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I started to get an inkling of this when he had the Yeti run away rather than finishing the first encounter. Why would he do that? Why wouldn’t he have it fight to the death? My suspicion is that it’s because the players were all rolling badly, and this was only a preliminary fight to get them in the mood for the session, so Pix was not interested in wasting time, energy, HP, and spell slots on an encounter that was ultimately just supposed to be set dressing. So he had the Yeti run away forever, even though it was anticlimactic, because he was already thinking ahead to the battle on the ice lake.

Speaking of which: let’s talk about whatever the opposite of rules-lawyering is. During the battle on the ice lake, we get a callback to the first significant example of Pix bending the rules for fun, when he allowed Mr. Wizard to turn Max into a light source—even though you’re not supposed to be able to use that spell on a living being—by handwaving it with the excuse that the spell was affecting Max’s clothes. We also get several new examples of this attitude: first, giving Ruby advantage against the Displacer Beast when she maybe shouldn’t have had it—because SOMEONE had to hit that thing—and second and most importantly to me, allowing Bro Dude to wield Max’s Spiritual Weapon with Commander Strike, even though that is definitely not how that works.

I’ve already talked at length about how that moment, for me, is the thematic cornerstone of Bro Dude’s character arc. It’s an incredibly powerful moment of friendship symbolically overcoming fear. And it never would have happened if Pix wasn’t willing to bend the rules of the game and allow Impulse to do something creative and unconventional.

Every single person in this campaign (especially Grian) was angling for Bro to have his moment, even though the dice were against him, and the DM is not excluded from that. The way Pix described each killing blow made it sound epic and cinematic—from pinning the Displacer Beast’s true form to the ice, to cleaving the worm creature in two with an uppercut from the Immovable Axe—even though Bro himself was rolling pretty low damage. Pix straight up volunteered the secret of the Displacer Beast the moment Bro made contact with it, not willing to wait for a Perception Check or a Crit to give him the key to victory. And there was even a moment that he broke the cardinal rule of DMing and outright suggested that Scar use one of his portent rolls in Bro’s favor, against the DM, so that Bro would have a shot at killing the worm and finishing off the session with a bang.

(On a funnier note, I also think that think Pix could see that the party was struggling a little bit with the bosses, which is why he held off on the Ice Mephits’ death bursts. Either that or he just forgot until the last one. But I like to think it was an intentional decision to be nice and turn down the difficulty level.)

I don’t know which came first in Impulse’s mind, Bro Dude’s fear of cats or his childhood terror of a feline creature, but the fact that Pix selected the Displacer Beast as a formidable opponent and a callback to that seemingly throwaway joke was inspired. And the way his face lit up when Impulse finally floated the idea of using Tremor Sense tells me so much. I’ve got a theory that the Displacer Beast was also meant to be detected by Tremor Sense; if I’m understanding correctly, the illusion that the creature projects is only a visual one, while Tremor Sense is auditory and would be able to circumvent the illusion and identify the beast’s true location. If that’s the case, Pix was basically on tender-hooks the entire time waiting for Impulse to remember his Dwarven racial features (which he LITERALLY USED earlier in the session but somehow forgets about in combat), so that cheerful “it’s almost as if I designed this encounter with Tremor Sense in mind :-D” has a bit of a connotation of OH THANK GOD I THOUGHT YOU’D NEVER REMEMBER IT

But affectionate roasting of my man aside, I do think this reveals something really lovely about Pix’s approach to game design. It’s not a coincidence that the creatures we encountered in Session Seven could all be turned by Max’s divinity and were weak to his Radiant damage. And it’s not a coincidence that the creatures encountered here in Session Eight could have been outwitted with Tremor Sense. Pix is selecting monsters that will give his spotlight characters a chance to show off their unique abilities and strengths. And the beauty is in the execution: despite every solution being premeditated, Pix still gives the players the freedom to discover the answer to his riddles on their own, so that they get the satisfaction of feeling like it was their own idea that saved the day.

As DMs go, I couldn’t ask for better than Pix. This is a brilliantly smart man who loves the game, loves the story, loves these characters, and most of all, loves the players behind them, and it shows in every little game design decision he makes.

watcher mention in grian’s new hc episode….. shot up from my seat like a sleeper agent and immediately went to work

still images under the cut!