The Speedy Detective

I have to confess that when campaign 4 was first announced, I was a bit skeptical of the idea of having so many PCs and three disparate tables with set "labels". I worried that the tables would be too divorced from each other, and I (wrongfully) assumed that most of the characters would be unconnected to the others. I also thought the fact that each table had a different 'focus' had the potential to be jarring.

Having now seen two arcs and at least one full episode at each table, I’m happy to say that my misgivings were quite off the mark. It’s clear that when CR decided to do something different for this campaign, they decided to push the medium of actual play to the limit. In doing so, they’ve created something that caters to many different types of storytelling all at once, an epic with a cast of characters more like that of a sprawling fantasy novel than your average ttrpg. It’s the kind of thing that would be SO difficult to pull off with a home game, but because of the fact that it’s filmed, they’re able to use the fact that it’s a theatrical production as a way to leverage the medium.

One of the things that has struck me is how each table has been rooted in a different genre. The Soldiers’ table felt the most like straightforward dnd — they had a revenge quest and a goal to find Teor’s brother, they left and went on an adventure, they met some allies and did some fighting and ultimately concluded with Casimir dead and Cyd acquired. The Seekers, meanwhile, were on the run from the moment they started, and because they kept leaping out of the frying pan into the fire (all the way up until they reached the Barrowguard), their sessions felt like nonstop action and suspense. The ultimate conclusion at Tannesar shifted somewhat back into a more standard dnd format, but the conversation with Pascard Velmonte also hammered home that this is something different (specifically, how it didn’t follow the standard rules for Speak With Dead and instead used the casting of the spell as a way to further the story).

I’ve just finished episode 19 with the Schemers, and they’re in a THIRD story that’s essentially a political thriller. I don’t think I’ve ever watched an actual play where half of the episode was taken up by scenes with single characters and npcs, but this was so important to how their plans are being set up. It sounds like it’s going to switch to being more collaborative in future episodes, but I still was struck by how different it felt.

The point I’m making here is not “dnd can’t be all of these things”, because part of the joy of ttrpgs is that they CAN be all of these things. The point is that actual play shows, until now, have predominantly been structured to showcase a campaign the way that a home game would, and now we have this new format that plays dnd using blocks of improv to form the equivalent of a tv show or movie. We can move from group to group, we can change the tone up, we can switch characters in and out — and it’s extremely cool and dynamic.

Critical Role has stopped trying to be a home game with additional viewers, and it’s a logical next step to push that even further after ten years. It’s revolutionizing the concept of what actual play can be, at least for me (and let me know if anyone else has done this in a similar format before them, because I’d love to check it out!) Campaign 4 spotlights the versatility of using ttrpgs and improv to build coherent, long-form epic stories with larger casts, and I imagine it’s quite a feat to pull it off with such skill. This feels like it might herald a new shift in the genre, and I’m excited to see how this influence carries over into other actual play shows.

When a client of mine tells me that he became abusive because he lost control of himself, I ask him why he didn’t do something even worse. For example, I might say, “You called her a fucking whore, you grabbed the phone out of her hand and whipped it across the room, and then you gave her a shove and she fell down. There she was at your feet, where it would have been easy to kick her in the head. Now, you have just finished telling me that you were ‘totally out of control’ at that time, but you didn’t kick her. What stopped you?” And the client can always give me a reason. Here are some common explanations:

“I wouldn’t want to cause her a serious injury.”

“I realized one of the children was watching.”

“I was afraid someone would call the police.”

“I could kill her if I did that.”

“The fight was getting loud, and I was afraid neighbors would hear.”

And the most frequent response of all:

“Jesus, I wouldn’t do that. I would never do something like that to her.”

The response that I almost never heard—I remember hearing it twice in fifteen years—was: “I don’t know.”

These ready answers strip the cover off of my clients’ loss-of-control excuse. While a man is on an abusive rampage, verbally or physically, his mind maintains awareness of a number of questions: “Am I doing something that other people could find out about, so it could make me look bad? Am I doing anything that could get me in legal trouble? Could I get hurt myself? Am I doing anything that I myself consider too cruel, gross, or violent?”