in melee which cost 2 death save failures each.
The boss in C3 E33 was something like a level 20 Fighter (Psi Warrior), who had a magic item which gave them part of the Echo Knight subclass kit as well. So yes, very overtuned. But in Episode 33, the party was split on what to do and some ran, others fought, and killing downed party members was specifically the boss trying to provoke a response in another PC. Ruthless, but not metagaming. Well... it was a little railroady, it seems like Mercer was trying to encourage Imogen to give in to her powers, by repeatedly asking until she got the message that he wanted her to do that.
The really problematic fight with her was actually episode 91. It was a forced fight. The party was fleeing from an attack they caused in a city, one PC had planted a tracker device on the boss (it was planted back in episode 33, actually). Despite one party member specifically saying they were checking the tracker to keep tabs on the boss, Mercer ignored that and had her get close anyway. The party blocked the tunnel she was chasing them down. She came up from a different tunnel and intercepted them anyway.
In multiple comments in cooldowns and talk-backs, Mercer said that running away was always an option. Well, no, it wasn't. The party was already running away before she was anywhere close to them, and they tried to continue to run away and block her from following, they have experience seeing that running away doesn't work with her, and she killed the first PC upon engaging. Of course the PC's didn't run away. Matt might have thought running was valid, but his actions made it clear that running away was not an viable option.
Yeah, but Lorenzo doesn't know what death saves are. Does he really know that he needs to stab the guy who's bleeding out on the ground in front of him twice to make sure he's dead without Matt's DM knowledge driving him? Taliesin definitely got out over his skis in that fight, no doubt. But if I were running Lorenzo in that situation I wouldn't burn an action attacking a downed enemy when there are more still on their feet.
But if I'm being honest I prefer that fight worked out the way that it did. I actually preferred Cadeuces as a character over Mollymauk.
I see this argument a fair bit - the “would the bad guy really stab the unconscious figure without meta knowledge?” I do not really buy that. Even in the real world, it was common practice to stab a downed enemy to finish them off. They even made special weapons to do so. In a world with magical healing, you can bet that is going to be standard practice.
As I said on this thread a number of years ago, I think there are plenty of times Matt meta games to the detriment of the game and player agency. But finishing off a downed character? That’s just how the game is designed, and any intelligent bad guy trying to kill would generally take that action.
At the very least the first swing had to happen because Lorenzo's attack was what triggered the reaction which knocked Molly out. The attack was already under way.
AND I just went back and actually re-watched the ending. Matt said that Lorenzo was going to take two Glaive attacks against Molly (who I think was the only one within range anyway) before Talesin used the Blood Maledict which knocked him out. I think that the Blood Maledicts only deal damage if you heighten them, and Talesin said he had committed to taking the damage even after rolling it and knowing he was knocked out. Matt had committed to the attacks, and Matt knows his players don't want him to pull his punches, so taking the second attack back would have been a blatant taksie-backie.
Unless you assume magical healing is a PC-only skill and NPCs have never encountered it, finishing blows are not meta knowledge.
In-game, how many people do you think Lorenzo had killed before? It's entirely reasonable to think experience had taught him that a couple stabs to a downed/unconscious opponent was generally enough to finish the job
Active characters:
Edoumiaond Willegume "Eddie" Podslee, Vegetanian scholar (College of Spirits bard)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Peter "the Pied Piper" Hausler, human con artist/remover of vermin (Circle of the Shepherd druid)
PIPA - Planar Interception/Protection Aeormaton, warforged bodyguard and ex-wizard hunter (Warrior of the Elements monk/Cartographer artificer)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
By the same token, in a world with magical healing it makes sense to move on and target other people who could apply said magical healing. Especially since magical healing includes magical revival from death, which can make the coup de grace a wasted effort anyway. I get where y'all are coming from, though. Sounds like I'm just an oddball because I prefer to have my baddies prioritize preventing potential healing rather than double-tapping.
I had forgotten that Molly's attack was a reaction and Lorenzo was mid-attack anyway. In that context it makes sense that Lorenzo was invested in finishing the attack anyway.