The ale moment, the "I...would like... to -" line and everyone freaking out telling him no no, is one of those early not-often-mentioned C1 moments I remember clearly to this day and strongly associate with Grog. The imminence of his rage was perfectly threatened and talked down. Its a favorite moment for sure. 😆
This CR episode highlights the importance of expressing the intent behind actions. "I'm swinging my axe at its head again, still with the intent of killing it" is a bit unnecessary, but "I'm flying as fast as I can away from the battle... for the purpose of gathering allies to aid our battle" could've allowed the opportunity of clarifying the situation and preventing table conflict and wasted turns. Hindsight and all that, of course.
Exactly. That’s why I do try (and hopefully succeed) in these videos to separate my advice from just, you know, having the benefit of hindsight for these specific examples. I do have the benefit of not having been at that table, having played a lot more 5e than they had at this point, and also having thought about this episode for the past 7 years 😁
communication problems is the main reason I often say something out loud, like "since I just rolled up and don't realize the ranger is wrapped up in the rug of smothering, I'm just going to eldritch blast it." *ranger pretend muffled yells* "oh no! sorry!! ok, everyone, don't, hit the rug!" or "since I know that barbarian and paladin have that guy covered, I know we need to get the bad guy's plans, so I'll run into the office to scoop up all the papers from the desk." it may seem silly to declare your intentions since that's meta knowledge the characters wouldn't be privy to, but it helps in avoiding player distrust, disagreements, and frustration.
This is my go-to. I've since gotten the reputation of being the player least likely to metagame because of it, but all I'm trying to do is avoid situations like the one in the video.
As a DM I've seen players who will try to do something detrimental to the party because their character doesn't know something. However If another party member tries to tell their character the context of a situation that would prevent them from acting in that way, they seem to be annoyed by it, or they say its not that persons turn. Which is why I always remind such players that talking is a free action, and as long as the length of the conversation is reasonable its completely allowed for exactly this kind of situation
I do this too, especially if I'm playing a character with a "dump stat". Like I was recently playing a pretty similar character to Grog, where I had very low intelligence, but was very smart about tactics. So we may approach a situation that may set my battle sense on edge, and I'd make a third person declaration of my belief with an in character statement. Or similarly if I'm doing someone I know is wrong/will lead to a bad outcome/isn't effective. I'll do that exact same thing. I'll state something like "As a player I know pulling this lever probably isn't a good idea, but *my character* knows levers open doors so he's just going to pull it" I think that's one of the hardest things about RP, is that a lot of times there is bad behavior and awkwardness and it's not always clear what's in game and what's out of game.
It also helps in situations where "It's what my character would do!" ... Somewhat. Little things like, say... I'm a dwarf who has just encountered some elves that the party needs for some quest, except the elves hate and distrust dwarves. This leads to the elves pissing off my dwarf, so my dwarf does something really spiteful that sours the elve's relationship with the party somewhat. It helps when the party finds the situation particularly hilarious out of character because these elves have managed to piss off most of the party as well simply due to my character's presence. In character, however, my dwarf got chewed out heavily by one of the other party members. However, (from the same campaign in fact), it doesn't help when what your character is trying to do (leaving the party in the lurch, right as the campaign is coming to a climax), even if there is a perfectly reasonable in-character explanation for it. (Which is different from a party member leaving the party in the lurch AFTER the climax has mostly been resolved because they got a better offer from the BBEG. Which also happened.).
yeah i honestly envy him so much, to be able to both be in the story, in the character and at the same time keep yourself from taking the game too much to heart is something phenomenal and I wish I could learn to do the same. It often seems like either one or the other is possible sommetimes
While the main Orion issues don't occur here nearly as much yet, I do think it's good to note that, the moment Vex killed the Beholder, Orion was packing up his things, ready to leave. Clearly not having what was happening. Not exactly the most important part of the episode, but it does show the seed growing, so to speak.
@@SupergeekMike Indeed so. What's sad is that in one of the later Tibs Episodes, the Vox Moochina one, he's legit great. No shenanigans, or anything. And then the Old Woman happens...
I loved Dungeon Craft’s recent video on the subject because he totally pointed out the issue of the Old Woman - yes, they all killed her. But when local law came knocking and said, “Hey, you killed an old woman? That’s messed up, that doesn’t look good and you’re already in hot water…” Tiberius dug his heels in and refused to acknowledge that their actions might have unintended consequences regarding their status in the political/legal world.
@@wolfox7776 Vox Moochina was the response to the Old Woman - it was Uriel's and Allura's admonishment that drove them to go help the farms that were losing livestock.
Another point of miscommunication is that Orion thought that as the quintessential d&d monster, a beholder was just too difficult for their party to kill. In reality, they are a difficult monster, but with 8(!) party members, they could handle it. To me, Orion seemed actually scared to face kvarn, which made his side of the plan-making just seem unreasonable.
That is exactly what people mean by metagaming, though. Its possible that Tiberius has maybe heard of a beholder before, and I'm sure he's heard that they are strong, but they're Vox Machina, and have faced innumerable powerful foes up until this point. It's Orion's out-of-game knowledge that would lead him to be this scared of a beholder, and that fear is exacerbated by the fact that he very obviously doesn't trust Matt to not throw them against a creature that they're incapable of facing.
This was around the time Orion got some medical news and thought he was going to die irl. From this point on he gets kind of protective of his character, gets kind of edgy, and just slowly starts devolving into "that guy."
Communication is very important. Don't just assume that what you are describing makes the same image in everyone's heads. In a recent game, my character was almost killed by a mining cart. The way the tracks were described, I was thinking subway tunnel, with tracks in the middle and walkways on the side. It was not. It was tracks filling the entire tunnel with no space on either side. If I had realized that, I never would have suggested walking down them, or at the very least, I would have said I was paying more attention. I thought I was perfectly safe to the side of the tracks, and then got nailed. Sucks, but the only thing you can really do about it is just be more clear about what you believe you are seeing, and just verify.
Honestly this is why I put luck rolls in my game. you you think a feature of the world might be there and make sense, roll a d20 on a 1-10 that feature doesn't exist on a 11-20 it does. So say your ducking into an ally to try and escape some and you ask is their a trash bin roll for luck. Now a Dm might increase or decrease that success or failure threshold based on how likely they think a particular feature is to be in the world so trust and things still need to be there like any table but I find it's a fun way to incorporate a cool feature into the game.
yeah that’s a massive pet peeve, especially if the DM says “Nope you said it” when you realize you misunderstood what was being described. Sure _I_ misunderstood, but my character would have seen there’s no room!
This is very true. I am reminded of when Matt killed Keyleth when she dove off a cliff, misjudged, falling toward rocks, then tried to save herself by changing into a goldfish. It all screams to me that what she was imagining was simply NOT what Matt thought he was describing. This is the kind of situation where I think the DM has to step back and ask themselves, would the *character* have been able to see how (blatantly) dangerous it was, since the character is supposedly seeing it, while the player is trying to imagine it in their head. The fact she turned into a fish to save herself instead of a bird is basically proof that she wasn't imagining the same thing as Matt at all, but Keyleth the character would have seen it in stark detail as the rocks rushed up to meet her. This is where there really should have been a little retconning to avoid a ridiculous, credulity-straining scene, since Keyleth really *wouldn't* have done what Marisha made her do, if she had really been there and seen what it was Matt intended her to.
"Matt killed Keileth". I think it's more likely that Marisha initially misjudged the situation and then decided to play around with that misunderstanding, instead of retconning the whole thing. After all, at that level, death is more of a discomfort. You can afford to get yourself killed for the lolz. Also, it's not like Matt went and said: "Nope, what's done is done, now die". He instead reiterated the cliff's description, and Marisha could have chosen to change her course of action. Luckily they went for the wacky option instead, since the whole thing was funny as hell.
Matt has said before that successful persuasion won't make someone completely go against their nature. The fact the mindflayers let him be with a 25 is LUCKY.
Matt says that and the DMG says that, too. I believe almost word for word, even. And I agree, except I wouldn't put it as lucky, more that Matt was anticipating Orion to throw a fit/derail things even more and found a way to shut things down without giving him angrier by having things backfire
@@niedude Matt is a good dude so he would totally do that but he wasn't cutting anyone a break that fight. Grog was restrained for mostly the entire fight and Scanlan and Pike were almost killed via their brains being extracted if I remember correctly. I genuinely think Matt was prepared to psychically blast him out of the sky but who knows
I really appreciate your videos. Because of how unfortunately sour things really turned with Orion towards the end of his time with the show, I feel like many find it difficult to look back on earlier episodes without that lens of what he eventually became clouding over everything else. But you're looking at these episodes as they come and judging them in a vacuum, and I feel that you come away with much more nuanced and useful critiques and commentary as a result. I've just always found it a shame that things got as bad as they did. Watching Critical Role for the first time and not knowing what was going to happen with Orion/Tiberius, I really just saw the rough spots as the same rough spots everyone else had. Over the course of these years of campaigns, every player has grown and become much better players by learning from their mistakes. As just one example, Sam Riegel has openly admitted that it wasn't until late in campaign 1 (towards the end of the Chroma Conclave) that he actually started taking Dungeons & Dragons seriously. It's just a shame that I can't live in a timeline where things didn't get so bad with Orion and I could actually see what an Orion who similarly had years to improve looks like.
@@forfaerghus8092 Yeah Tiberius the character is great. The real shame is that Orion claimed Tiberius so he had to be removed from the comic adaptation series. It would've been neat to at least see more of the dynamic there.
@@smoogieboogie1694 I cannot fault Orion for that since he did create Tiberius and probably still cares a lot about his character. And if I may add, what Matt did in episode 64 felt just plain spiteful.
@@forfaerghus8092 It's not spiteful at all lul wut? It was super respectful and gentle, with the cast and their characters getting a chance to say a real goodbye to what was their friend for a large part of the beginning. Spiteful would have been completely ruining his memory by like having him get absolutely destroyed a couple episodes after Orion left. 30+ episodes (like >6 months) later is not spite.
I’m mostly on board with your point that Orions behavior in this episode wasn’t THAT egregious, and it really only stands out now in hindsight. The communication and planning aspect is a big part of what went wrong. I do think, though, that while what he was doing wasn’t “metagaming,” he did engage in another common player behavior that can bug DMs: attempting to resolve a relatively straightforward combat encounter by recruiting an army of NPCs to fight the battle for them, basically subverting the whole quest. I’m sure plenty of people have seen it: “my character has a noble background, let’s just go to the King and ask for him to send his Paladin retainers with us?” And yeah, Matt kinda set himself up for that in this instance by putting K’varn in the middle of a city of Mind Flayers, but as an experienced player it does come across as a bit… unsportsmanlike on the player’s part, because either the DM has to shut it down (ruining the player’s fun), or go along with it and run an extremely anticlimactic, one sided final boss fight. Also worth pointing out that Orion tried to do the same thing during the Briarwood arc, sending a message to Tiberius’s father asking him to send the Draconian army to fight them. So it’s not just a one-time thing.
I’d say requesting the Draconian army to fight the Briarwoods is probably worse in comparison because that is _Percy’s_ character arc. Sending an army to do the work for you robs Tal of agency as a player. Not to mention Delilah is a necromancer and Sylas is a vampire. What is the Draconian army going to do against an army of the undead and an immortal creature that can only be killed by sunlight or the equivalent spells. If they don’t have the necessary resources available Tiberius would be sending them to their deaths and potential use as puppets against him and the rest of the party. Of course I can’t remember if the intent was to send the army to do the work while they sat back and did nothing (with the argument being that they can’t leave the city to go fight the Briarwoods themselves) or to have the army join them in the fight. Either way it’s still Percy’s quest and really their strategy of quietly sowing the seeds of rebellion and taking down the Briarwoods’ generals one by one was probably better than broadcasting their arrival with an army of hundreds at their backs.
Maybe I'm just more oldschool in my sensibilities (even though I basically started with 5e) but to me, part of the game is using every resource at your disposal to make sure you win a fight. Now, that's just my style of game -- Matt likes to run a more cinematic game with big setpiece encounters, and that's fine. But I like when players color outside the lines to give themselves an advantage because it means they're invested and actually thinking about the game, not just running in and using whatever they have on their character sheet in an all-out brawl hoping it'll work out. They found a creative way to eliminate the mind control. It seems silly to not reward the same level of creativity to make the fight easier just because it might not feel as epic or climactic. I'm sure we've all had encounters that we designed to be these big, harrowing action sequences, only for a cheeky player or a series of bad rolls to end it faster than expected. It's a learning experience. In the meantime, I don't see why a small army of Illithids coming in like the Riders of Rohan at the battle of Helm's Deep wouldn't be cool as hell. I love Matt Mercer as much as the next TTRPG nerd, but I smell a little bit of DM pride coming through here.
@@Boundwithflame23 Oh, that was way worse. Rallying people to rise up against the monster oppressing them is completely legitimate, and the party was invested in the arc of getting Clarota a redemption arc with his people (even though he was a monster himself who was likely always going to betray them). That's a justified character journey. Trying to call in a squadron of knights who have no connection to the plot and your character hasn't been closely connected to and asking them to ride in makes no sense in the world and no sense for the campaign. Vex even said, "Uhm, I wasn't aware we had an army we could just call in this whole time," because of course they didn't, that would make no sense. Despite that, there's still a way you could let your character try it in a way that fits. They needed an army, but they couldn't use the connections they'd build up in Emon to help because Uriel was under control and the party had burned their local political capitol. So have Tiberius be more tentative about his proposal. "It may be possible to convince my father to aid us, if we can find evidence. Should I try to call him in?" Matt was super generous about letting the players start an insurrection with very minimal effort because it was the overall plan. If they'd had to plan to come up with evidence to send to Tiberius' father to get the army, Matt might have allowed it. But Tiberius tried to draw them in by sending off a single letter-he was trying to shortcut major issues instead of putting in a bit of team effort. In short, don't just have your character say he's solved a problem and pretend it's going to fly.
Matt gave *very* clear indications that the other Illithid were not going to be friendly. He also clearly held back when Tiberius ignored those warnings and went in, he stated that he could have mind blasted him three times in that round, and most DMs I know would not allow someone to Persuade out of an attack in that situation, given that he was clearly trying to deceive them, neither speaking Undercommon nor communicating via telepathy while in the guise of Clarota.
Sending Cannon fodder against a master necromancer might not be the best plan of action. Might aswell abuse his arrogance now before the mind flayer consolidate the city.
Yes, there was miscommunication. Which wasn‘t on Orion alone. But that explains why Tiberius acted in a way he wasn‘t exactly helpful and messed around somewhere else entirely. HOWEVER: It neither explains nor excuses how ORION dealt with the situation: He gets angry. Mostly at Matt as it seems. And sours the mood on the table. There is a situation where somebody describes the battle as a scene from a specific movie (don‘t remember, might have been „Transformers 3“ or something…). And Orion‘s response in anger, with Matt on the table, is something like „Yeah. And that movie sucked!“ I have little patience for a player disrespecting a DM like that, especially during the game, at the table. Critique a DM when he has made a mistake or a session that sucked. But don‘t throw something like that at him while the game is still running. The atmosphere at the table wasn‘t bad because there was miscommunication, it was bad because Orion pulled down the mood. And while this can happen to all of us, and nobody will always be perfect in how they handle a session where they feel like they have been screwed over (as Orion might have felt for good reasons in this one), I really don‘t think it‘s a coincidence that it was Orion who this happened too. Lot‘s of blame to go around, why there was clear miscommunication on the table. That‘s not on him. But it IS on him, that it then escalated and turned so sour.
Right, that’s the biggest lesson I discuss in the video, you have to be in control of how your frustration manifests at the table. (It was Iron Man 3 BTW, although I don’t remember the context of why Taliesin referenced it, but it was yet another example of Orion’s frustration manifesting in really aggressive and unhelpful ways at the table.)
It's been a while since I've seen this episode, but any time someone tries to do "social" encounters in the middle of combat it shows a big disconnect. Five rounds is 30 seconds of real time, and while I get that DMs/Parties sort of mess with the space/time continuum when it comes to conversations that happen during combat (although most of it is not in character), going somewhere far away and trying to convince a bunch of people to join you in a fight that started 18 seconds ago and will be over in 12 more seconds just doesn't really work at all. At some point the plan that was in his head broke down and he didn't really adapt to what was actually happening, and I think that sort of explains one of the problems with the player overall. He always had his own plan that he never articulated to the group, either by choice or subconsciously. In isolation when looking at just this one episode it's honestly no big deal, but when added to the totality of all the episodes it shows a pattern.
I agree with everything you said, however I disagree completely that it's a disconnect. That is to say, yes, when one player is not on the same page as everyone else, THAT'S a disconnect which should have been handled is Session 0, and obviously Tiberius/Orion was guilty of selfish tunnel-vision. But not every group takes the timing of combat rounds literally. And I don't just mean _"Okay a round is six seconds, but we're going to fudge the numbers for certain exceptions",_ I mean _"Homebrew: a round is NOT six seconds, it's an ambiguous period of combat that happens CLOSE TO simultaneously but plays out narratively just like any other scene"._ This is most games I play or GM. The (accurate) reasons you're describing are exactly why we DON'T want a round to be six seconds. An "epic" 24 second battle feels dumb and realistic. You heard me. DUMB and REALISTIC. D&D is a form of escapism. The rules are designed to bring foundation and consistency to the game, while simulating any possible action a character might take. The real disconnect is trying to make as many rules feel "as real as possible" instead of "as fun as possible", despite 99% of the rules absolutely failing to do this. ESPECIALLY rules which measure time/distance. Move Speed, Travel, Falling, Drowning... when put against a drop of scrutiny, they fail miserably to simulate real life. Why force them to, when that has little-to-nothing to do with gameplay? Especially when everything else about D&D is absurd, and hand-waved for the cool factor? It's attempting to do the GM's job for them. I _want_ the witty banter between the villains and the characters. I _want_ the "Desperate times call for desperate measures" wildcard plays. I _want_ the dramatic pause when a beloved character is run through unexpectedly. I _want_ reinforcements to show up and turn the tide of battle. I want these things without tiptoeing around "realistic" rules which cause every encounter to feel like it's happen inside a time vortex. If the Fighter is engaged in combat against two brigands, they are CONSTANTLY exchanging blows. The hero is backpedaling to keep from being flanked, swipes are being dodged, swords and shields are clanging against one another, a near-miss leaves a small cut on someone's face. A fireball scatters the combatants, burning one to a crisp as the other two, scorched scorched and bleeding, gather themselves and continue their deadly dance. Who gives a shit how long that takes? (INB4 other than tracking the duration of longer spells, which are never relevant to a single combat anyway, and whose currency is fungible regardless of how it's measured). The actual attack roll represents a moment where someone shoots their shot, takes their chance to land a deadly blow or miss badly and re-position. You know, like cool fantasy battles which have NEVER been realistic. A hero can survive being stabbed fifteen times and exploded three times, but they can only endure more than a minute of swashbuckling because "that's how fights work"? Hard pass. I'm not saying that consistency is bad - far from it. Consistency is key. Six-second intervals suck narratively AND for consistency. It's okay to let them go - they don't serve D&D.
If anything this also highlights the problem with six second rounds, it's completely unbelievable by any metric. Number 1, how can dozens of individual turns occur in 6 seconds, I've heard people argue that it all happens at the same time, but that doesn't make sense when the wizard's fireball takes into account all movement in turns before. Number 2, most of the actions described in spells or even attacks can't happen in 6 seconds without superhuman speed (I'm not even gonna get into movement speed) Number 3, if you scale this concept up, every large-scale combat in the d&d world would end in 2 minutes or less. (Armies of thousands of men collide on the battlefield, and after barely a minute, one has lost). The 6 second round concept has and always will be one of the biggest problems with RAW, because it just doesn't make sense. Just adjust spell durations to be round based and have time be a DM judgement.
@@Eshajori a Session 0 isn't solving the issues that Orion had in the rest of the table. Session 0s aren't a panacea that preemptively solves all issues, especially when I guarantee you Orion never believed he was in the wrong. Sometimes you have to play with someone to realize they aren't a fit at the table, and at that point you need to react accordingly which I what they eventually did.
Unfortunately, initiative does end up ruining any chance at diplomacy later on in another episode: Campaign 2, Episode 104: "The Ruined Sliver". And in this instance, it's Matt that jumped the gun by prematurely calling for initiative, thinking that the group wouldn't trade blows right away. Sadly, at that point the players had it ingrained in their heads that initiative = combat must start, therefore words are useless. As such, it leads to a VERY uncomfortable moment of misunderstanding... and a lot of guilt-tripping for poor Marisha, who in the moment acted based on that aforementioned instinct that diplomacy was done. And Matt kept thinking that what the players wanted was what he intended. He DOES end up mentioning on Twitter later that he 100% handled the situation poorly and unintentionally kept perpetuating the guilt-tripping that had kept going on until it finally stopped. And I'm glad that Matt acknowledged his own culpability in the heat of the moment. He had caused discourse that wasn't meant to happen and hadn't realized it until later on, due to pre-recording it.
@@SupergeekMike And thus a lesson that all DMs should learn: don't declare initiative unless you know for certain that ALL other options have been exhausted OR unless the players themselves resort to aggression. Case in point... SPOILERS FOR C3, EPISODE 29 The standoff with Yu. Initiative had been held off, diplomacy was still in effect... until Fearne took aggressive action with her Flame Blade. THEN initiative was called and it did not deescalate until efforts were made to do so. THAT is how you handle diplomacy and weigh it against conflict: when efforts are made on both sides as to whether the aggression is perpetuated or quelled to a point where diplomacy takes the floor again.
@@AdamEspersona ...which emphasizes that, even Matt still grows as a DM based off of the experiences and examples of others. He demonstrates the grace of humility often not spoken of for being a GM.
@@theargawalathing Hell of a lot better than all those “Never MY Fault” DMs you hear about a lot in RPG Horror Stories. The kind that are the actual “That Guys” instead of the typical “problem players”.
@@AdamEspersona Good example. I was thinking of C3E30 myself where Matt even more clearly states "you have made a (very) aggressive move, so now we move to initiative", because the group has actually physically attacked the NPCs.
The fight against K'Varn was awesome and unfortunately it's been mostly forgotten by now. I do wonder if one of the things Matt is holding onto to this day is the other Horn of Orcus. What a callback that would be! But maybe he won't because this Underdark plot was pretty much erased in the animation.
I had a theory about it, but I'm wondering if it's actually even plausible since this arc might only be loosely considered canon at this point. When Clarota told them the name of Yug'Voril, he referred to it as the "city of secrets." They also later figured out that the temple that housed the elder brain was probably actually one of Ioun's ziggurat temples. A ziggurat located in the "city of secrets" is definitely reminiscent of a certain lich. So the question is, if you were a lich and you were aware of your one main weakness, that you would die or at least be vulnerable to death if your phylactery was destroyed, what would be an ideal item to use? Maybe an item linked to a fiend who was the closest being to claiming the title of god of undeath, had the useful ability to enhance necromantic abilities, and was indestructible? Maybe in the past Yug'voril was inhabited by Ioun's worshippers, but was taken over by Vecna. Maybe when K'varn was possessed by the horn, he was actually possessed by a certain soul connected to the horn, and was drawn to that city and driven to create an army to march on the surface, coincidentally around the same time that the Briarwoods were also making plans to build up an army of their own in preparation for Vecna's return.
Matt's clearly building towards Tharazdun at this point. I think that's the ultimate big bad Matt wants to work towards. As with the whole cult arc in C2 and the ending with Kingslys dreams revealing Tharazdune was behind the corruption of the Somnovum.
Love this Demystified video of yours! It's so easy, when we are looking at something connected with other problems, to just assign all the bad things we know are problems to every time we are looking at that subject. Thank you for looking at this episode objectively and laying out the actual issues and what we can learn from them. This is such a great series, thanks so much for all your hard work!!! Love the content!
It's a bit disheartening hearing the reputation that this episode has within the fandom, considering it's the episode that convinced me to keep watching Critical Role. I knew absolutely nothing about D&D before I started watching CR, and this episode made me realize how CINEMATIC D&D can be. I honestly didn't notice the stuff with Tiberius (until it got uncomfortably obvious at the end) because I was so enthralled with the story. I really hope that newcomers to Critical Role give the Underdark arc a chance, as there are a lot of really cool and fun moments worth watching.
I agree. I didn’t notice a lot of the earlier Tiberius/Orion problem player behavior at first because as someone who only had rudimentary D&D experience, I was so enthralled by everything else going on. I had noticed some things that annoyed me from him, but a lot of the players had done things that annoyed me too so I just saw it as my preference vs. theirs. It wasn’t until I started reading the comments sections of this episode foreshadowing the bad behavior to come that I realized how many early signs I’d missed and started looking for the bad behavior. I’m glad I started with the Underdark Arc as well because not only did I enjoy it it did create a contrast to just how good the briarwood arc was too and how much better it could get
Agreed! I really, really loved that first arc and especially that fight against K'varn because everyone was so terrified. Like, the players were visibly shaken up by going up against this beholder. It was definitely one of the things that cemented the need to keep going with this series because it was so powerful. At that time I really wasn't that irked by Orion/Tiberius yet. Sure, I understood how the others were annoyed because Tiberius was so adamant not to step into the lair of this beholder and ended up barely being helpful in a moment they all thought they'd get wiped out by this thing they were going up against.
I love the Kraghammer arc so much. I really really love it. It’s a shame things went so wrong at the end of this arc/the beginning of the briarwoods arc because it’s really really good.
This one definitely hit home for me. I recently had a situation where a plan wasn't followed and it killed my character. Without getting into details, we were a party of level 4s, and I was both the only heals and the only tank (paladin) and the scenario is that we needed to sneak into a villain's lair, rescue some prisoners, and get out. I used a one time use item to fly into position as a butterfly after the bard (also as butterfly) and I scouted the area and came up with the smash and grab plan. We were going to stealth to the side door, I'd hold off the guards, and we'd grab the prisoners and run. I had really good AC AND had misty step via a feat so I was really confident I could hold the guards off for long enough, then burn my misty step and dash to get to safety. What ended up happening was a full on fight where my character was all on his own and got taken out by the boss who was definitely too strong for us. I really felt like my party let me die. And in retrospect, probably should have abandoned the plan and burned my resources to regroup, especially because I know that the group I'm playing with is tactically... not great. But also it was really hard to walk that line of expressing "hey remember the plan" without telling anyone how to play their character. The silver lining is that my PC's death was 100% in line with their character, and that was the exact kind of cause he'd have given his life for. But that frustration when you're feeling like everyone agreed to a plan and then left you hanging out to dry is definitely real and only amplified when you end up paying the price for their failures. (doubly so because a party member looted a magic item from my previous PC and didn't politely pass it on to my new PC)
See this is where you and orion are different. He never would have let his character get into a position to be killed at all, let alone killed while his teammates lives. Why do you think he would not engage and only ran scared vs. Khvarne?
But you see, its Sam Riegel, so his chauffeur is clearly just going to be Sam in a comically fake moustache. Possibly with a mannequin of himself that he swaps with in the back seat.
What I found interesting is that Tiberius actually started as one of my favorite characters. He was quirky, he was obviously intelligent but socially/culturally inept, and seemed to be playing the "I come from a noble house, why doesn't that impress you?" character. I enjoy those. Then Orion started TELLING the other players what to do. He would try to take inventory from characters when their player wasn't at the table (Scanlan's circlet). He always seemed to have "just enough sorcery points" or "enough gold" no matter the situation or shopping spree. Orion clearly wasn't reading the room of his fellow players (Travis was DONE multiple times...)... Honestly, I felt like Marisha was trying to pacify the situation when she was giving Orion some mild backup during planning. When she yelled "Run" during the fight, I don't think it had anything to do with Orion's plan, but as a 'self sacrificing' moment to get her friends out of a fight they may not win. Orion's dogged determination to negotiate with the mindflayers when it started to become obvious (the carpet only flies so fast per round...) the fight would be over one way or another before reinforcements would make any difference is what most of the people I have talked to point out.
The way he tried to enter the Thunderbrand Manor in the first episode was the first red flag for me, second red flag was his reaction after Scanlan killed the Medusa patchwork creature. Ep. 11 was third strike for me. I agree on the whole communication problem with there being not a clear plan. What annoys me is that he wants to stick to his plan no matter what and it needs a fail with a 25 on a persuasions role to make him take a useful action in the fight. Which brings me to my biggest problem with Tibirus. How little he uses his spell variety for combat specifically in this episode despite being a lvl 9 sorcerer. He neither used Firebolt, Ice Knife or Scorching Ray he rather cast Fly, Invisibility and/or Stoneskin on himself and is upset that he doesn't do more dmg. Meanwhile Percy altough unhappy with the relative low dmg from Bad News switches tactics and starts consistently going for the debuff instead of dmg and became de facto MVP. Rolling with the punches and making the best out of it is in my opinion what makes a good player/DM and thats were Orion ultimately failed.
Don’t forget when they are planning he continues to iterate how he doesn’t want to face Kvarn, yet they ask him in character why don’t you want to face him. Instead of saying something he says nothing.
This video convinced me to subscribe. Not because of the 7-year old drama. Because of the thesis statement or 'lessons learned' at the end. Solidly analyzed, I've just joined a group that records sessions so I plan to apply similar analysis to my own playing as I find myself also in the camp of being a strategic player who frequently tries to help party members. I've frequently found that other people at the table try to help players who struggle and their help is accepted but my contributions are often taken the wrong way because I word it strangely or too emotionally. I can bring my ADHD/ASD into the conversation but controlling my behavior and tone is on ME.
I have such a vivid memory of this episode, because I only listened to the podcast version a few years ago. I had no influence from the comments or the community, and I generally liked Tiberius as a character. Until this episode. It wasn't until midway through the fight, when Tiberius was still flying around on the carpet, that I thought, "What are you doing, man? Your party needs you!" For me, the problem is Orion's stubbornness and desire to follow his own plan, rather than deciding (as we all have to do sometimes), "I think this is dumb, but this is the situation we're in, and I need to help the party." But I also feel for the guy - I've been frustrated at a table before, knowing my attitude affects gameplay, but I just can't shake myself out of it. I always apologize once I calm down, but it doesn't make the experience any better.
In my current campaign, our gnome artificer speaks only broken common, and has a habit of pulling out a phrase-book that he periodically adds to, and more often than not coming out with something very crude, the wrong thing for this particular context, or both and it is a delight to see.
I haven't watched this episode in years but I agree with you that I don't think it was "main character syndrome" or metagaming that was the issue. You bring up a lot of valid points but what always stood out to me about Orion, especially in this episode, was his unwillingness to "buy in" or accept what the situation had become. For example, after his first round was spent doing nothing but moving, combined with the fact that like half the party was already in/heading into Kvarn's lair, it seemed fairly obvious that it was too late to go through with the Illithid persuasion plan. I honestly think Matt did this on purpose so he could specifically get everyone on the same page of "the boss fight is happening here and now" This is further reinforced that by the time his second turn had come around and too much had happened and they were already like waist deep into the fight. Its also where Orion made the poor decision to stubbornly try to stick to the persuasion plan. Basically he should have just accepted that the fight was happening now whether he wanted it to or not. He absolutely would have been justified for feeling a bit railroaded and disappointed, but the rest of the cast just put it behind them and accepted what was happening because they realized that not everything can always go the way you want it to. Instead, while the narrative and actions of the story are all flowing one way, Orion stubbornly sticks to what he wanted to do and fights against the current no matter how much that will bog down the story or game play. I remember being frustrated at him watching it and you could tell how the table was frustrated as well. Was there miscommunication and did they jump into the plan before everyone was 100% on the same page? Yes But I think it ultimately came down to Orion being stubborn and uncooperative because he was upset things didn't go how he had envisioned it.
Yeah I think if he hadn’t been totally locked into his plan he wouldn’t have been as frustrated and hostile here. And who knows how the campaign would’ve been different if that had happened… Ah well.
@@SupergeekMike I think you perfectly pointed out how he didn't respond in the best way here and how he could have been much more civil/understanding. In the end it is what is and his later actions were still 100% his own fault Honestly it's just kind of a shitty situation all around because not only did the cast end up losing a great friend but Tiberius is still absolutely one of my favorite characters from the Vox Machina campaign. Thank you for giving such an extensive breakdown, It was a great video!
I feel this episode in some way was the beginning of the end. Probably because everyone felt the pressure of delivering a great product. These are after all seasoned veterans in the entertainment industry. They have all i am sure both seen and heard of how quickly things can go to shits. And now they sit there, more or less "live" live... Not even the slight delay that TV uses to save them from a cockup. With a live and pretty abrasive studio audience. Orion was pretty much run over by the circumstances. He was full on eating his own and everyone's stress. That does not excuse some of his actions. But i have some understanding for his fall form grace.
I want to commend the empathy on display in this video, and in your other ones as well. I know that my reading of Tiberius through my time in Campaign 1 was colored by the ~vibes~ of the other players and the almost combative tone that was taken by them and the community in response. In retrospect, yeah, Tib's first 3 turns would've been more benificial if spent fighting K'varn, but he tried his best to make the best of what he had; it simply wasn't enough. Him wanting to go faster on the carpet shows that he knows this is a risk and that he wanted to be back with the group as quickly as possible, but it often gets characterized as him leaving and bumbling around for a bit. I'm super glad that this series exists and I'm appreciative of the wisdom that it imparts. You're doing good work :)
For real like this session wasn't that bad to me after all the notoriety I skipped it my first time through the campaign 6 years ago because I was bored by the underdark But a lot of his 'Problem Player" issues are stuff we all do which might be why it upsets us seeing our worst habits
It's true most of what he did really wasn't that bad, some of it was but most of it is pretty normal just made to look worse with the back drop of excellent players. That being said their is plenty of evidence that he's a problem person full stop who was a straight up abusive boyfriend.
@@yaboijdg6312 it and the first Briarwood fight episode definitely showed the most significant of it But something it seems viewers forget is we were all problem players at some point; you don't just start TTRPGing perfectly. It takes self awareness, intent to be better and dedication but eventually you evolve.
@@doesntmatter2467 I can't say anything regarding his personal life beyond internet hearsay I find as reliable as thyme but it definitely seems it had more than just his cheating and MCS that led to his being booted. Things behind the scenes that likely be best left to the people involved respectfully for their privacy
Wrong. Marisha and others do plenty of the same mistakes, and people aren't as up and arms about it. You should also stop insulting people's intelligence with your pseudo-psychoanalysis, people are better than that, most people aren't "that guy", not being perfect doesn't mean you were as terrible as Orion. " I can't say anything regarding his personal life beyond internet hearsay I find as reliable as thyme " So you aren't actually interested in the actual screenshots, videos and further proof of what happened yet you claim it's unreliable? You're just being really disingenuous at this point. People are still talking about Orion because he was that bad, if you still don't get it it's because you are willfully trying to stay ignorant about it.
Communication is the best way to make a good session. Explain, that even if you think it's too much, your table will appreciate it. Perfect video to explain how, thank you
Something I've learned from DnD, is that it's very much like BDSM, as in the fact that you *have* to communicate: communicate intent, communicate with the players, communicate with the dm, check up on each other, make sure everyone is alright, all that good stuff.
Orion always seemed disinterested whenever there's a scene going on that doesn't involve Tiberius in any way. Semi-understandable, when you have nothing to do at the moment, especially in long scenes, it can get boring. But, it seemed like everytime he wasn't "on-screen" in a sense, he didn't look engaged like the other players often do. Maybe that's an aspect of it, comparing him to the others, who usually look deeply interested even in scenes not about them, makes his lack of reaction stand out more. I might be reading too much into it. I don't like when people use expressions or body language to jump to conclusions, especially to say "they clearly don't like each other because one of them rolled their eyes at this part in the video," or something. It was just something that stuck out to me.
I think the difference between assuming interpersonal relationships from ONE moment of interaction versus Orion's constant disinterested body language is the difference. He would ALWAYS seem like he's rather be elsewhere when scenes not involving Tiberius were happening....the vast majority of the time. So because of that consistancy...it's hard to not notice it when it happens, I think. Because he really does stick out like a sore thumb in those moments compared to every other actors body language. The only time Travis has those moments is during shopping episodes and he has explained that's due to his disinterest in shopping in-game and IRL and also his ADHD.
@@MollymaukT to be fair Sam also breaks this rule and will sometimes check twitch chat while they are streaming...but yeah, I think Orion did it more frequently than Sam does.
@@AnxietyRat I think that's also early on enough before they had a dedicated team to track chat. And that goes for Orion, too; I'd wager a lot of it was keeping track of chat
I think there's another really valuable lesson that goes hand in hand with the communication one, and that is: follow up. As several people have pointed out, a lot of the legend of this episode is colored by the perception of Orion's behavior in other situations, because over time he built a (deserved) reputation for bad table etiquette and unacceptable behavior. I can make no claim to know what was said after the cameras were off, but I know what it looks like got said: nothing. You can't go through any part of life assured that you will never be irritated or irritating, but you can choose to be mature about following up afterwards to talk clearly and responsibly about what occurred and how it can be ameliorated in the future. It really doesn't look like that happened at all, or if it did it was done in a way that was ineffective or even counterproductive. Miscommunication will happen, but hurt feelings are less likely to
You're right; if this was a one-off situation, people/viewers might have been annoyed but probably wouldn't have thought much more than 'miscommunication/a bad day'. the problem was this player continued to have worse problems
@@liizumi3337 And it doesn't look like anyone really talked to him about it. That's the biggest thing that I did pick up on this whole situation is that there wasn't really a in between session talking of things out that connected with him.
@@leadpaintchips9461 I don't think we can say that; we have no idea what happened off stream, what conversations they did or didn't have. We weren't there, and they haven't said anything.
@@liizumi3337 All we can see is what is in the streams, and it _is_ obvious that his behavior only annoyed people more as time went on, which is why I said nothing connected, because nothing changed positively. His behavior didn't change. We don't know what was happening when the cameras were not on the table, which is why I specifically didn't say no one tried. But I can look at the results as to when the cameras were rolling.
Absolutely my favourite video of this series so far. Such an important topic in the lesson section, nuanced discussion. I've run into this problem to some extent several times with my gaming group, but I still recall one time where tensions got incredibly high, worsened by a failure to conclude the situation one week and background discussions (and turning things over in minds) until the next session - it also boiled down a lot to communication and taking the game so seriously that players were having a hard time rolling with things or even dealing with other players. Oh, and your point about evolving and growing as a player: perhaps the most poignant thing said in a thoroughly poignant video. Thank you.
I greatly appreciate the clips of the show edited in for reference. If I'm honest I felt your other video about Tiberius could've benefitted greatly from some clips from the show added in for context. Great video, Mike.
Thank you. There aren’t any clips in that episode because I felt it could be frustrating and potentially triggering to people, and unfortunately I felt it wasn’t worth it. I also try not to include clips of Orion’s misdeeds in these recaps for the same reason. (It’s also not my content so since I am at G&S’s/CR’s mercy about how I use it, I try not to use those clips.) I also just personally don’t enjoy seeing those clips over and over, which I’d have to do if I include them, so that’s another reason I try not to use the worst clips in the videos.
@@SupergeekMike It's understandable to choose not to use specific clips, especially negative clips, but for reference sake, *Fair Use* covers this sort of usage: "Section 107 of the Copyright Act provides the statutory framework for determining whether something is a fair use and identifies certain types of uses-such as *criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching* , scholarship, and research-as examples of activities that may qualify as fair use." I'm honestly not 100% sure how this applies to critique of a *person* rather than a *fictional work* so there might be nuance there (though news reporting has its own interesting set of guidelines). But using clips from something, without seeking or requiring permission from the original creator, for the purpose of critiquing or teaching about that thing, is a bona fide usage and part of the core intention of the Fair Use doctrine. If we had to seek explicit permission to use clips, we'd never get the permission of the people whose work we intend to criticize, so this is a crucial nuance to the very nature of copyright.
in my last session i unknowingly avoided a player having the tiberius experience commented on this episode, the paladin and the barbarian were in a tavern brawl, attracting a lot of attention of the town, meanwhile the rogue wanted to infiltrate in the ruins of the baron's house to snoop around, instead of making him act during initiative I "edited" the fight like a movie, every round we switched back and forth from turn based to real time, I think that would have made the flying carpet ride much less frustrating
Okay so I'm using this series as a way to recap the first 20 or so episodes so I don't have to sit through the first bit with Tiberius in it, so I haven't actually watched the episode and can only really go from what you've said but... While yes, the whole situation is caused by miscommunication, I'd say that by round 3, seeing everything that is happening and the way things are going, continuing with what you *thought* the plan was is definitely not the play. I mean, at that point you just have to go "Ok well this was not what I had agreed to, but if we're fighting now, we're fighting now" rather than stubbornly following your own plan all alone. An inability to adapt to the situation was absolutely also the problem here
I remember when I watched this I got very frustrated at Orion's actions during this episode being so confused about what he was doing, and it was easy to forget that it wasn't entirely on him. Watching this campaign as someone who started with Campaign 2 the cast as a whole were still rough in how they communicated at the table although their chemistry was almost always on point and quickly came together in a satisfying way, at lest for me. I appreciate that this series isn't just dunking on Orion though because that would be easy and appease people but no one would learn anything, it'd just allow people to externalize all the issues on their game onto the "problem player" and not a collaborative issue. That's not to say that Orion's behaviour later was justified but it's nice to hear someone look at the situation without looking for a villain.
I just watched this episode vod with reactions from MegaphoneMan0 and OMG I had to come back and rewatch this. The ending… and oh man Tiberius/Orion telling Percy/Taliesin to basically shut up since he killed him had me fuming 😤
I always thought Orion in these earlier episodes didn't really deserve the hate he got, sure he wasn't a perfect player or anything but at this time he seemed to just have a bit of tunnel vision that got in the way of the game which is pretty common in DnD so I'm glad you took the time to say with your full chest that it wasn't all his fault. I do think this is probably the episode that began his downward spiral though.
I came into CR late after orion was out, and from what I saw when I joined in was that he wasn't that bad in the show and a lot of the hate was community spiraling and off screen drama
@@digadigado it really wasn't until the last few episodes he was was he really bad. But a lot of his problems came to light later on and he's done quite a bit of bad stuff over the years. I'm glad he never came back to be honest. Hopefully he's turned a new leaf and doing better now he's clean from the drugs etc.
I think he did deserve the hate. His constant attempts at cheating and generally being a poor team player were worthy enough of hate. He always seemed to bring a tension between the players that I think was inimical to what makes the show (and D&D proper) work. The stealing and harassing and other real life stuff should similarly not be hand-waved away.
Right? You never see him without a beard anymore. Imagine starting with C2 or 3 and then randomly coming across a clip of C1 with pre-beard Travis. You might think it was a completely different person whom Travis replaced if you weren’t told it was him. (“Who is that guy sitting next to Laura? Is it someone who left the group?” “Nah it’s Travis.” “That’s _Travis?!_ Really?!”)
@@Boundwithflame23 lol right like I watched all of campaign 1 and thought ok this might have been a guest I don't remember lol till I noticed grog was speaking lol
I always enjoy watching your videos because I can usually find something I want to have in my games. My first ever session 0 as a DM is coming up on the 10th, and I added the "try not to lose sight of the fact that you are playing a game with your friends" to my session 0 notes.
One addl thing I think is a major contributor. In the q&a aftwr ep 10, Orion and Matt agree that Tiberius is a “Kaiser Soze”. I think Orion believes he need to be the plot twist and that he shouldn’t reveal his motivations to the audience. Great episode and thank you for taking a balanced, detached look at what you think was really happening
I agree with you on a lot, though it is hard to really understand that when you binge the next canon episode only to see worsening things with tiberius/orion. Great vid though, glad someone is speaking about things like this.
The first time I watched this episode I was very new to dnd and I didn't notice anything bad or toxic. I was completely into the story, I realised there were two plans going on, but as you said Tiberius and Keyleth both seemed on the same page with getting the other creatures help, so I didn't see it as wrong in any way. I saw Orion's frustration, but I thought that was fairly normal under the circumstances (high stress battle, and things not going according to plan) and that it was part of Tiberius too, he's a red dragonborn, having a temper seemed normal. It's only later when I looked into why he left CR that I learned there was more coming to a boiling point there. Another thing you touched on, that I think played a huge role, is the fact that as much as they were trying to keep it like their home game, it very much wasn't at home. They were all very aware that cameras were rolling and they felt like they had to keep the ball rolling constantly. Matt has become very good at judging when it's time to change the rythm of story telling a bit and the others too know how to switch things up to keep things interesting too, that's where their acting careers shine. But at the time they were learning how to translate those acting skills into dnd for a public skill, and sometimes they overcompensated, and maybe were still paying too much attention to negative feedback. Looking back this episode felt a bit frantic. I will say that Matt seems very aware of his own part in the mismanagement of their early games, every time someone asks for DMing advice he hammers in the COMMUNICATE message and I've always thought this is where his mind goes when he says that.
My favorite thing about Orion was his name. It made the whole cast sound like they were an adventuring party, Taliesin, Orion, Travis, Marisha, Liam, Sam (okay, Ashley and Laura do just sound like two girls who randomly stopped by), but everyone else sounds like character names.
My favorite part of a dnd game, both as a DM and Player, is the plotting of the plan. As a DM, it gives me time to do some last second prep work for the upcoming trial, and put in some wrenches in those wheels of the plan, as well as giving all that planning some payoff. And as a player, i like to be prepared and have contingencies for all the things i do, and sitting down with the rest of the party and co operate on a plan is so much fun, espensally when i can just pull out some random rubish from my bag and make it relevant to the adventure.
I think language is such an underrated element in DnD roleplay in general. I would argue, it's because the hobby mostly started in native-English speaking, monolingual cultures.
I might agree that language is an under utilized element of DnD role play, but I think that’s for practical reasons, not cultural ones. At their core, tabletop rpgs are games about talking: to players and NPCs alike. Because of that, there are very few situations where language barriers can be used to actually produce fun play. Commonly, they’re used in two different ways. 1. To block off most players from communicating in a social encounter so that a character who isn’t high charisma gets to take on the role temporarily. (Like a half orc negotiating with an orc chieftain) 2. To add flavor to a lore dump. (Like having a secret letter encoded in abyssal so that one specific character can read it. And while those situations can be fun, it’s on a once or twice per campaign basis. I know half a dozen GMs who tried to emphasize languages in their games and wound up dropping the idea after just a couple of sessions. Common was literally introduced to provide a mechanic for tables to ignore languages.
In one of my group’s campaigns my second/backup character was the only one who could speak goblin (I gave her the outlander background and reasoned that maybe she just kinda picked it up) so she effectively became the party translator and designated negotiator. Bonus was the goblins couldn’t understand common so we could discuss plans freely in front of them but it also meant my character might have to lie. Which put a lot of weight on me cuz I’m not all that confident when it comes to RP. Im getting better at it but it’s still intimidating when I have to improv something on the spot and have and no clue what to say. 😅
These videos are interesting to me, Mike, because I agree with your premise in large part that the all the 'oh this was the moment that Orion royally f'd up and is the worst person ever' usually landed to me as 'oh that was it?'... but I also instantly from Episode 1 of watching the whole thing from the start was just moderately skeeved by nearly every single thing Orion did. I did have the backstory coming into it, so that may have actually blunted the worst moments while amplifying some of the stuff, but just watching Episode 1 and Orion's attitude (meandering off on his own completely solo, butting into other people's events) it was easy for me to point out 'yes this is the problem player at the table', and then it just slowly and gradually gets worse from there, with this as one of the major turning points. There's definitely a lot of rough about the early episodes in general, but ultimately the real problem seems to be that Orion Acaba took things personally and held grudges, and even when the rest of the cast has issues or conflicts their conflicts are in character or they're briefly annoyed but within a week have smoothed things over because they talk it out out of character between episodes (like the Keyleth wind walk roughness)
That’s a subject I’ve seen some folks bring up - some audience members just had bad vibes early. Like you said, it’s possible some context of what happened colored their perceptions, but everyone also has different thresholds for bad behavior and stuff that bothers them early on. Some commenters never noticed any of Orion’s poor behavior, and boy I’m envious of their experience with these episodes of CR lol. I think another factor is that the tone of the game changed a lot when they started playing weekly, and that’s why a lot of the cast members do some of the same things as Orion early on/why his behavior doesn’t seem that bad to them. But as they changed, he didn’t.
@@SupergeekMike I don't exactly regret watching the early episodes, I really wrestled with it but I wanted to see it for proper historical value. But then after going ahead and doing that, with my wife when she got annoyed that I kept laughing at stuff she couldn't hear we just watched Legend of Vox Machina on Amazon and then restarted started on episode 39 or so, and I highly recommended avoiding watching the roughness at the start, other than the Slayer's Take so she knew who Zahra was. I'd say this is a really solid way for people to get into CR now and have context without getting really turned off by the shaky start. I agree with you that it's a transition thing, I suspect if Orion wasn't aware that a bunch of people were watching he could have been a lot more chill about things, problems wouldn't have happened so much, etc etc. Also monthly to weekly is a big shift too where there's less time to cool down, when added with the pressure of actually playing your game as a business and a true audience show, it was tough. And despite not liking Orion and often not liking Tiberius because of Orion, there was the occasional shining through of excellence and comedy like the whole section where he keeps getting shuffled to middle manager to middle manager, but then again things like that were when it was just Tiberius riffing off of Matt (and vice versa) and didn't happen as much when he had to interact with his fellow players.
I remember when listening to this situation that I wasn't overly annoyed with Tiberius but his wording about the dangers of the lair did sound out of place, which is something players can struggle with (the age-old hit point question is another example). However, the big part for me was actually Laura asking Tiberius why he was being "such a dick", and it didn't sound in character at all. While I think Vex might've had some grievance, it sounded very much from Laura's heart. That really perked my ears up to the drama. The other big point was rewatching the HDYWTDT and analyzing Orion's body language. It was pretty disrespectful imo and betrayed any semblance of teamwork. It portrayed, instead, an idea of childlike annoyance that they should've died because they didn't listen to them, rather than a relief that they skirted death. That unspoken element really made the negativity for Orion for me and others, I think. Still really liked Tiberius though; and this entire scenario was badass and extremely engaging
There was a lot of miscommunication, but the fact that Orion was being so abrasive really is the problem, and honestly it felt like he was ALWAYS being abrasive, especially with how flippantly he'd use Silence on another character not once, but twice. Casting an offensive spell on another character without at least some communication beforehand is a red flag for me; I've been there, and that player is no longer in the group for multiple reasons. Maybe it wasn't metagaming, but I do feel like he wasn't reading the room, still, and being angry at the party for going into the fight feels incredibly misplaced. I have trouble not condemning him for this episode even if the particular issues people site may not have necessarily what was happening, any good will of that being the case is still soured by his behavior in general, not just in this fight but in all of the episodes he was in, especially right before he was removed. Snapping "It's my turn" and saying "I know, but we need to do this as quickly as possible so I'm going to try" aren't really sending the same message to me; "it's my turn" sounds a lot more selfish, whether he meant it that way or not, and considering his behavior in other episodes, that's hard not to still hear.
Yeah, the path of becoming “That Guy” has to start somewhere, and for him, it was this episode. And the cast did try to remain civil and friendly… only for him to just get worse and worse until it came to a head.
While he had some troubling behavior prior to this episode (like one instance of silencing Vax and then answering his question anyway), I think this is where he learns the wrong lesson and starts communicating even less with the other characters/cast members.
That incident had a HUGE net positive though. When Scanlan moves to dispel it Orion counterspells it to which Sam says “countercounterspell” and Orion points out Bards don’t have it. Because of this when they leveled up he used “Additional Magical Secrets” to learn the spell and we all know how clutch that was later on
@@MollymaukT I don't like thinking that it's thanks to HIM that Sam had Scanlan learn Counterspell. It makes every single Counterspell used by him since feel so wrong. No, he could have simply picked it on his own.
As a first-time DM who is usually completely overwhelmed with everything, the series is so incredibly helpful! It gives me certainty, it gives me so many tips and I'm looking forward to learning a lot more. Thanks
Disclaimer 1: I truly love the CR cast (minus Orion) Disclaimer 2: yes, "no plan survives contact with the enemy" Now that those are out of the way: the CR cast/party are infamously, horribly flaky when it comes to planning. I am often frustrated as a member of the audience; it would be worse as a player at the table. So, I can empathize a little with Orion.
I do think it gets worse later in the campaign (curious if I’ll be able to see the plans that went wrong and caused the issue? I dunno!), and they seem to have forgotten the other quote: “The plan is nothing, the planning is everything.”
@@SupergeekMike It definitely gets worse later in the campaign. There are a couple episodes specifically in one of the future arcs that you could skip entirely because they literally spend the entire session planning and/or bickering about said plan but never committing to anything. Let's just say there's a reason that the phrase "At dawn, we plan" has become a somewhat notorious running gag for CR.
Fun fact I have since read some heart breaking and bittersweet fanfic that references Percy telling Vax he wants his last words to him to be annoyed & indignant and oof 😭 my heart.
I think some of this (not all) is also due to how new they were at doing things live. They get better by campaign 2 and 3 Matt tends to call breaks or end of episodes (which is probably also time thing but it demonstrates a point) when the players planning starts to go in circles and they just need to go away, think, and do some above table talking which not every viewer likes to watch. Personally I also love watching them plan but I respect the creative process that goes into making the show fun for all people and that role playing planning is hard and not fun for all. I think Travis and Grog shows this because Travis is a great planner but Grog isn't due to the way he is built.
Your advice about communicating ooc why your character is doing something is a good one as it’s important to keep player and character separate in your mind; it’s possible and perfectly fine liking a fellow player while hating their character just like how it’s possible to like an actor but hate the character they play in a movie. One caveat I’d add to this though is that while doing so, it’s important not to fall into the “but it’s what my character would do” to try and justify your character acting like a jackass trope.
Orion definitely has worse moments in the show than this, which personally I never saw it as all that bad to begin with, but I think people aren't recognizing that, back then, the cast was all kinda a lot ruder in general. Maybe it is a carry over from their days as "The Shits" but they all are kind of assholes to each other. Could be spurned on by outside situations like the background problems with Orion for sure, but when you are in game, trying to work together, and you have half your party making fun of you in a relatively rude and condescending way when you're already frustrated with what's happened in the encounter in general as nothing has gone your way, it kinda makes sense he'd be a bit rude in response. Compare the pranks and jokes the players played on eachother early on compared to anything they do now in C3 or during C2. Everything was more sexual, ruder, sometimes to the point of being what most dnd horror stories writers would label as "That Guy" behavior, excessively antagonistic towards your party members for the sake of the laugh. Some of the players took that shit in stride but it's important to remember not everybody wants to experience that kind of humor, especially not in front of an audience of thousands of people you don't know.
I do think one of the big reasons he left the show is because the culture of the table changed around him, and he didn’t. That’s not a bad thing on its own (although it manifested in some pretty gross ways), it’s natural that playing every week would change the game. And it must’ve been isolating to feel like you’re the odd man out who isn’t a part of things anymore. But I do think this is one of many reasons we start seeing his behavior get worse starting with episode 13.
We have/had a similar issue in a game I was in. Where the characters are all pretty morally grey which means that the player feel actions are justified and the rest of the table sees the character as a dick. Which we have had bleed over to bad feelings out the game. We didnt even notice how rough it had gotten until an outside person went “Man… yall are horrible to each other. Why do your characters even hang out anymore??”. So now we are taking a break to figure out what we want to do about it. We are playing some other games until then. Bc we have played so long we are all really invested in those characters, but we will have to openly ignore past actions and feelings in a lot of areas to justify new behavior.
I think the best option at this point would've been to ask for a short break so you could cool off. Sadly, when your plans just keep getting foiled you're going to be frustrated as hell--or when you keep getting bad rolls. Other than that, communication was probably the hardest part through-out season 1 of CritRole. There were massive growing pains for everyone--Matt included. The other problem was that the group is 8 strong--9 if you include Matt--, it gets to a point where it is like herding cats. I'd argue that this was one Orion's/Tiberius's stronger episode because he was trying to be a team player. Travis's/Grog's moment with the cask of ale was priceless, and reminded me why I loved Grog so much, and ironically shows what happens later on in the episode on a much smaller scale. There was this one time I was playing D&D3.5 with one of my older group of friends, we had a group about 6~7 players, and I wanted to cast Obscuring Mist around our riverboat so that we could stealthily get past an encounter. I was apparently the only player that didn't know that the DM was using RL Logic for the mist--or they all just wanted to side with the DM out of frustration with my choice and how the DM decided to interpret the rules--and make light carry through and be amplified, and it ended up in a massive verbal fight between me and everyone else because communication just didn't happen when it should have. You'll find that the sweet spot for D&D is around 5 players in-person, 4 for online, because it makes these communication breakdowns happen less frequently. They'll still happen, but they typical tend to be over smaller things instead of something that would typically change the course of an entire encounter.
I don't defend Orion's shenanigans but he wasn't at fault either against a hydra when they travelled to that capital city full of temples (can't remember the name right now). Matt was a bit ambiguous on how much space the hydra occupied, Orion thought it occupied 20-feet so throwing a Fireball at it would certainly not harm anyone. Matt then said "ok, these players take damage" and Orion was quite jaded by that.
The problem I always had with Tiberius was simply two words: Power. Gamer. Basically, as time went on, I tried to accept the eccentricities of Tibs, back when I first found Crit Role. However, there were some in-game moments that started to make me question Tibs' motives in all things, the first was the fight with K'Varn. I felt like he should have helped, should have been there to be more of a distraction. But no, Tibs ran when combat started, and Grog almost died. For me, that was a huge red flag -- especially at a D&D table. You don't just abandon your friends when the heat gets turned up. You sweat through it like everybody else. After the K'Varn fight, I noticed other things. To mention them here would be very, very spoilery. Needless to say, Orion, Tibs' player, tried to basically do what the other PCs were doing, and then was trying to one-up them. And that was while conventiently "forgetting" what his magical items could do, or when he tried to buy a set of magical armor, and Matt basically told him no, checked the book, and then emphatically told him that sorcerers don't wear armor. While I liked the concept of Tibs as a character, Orion's power gaming "Anything you can do, I can do better" attitude nearly made me stop watching. It was only because people in the comments said things would get better that I slogged through the cringe that Orion started doing on the regular. And I completely got why the other players, Laura Bailey in particular, started being very uncomfortable around him on-screen. I think right before the end, they started hearing rumors of what was going on with Orion outside of Critical Role, and that was the driving force to get him off the show. The very last episode Orion is on, at the end you can see visible relief on the face of the players that the game had ended. The first episodes without Tiberius, they aren't sure how to act, not knowing if Orion was coming back. And then when it was finalized that Orion was permanently gone, the table gets much more at ease, and you can tell that the stress Orion put them under was gone.
Yep. Had a power gamer guy similar to this in the last group I played with. He always had to be the leader, the smartest guy in the room, the one with the coolest items, the one who dealt the most damage. Which I kinda could have lived with if he wasn't also a manipulative snake, both as a player and in real life. I always felt like was only being nice to people to get his way or to get information he could use against you behind your back. Sadly the DM was his best friend and enabled him all the time.
There's nothing wrong with power gaming. The problem comes when roleplaying takes a backseat. He never took a backseat in roleplaying, his style of RP just never meshed well with the groups casual bullshit. To be fair, I only really watch Critical Role for Matt, as the players themselves not remember their classes most of the time after years is... stupid.
@@Adanu191 : I find power gaming to be something that inherently divides a table, though. Every person who plays in a group wants to have that optimized situation where their character gets to shine -- like Pike taking out over half of the undead in Whitestone in one shot. She was a Cleric, and Clerics are the bane of low-power undead. A Rogue wants to have that assassination kill. But when you have a power gamer present, they want to take credit for what other people do, in terms of solutions they didn't think of themselves. Or, barring that, they become narcissistically angry at another character succeeding. My own tabletop experience shows this. Over a decade, probably 15 years-plus ago, I was playing in a Star Wars campaign with people who I had been friends with for few years. My character was a Solustan, who, in the rules, got a bonus to Dex. This translated into being better than humans and most other races when it came to Dex-based things (Solustans in Star Wars struck me as being similar to Elves in D&D). This includes piloting vehicles, whether speeder bikes or ships. I also had taken Weapon Finesse to use my Dex instead of Strength, and had a double-ended lightsaber like Darth Maul from Episode 1. Anyway, early on in the campaign, I won a speeder bike race by rolling 4 nat-20s in a row. This got us some upgrades for our transport we were using. Later on, the Gods of the Dice gave me a nat-20 against a Yuzhon-Vong Corvette (Corvettes are small scout ships), when I fired a concussion missile and managed to hit the Corvette, despite a gravity well that had been deployed as a defensive tactic. I say all this because the one guy who was the power gamer thought he was just as good as a pilot as I was, despite his stats being nowhere near as focused in Dex as I was, and the fact I was pulling off seemingly impossible feats in various situations. It was garnering support and attention away from him, and I didn't know this, as I thought I was helping the group succeed. It was only a couple of sessions later that I was told not to come back, and some BS reason was made up, as what I was told made 0 sense. I respectfully accepted what I was told, rather than argue and disagree with it. I just felt that it was not justified to kick me out, when I knew I had done nothing wrong. It was at that point I started thinking about why it had happened, especially when I had another friend who knew the same people I did, who then told me a couple of situations he had been in that had been power-gaming situations. For this mutual friend, it wasn't the first time he had pulled something like what had happened to me. So, after examining the information I knew, particularly behavior, I came to the conclusion that this friend who I thought was a decent game player was a power gamer. I haven't played any RP or TT games with him since that time, and for good reason. Power gaming isn't a playing style or a character traits of a character in-game. Power gaming is basically one person acting like they are the ones that get to have all the cool moments, and everybody else is just minor supporting characters. I find that power gamers are the kind of people who read a book which centers and focuses on only one character, the main character, and they take that focus and bring it into a collective group tabletop game, where the story centers around a group, rather than a single, character. And when a power gamer fails to understand this, or fails to realize the game group isn't a high-powered gaming group, what they do ends up breeding a severe dislike and resentment among the other players in the group. And if the power gamer senses this, it's either, they'll do everything they can to ruin everybody's fun, because they sense that their time grows short playing, or, they'll do what they can to kick out the biggest threat to their dominance. In my case, because the power gamer I dealt with, knew I wouldn't stand for the inherent bias from the GM that was allowing him to do what he was doing, he convinced the GM to just kick me out of the game. The situation with Orion was the former reason for letting him go, not the latter. It also didn't help that the main cast of Critical Role had probably been hearing about the various things Orion had been doing outside the game.
Not to excuse Orion's faults - in time it became clear he was the square peg in the round hole - but in my opinion one can't raise "anything you can do, I can do better" without also noting, in the interests of balance, that others around the table weren't always innocent of this... specifically around RP elements (which probably shouldn't be a surprise; pro actors and all). Example: revisiting these early episodes it's striking to count the number of times, after Matt's rebuffs someone's persuasion attempt, Laura follows in with a substantively identical argument; feeling less "appeal to an alternative bond or flaw of the NPC" and more "perhaps they'd be convinced if someone just did a more epic job of asking". Have no doubt there are tables out there where this'd rub people the wrong way as much as any other 'power gaming' moves. Yep, there were times Orion was an ass and yep, it was totally understandable why Laura and others became uncomfortable. Unfortunately though, when people have different expectations and are looking for different things from their D&D, it isn't always possible to lay responsibility for dysfunction and miscommunication in a group solely at one person's feet. It's a tough situation.
Good video and commentary. One thing I always try to keep in mind during any personal interaction is the fact that I cannot control the actions of others, but what I can control is my reaction.
Had a recent moment of frustration where a player grew upset with an encounter that went south and the players failed at it within about two rounds. I had to stop the game to break down the mechanics that showed that it was just die rolls that shifted the encounter to allow for the environmental effect to shift things so dramatically. That, per the player, was more than enough to change their demenour from upset to content.
This was great. I watched this episode live way way way back when and so looking at it again in this video was really fun (and honestly, much less painful than rewatching the entire season). I think the advice at the end is great too. Speaking as a player and a long time DM, the idea of explaining your actions and ideas, is genuinely valid.
I began watching the show this year and I remember watching this episode, and without any context at all, after watching it and read some comments I didn't think at all about all they've accused Tiberius all this time. It's true that I believe this is his turning point, after this episode it starts getting more annoying, but in this episode I still liked him.
Yeah I unfortunately think he learned the wrong lesson from this experience and started sharing less instead of more. Episode 13 really does kick off a new pattern of behavior, unfortunately.
i am so very grateful for these episodes, i immediately click when i see them uploaded :D thank you for your work, your insight is very valuable and your presentation is really nice!
Stopped on this video because it always brightens my day to see a critter wearing my t-shirt design, and stayed because I found myself really enjoying your thoughtful perspective. ❤
I figured out how to time the uploads. Thursdays of the opposite weeks to my D&D games. My group meets bi-weekly on Sundays. Starting session 1 of our new cyberpunk D&D game this coming Sunday (last session was session 0 of course) Wheee.
What Orion said after ripping the horn out says it all. "Yeah, I just killed it, don't tell me what to do" Everyone at the table was looking at him with shock and disgust. Not a team player, and taking credit for all the work that everyone else actually put in with him doing nothing but getting the killing blow. Orion's problem isn't and never was communication, it was his toxic personality. Even setting aside the charity fund he stole from, the people he threatened, the crowd funding money he stole, the cheating, the badgering Sam to take an item from him, and all the other things the man has done, he can't even be decent with his own friends. The worst in-game thing he ever did, that I can recall at least, was the situation with Vex's arrow. This whole situation with him was terrible, and it wasn't even the worst thing he has done in the game. That just speaks to what a problematic person he is. Don't forget the time they fought a Rakshasa and he wasted all his magic trying to show off in front of everyone and was pouting that he didn't get a chance to recover his spell slots and pouting that Rakshasas are immune to most magic, so he just literally sat on the ground and did nothing. I really do not like this man and the happiest moment in all of CR history was when Matt said he wasn't coming back, especially after the last 2 episodes he was in.
@@highspeedstrongstyle9061 I know... Orion is the worst. I did not like him at all as a player, but finding out the real life things he did just made it all so much worse. Absolute trash fire of a human being.
@@highspeedstrongstyle9061That’s by far the most egregious example of him butting into other people’s moments but he did it several times in the few episodes I’ve watched (just finished episode 11 today) to the point where I as a new watcher noticed it without even knowing to look for it. It’s like the “Here’s your equal attention cake” meme from Family Guy. There’s a moment a few episodes behind that, where the group need to get passed a Boulder and Grog being a gigachad lifted it over his head and out of the way for them. Even after it was clear that Grog had cleared the way, Tiberius needed his equal attention cake and “helps” by magically pushing it even though Grog had already passed the strength check and solved the issue. There was that time where Scanlan grappled the giant with a spell and everyone was impressed at how cool that was. Guess who immediately needs to also try to magically grapple the giant moments later?
@@highspeedstrongstyle9061 Oh I'm still very much enjoying it, I even find Tiberius has some genuinely charming moments despite some of his negative behaviour. It's just hard to not notice his "What about me! look how cool I am guys!" attitude, but it's only mildly annoying at worst, at least so far.
I really enjoyed this video! This makes the feelings of dislike of this episode make better sense. I thought the episode had problems but never to the point people talk about it today. There’s so much I want to say here but it’s been covered by others already. I wish more people would watch these episodes and do so with a open mind. The early CR episodes are much better and memorable than current fandom seem to think, in my opinion. The player who left is a problem but for the most part it isn’t completely out of hand until the last few episodes of the group episodes leading up to the Brierwood Arc. There are also other problems/issues going on but also great stories. Some of these we can learn from and I’m enjoying your attempt to do so.
I would like to point out that the words "I want my last words with you to be indignant and irritated." were reversed and used much later in the campaign. It took me a while to realize that but it's an amazing detail that I LOVE! Great channel, great series, I'm loving these.
Great take as always. I remember watching this a couple of years ago, and seeing Orion get annoyed that no one was following "the plan". It was really hard to watch, like when a couple has a public argument. Then when Vex gets the kill, everyone cheers and Orion scowls. That was the moment for me when I skipped to Episode 27. I have no desire to go back and watch them, so watching your breakdown will be interesting.
It’s going to take a long time… but I can’t wait until you explain Scanlan’s meltdown and leaving episode. I feel like I did not get what was happening there… and never connected with Taryon as well
SPOILERS and OPINIONS here: Sam built in a lot of issues with his character that none of the other players caught on to. Sam loves being a troll, but he also loves playing deeply conflicted, complex characters, and Scanlan was still mostly just being seen as class clown. My impression is that he wanted Scanlan to have as much emotional weight as the others, but no one was picking up on it, so he conspired with Matt to have a big epic "You guys don't appreciate me!" scene and then bring in another character. It freshened up the arc they were in, it made the other characters appreciate Scanlan more, it let Sam do a LOT more trolling, and it also rejuvenated the players - whatever the fans thought of him, you can see how much everyone both loves and hates this new addition, and then how overjoyed they are when Scanlan comes back. Matt also loved every minute of it. We have no idea how long they'd been planning it together.
Communication is a big part of why issues occur within a party. Especially if it is a large group. Remember to give everyone a chance to speak and be willing to listen.
Honestly, it's very refreshing to see a different a take. I was absolutely one of the audience members who saw Orion as the main villain there, and while i still think his behavior wasn't great, it's good to see an alternative.
I find these videos interesting cause I had to remove a player from my group for alot of these same reasons. The big one was that he had sex with another players girlfriend while they were still dating which was terrible. But this was also around the same time I found out he repeatedly fudged die rolls and just straight up lied to me about what he rolled. He also constantly argued about every rule in the book, trying to get me to be lenient on the players so they had an advantage but never corrected me if I made a mistake mistake that helped them. He also got very upset with me when I threw a difficult encounter at them exclaiming that I was being ridiculous and trying to kill them which was never true. I think the cherry on top of this shit sandwich was at the start of the campaign he sent me a backstory which was two sentences: "My parents died in a house fire and now I'm trying to find whoever is responsible." Ugh
Going back to Orion's worries about struggling with the idea that Matt -isn't- trying to kill them, I think I get some of that communication problem. I've had similar thoughts myself sometimes. When you feel like the GM is against you, you don't want to voice or explain a lot of your actions. There's this weird instinct to hide it, play your cards close to your chest as they say, and then surprise the DM with your big GOTCHA. Because, at least in your mind, if you announce your plan, the DM will just think of how to counter it and make up something to do that. The problem with this, of course, is that the DM is the one who has to interpret your actions as well, so if you don't say what you're trying to do they may not know what to call for, or might ignore it entirely. So, I can at least understand not vocalizing a lot, and the hesitation to share information with the party more librally. Especially if you think everyone's on the same wavelength as you.
The thing that I saw was that it wasn't all his fault. I don't know what was going behind the scenes, and with how much they just didn't talk about the whole situation and wanted to move past it not a whole lot of other people do, but from what we were shown this was honestly a failure on all fronts pretty much consistently when it came to him. I do know that his life had extra baggage at the time. I do know that there were flashes of frustration and confusion from everyone towards everyone during this time, but the only time where it seemed to fester was between him and the rest of the table. People have been absolutely villainizing him since he left the group all those years ago, even before some of the other things started to show up (like his personal life stuff became public).
@leadpaintchips9461 He did threaten to sue a fan of the show for showcasing her artwork she was going to sell and saying she wasn't a "critter" but that was the only thing I saw besides his personal life and during games. I remember Matt and Travis having to go online and make an apology and etc. to smooth things over
My recollection after seeing this episode for the first time was that Tiberius had pretty much missed the entire fight, so when I rewatched a few months ago I had been surprised that he had actually gotten back earlier than I had thought and been more involved with the fight than I had recalled.
When I watched this session I just enjoyed the combat and Orion's behavior really didn't' seem like that big of a deal. The only thing I remember thinking is that he would have been more useful casting a fireball or two. I love that no matter how carefully they plan things it always immediately falls apart upon first contact with the enemy. That would probably happen anyway, but they seem to so willfully embrace it and the ensuing chaos.
@@SupergeekMike I thought you belabored the Tiberius problem a bit too much at the beginning of this playlist, but you backed off after you made it clear that the character (and player) became a problem and exhausted the reasons why. You then made a point (intentional of not) of showing that early on Tiberius was a good character and a benefit to his party. But when he started to go off the rails (as by this point he has) … it's important to point out that he's not the only one who's not on the same page with everyone else. The issue is that while everyone else is going to start working together and communicating with one another, he's going to be the exception to that.
Just finished watching this episode for the first time and honestly, up until pissy Orion after persuading the mindflayers doesn't work, this was one of the best episodes so far. The entire first half with Grog and the ale and trouble communicating was pure comedic gold. Percy being the MBP of the boss battle and having the badass "I ignore ¾ cover" was so awesome. But man that last 40 or so minutes are so bad, though I found some enjoyment in the cast making fun of Orions childlike behavior
When I was catching up to the campaign however many years ago, this was the only episode I skipped because I saw comments discussing a vague tough spot and I already was put off enough by Orion and the table vibes. Now I feel like ive finally TRULY caught up haha.
I must admit I agree with you. I had seen some videos about Tiberius before watching this episode, and most of them were about meta-gaming and main character syndrome. That doesn’t seem to be what is happening. I feel it would have gone much smoother if he had told Matt what he was planning “I want to see if I can travel down and recruit mind-flayers”, and possibly Matt would have said “it will take a full turn to get there” or something. I think Tiberius is so frustrated by the time he has his first real action because he has essentially wasted 3 full turns.
I just wanna say I’m glad I stumbled across your channel, I love how you break things down and try not to take a Biased approach. Keep up the awesome work. You got a new subscriber for sure!
I definitely think that, like your earliest video said, Orion was feeling the sting of the change from Pathfinder a little too much in the fight, so he decided Tiberius was going to get a big moment "bringing in the calvary", so to speak. He spent 2 turns hearing Percy give everyone advantages, Vax swinging in very stylishly, Grog jumping straight in and ending up on K'Varn himself, and everyone getting a badass moment while he was just slowly floating down. He reaches the bottom, gets ready to lead a Mind Flayer charge and... no one follows him. He just goes back in, alone, and Vex gets a kill shot. Anyone would be more than a little peeved if they missed the entire boss fight trying to do something cool, especially if they're used to being a main damage dealer of the group, so it's understandable how upset Orion feels with how the fight turned out.
Yea, but that happens in D&D don't know how many fights my rogue has gotten dropped by an unlucky crit early in a fight to just basically wind up taking a nap while the party cleans house
@@chrisbennett9048 The difference was he had agency still, he was still taking turns. If he was unconscious, he would be resigned to saying "well, it's out of my hands!", but he was trying to do something cool and be a hero and it just didn't work out.
@@MorningDusk7734 yea once again that happens. Unlucky rolls or someone else's rolls get some lucky crits or whatever. Yea it sucks you talk the DM try to adjust and hope it works out better next time. I understand it can be aggravating sometimes, but it's to be expected sometimes. Plus yes he had agency, so he could've abandoned it at any time when he realized it wasn't going to work as quickly or as well as he thought it would, but he chose to be stubborn and stick with it so unfortunately that was his end result.
I think, if it just was a bad persuation roll from Tib's that let to the mindflayers refusing it wouldn't have been a big issiu, but rolling high and still go back empty handet after loosing 2 Turns, had to sting a lot more. I could see how Orion could think that Matt is just "blocking his idea becaus he didnt like it", specialy given that Orion is more in a Player VS GM Mindset. I Personaly would probably given Tibs one ore two Mindflayers becaus i tend to reward hight rolls and ressource investment (But that is MY gm style and Matt has clearly a different one than me and that is fine). So i can see why it got worst mit Orion later on, if i have the feeling that that the GM seems to decide against me if i think i have a good idea i just stopp communicating. I'm not excusing Orions beheavour I just try to give my explanation for the worsening of his beheavour
I never was really annoyed by Orion. Sure, there were times when he was really...abrasve...but yelling at each other happens sometimes during play at our tables (and not "in character"...), and for me and my friends, this kind of "discussion" has always been a part of having fun: we don't hold grudges for this kind of silliness. But I guess it might be a cultural thing, since I'm french :) Anyway, thanks for your series of videos. I tend to think that focusing on others things than Orion makes better content, though.
Honestly, I’m glad I found this video. I’m not the biggest fan of Critical Role. I’ve never actually watched a single episode. Big podcasts that eat away hours of my time isn’t how I enjoy content. Some people might be able to have it on the background while doing other tasks, but I can’t do that. But, as someone who is a big fan of D&D. It’s impossible to avoid the impact that Critical Role has had on the game. Not to mention it is a fascinating study as well. A game of D&D, played by voice actors, and they shared the world they created online. Because of this, the status of Orion, the person who left Critical Role, is something I have only heard by the stories of others, and there is a lot of hatred and bile towards them. A lot of anger and spite laid directly at their feet. Because of this, videos like this are absolutely essential in my mind. I have no doubt that Orion had his faults, especially during the later stages of the game, as you and others have mentioned. But the fact you are able to look at one of the instances that people bring up, and realise that actually, it was the fault of the whole group, instead of just Orion. And that by not discussing the situation properly afterwards, that the group did not try and fix the situation and make sure that everyone was on the same page, just meant that the wrong lessons were learned and Orion ended up spiralling until he ended up leaving the game. I am glad you are able to recognize that, and I hope this video gets many, many more views. ... And I guess, this video means a lot to me, because I feel like I’ve been in this situation before. That I’ve been the person considered ‘Orion’, where I am seen as the person at fault, when it’s an issue of communication as a whole. After the gaming shop I was going to went bankrupt, we tried to make a gaming group to continue playing. Except, during the second session, a bad choice and bad rolls had my character vomiting during a celebratory meal. Which was then mocked to the extent that a far more experienced player than me had their gnome artificer make a clockwork figurine to replicate this moment. Needless to say, I was not happy with it, and despite the fact I tried to wave it off and roll with the punches. I still ended up being asked not to come back to the game afterwards. And it really feels unfair as I was the one having my character being relentlessly mocked and being made fun out of, and I was struggling as a player due to my inexperience with live-action games. Yet I was the one told to leave. I guess it’s not exactly the same situation. But my point is that I’ve been the ‘problem player’ several times in the past, and almost every time the situation has been more complicated than people give it credit for. So videos like this, where you look at a situation and point out the mistakes made on ALL sides, not just the side of the ‘problem player’... they really do mean a lot ot me.
Thank you for sharing your experience. As someone who has already made a video laying out the many issues Orion had at the table, my goal with these individual videos is to actually try to push back against the commonly-accepted narrative. Yes, he definitely had personal failings and poor behavior, but we as DMs and players can learn from the circumstances of each instance, and see what we can do differently in the future. And as you mentioned, and as will often be the case whenever I bring him up on the channel… almost all of these issues can be solved with better communication. My goal isn’t to fully absolve him of his role in events, but to try to be as fair as possible. Hopefully by doing so, I can invite more mature discussions of these issues.
@@SupergeekMike Aye. Mature discussion is what we need in order to grow and get better as players and dungeon masters. So I am thankful for your efforts. We don't need Orion absolved. Just the discussion made fair. And I thank you for that. And thank you for the reply as well.
As much as I don’t like critical role this really helped me come to terms with me leaving a game that I got kicked out of due to this exact thing and I am certainly going to try and not due these things next time I’m in a campaign of any
![เปิด อาณาจักร หมื่นล้าน "สาระตั้ม" l [Nickynachat]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/3XE0nPF4YkQ/mqdefault.jpg)
“You done running for congress out there?” a joke likely said in annoyance but still a funny one liner from Sam
Do you have a timestamp :)?
^
@@noone-ld7pt It's in Episode 11, right after the 4 hour 15 minute mark.
The ale moment, the "I...would like... to -" line and everyone freaking out telling him no no, is one of those early not-often-mentioned C1 moments I remember clearly to this day and strongly associate with Grog. The imminence of his rage was perfectly threatened and talked down. Its a favorite moment for sure. 😆
And then he eventually rages and screams “it’s my cask of ale!”
When does this happen
The Natural 20 with Matt’s wtf face is gold.
And Pike saying "I'll buy you 10 casks of ale...if we live" was the most adorable Pike moment for me.
To be fair, it's LA driving, which is more like parking.
Ben there done that. Now I live in NorCal.
ive gotten out of my car, gotten a coffee and returned in the time it took for traffic to move lmao
This CR episode highlights the importance of expressing the intent behind actions. "I'm swinging my axe at its head again, still with the intent of killing it" is a bit unnecessary, but "I'm flying as fast as I can away from the battle... for the purpose of gathering allies to aid our battle" could've allowed the opportunity of clarifying the situation and preventing table conflict and wasted turns. Hindsight and all that, of course.
Exactly. That’s why I do try (and hopefully succeed) in these videos to separate my advice from just, you know, having the benefit of hindsight for these specific examples.
I do have the benefit of not having been at that table, having played a lot more 5e than they had at this point, and also having thought about this episode for the past 7 years 😁
communication problems is the main reason I often say something out loud, like "since I just rolled up and don't realize the ranger is wrapped up in the rug of smothering, I'm just going to eldritch blast it." *ranger pretend muffled yells* "oh no! sorry!! ok, everyone, don't, hit the rug!"
or
"since I know that barbarian and paladin have that guy covered, I know we need to get the bad guy's plans, so I'll run into the office to scoop up all the papers from the desk."
it may seem silly to declare your intentions since that's meta knowledge the characters wouldn't be privy to, but it helps in avoiding player distrust, disagreements, and frustration.
Never hurts to explain the factors behind less than likeable decisions.
This is my go-to. I've since gotten the reputation of being the player least likely to metagame because of it, but all I'm trying to do is avoid situations like the one in the video.
As a DM I've seen players who will try to do something detrimental to the party because their character doesn't know something. However If another party member tries to tell their character the context of a situation that would prevent them from acting in that way, they seem to be annoyed by it, or they say its not that persons turn. Which is why I always remind such players that talking is a free action, and as long as the length of the conversation is reasonable its completely allowed for exactly this kind of situation
I do this too, especially if I'm playing a character with a "dump stat". Like I was recently playing a pretty similar character to Grog, where I had very low intelligence, but was very smart about tactics. So we may approach a situation that may set my battle sense on edge, and I'd make a third person declaration of my belief with an in character statement. Or similarly if I'm doing someone I know is wrong/will lead to a bad outcome/isn't effective. I'll do that exact same thing. I'll state something like "As a player I know pulling this lever probably isn't a good idea, but *my character* knows levers open doors so he's just going to pull it" I think that's one of the hardest things about RP, is that a lot of times there is bad behavior and awkwardness and it's not always clear what's in game and what's out of game.
It also helps in situations where "It's what my character would do!"
... Somewhat. Little things like, say... I'm a dwarf who has just encountered some elves that the party needs for some quest, except the elves hate and distrust dwarves. This leads to the elves pissing off my dwarf, so my dwarf does something really spiteful that sours the elve's relationship with the party somewhat.
It helps when the party finds the situation particularly hilarious out of character because these elves have managed to piss off most of the party as well simply due to my character's presence. In character, however, my dwarf got chewed out heavily by one of the other party members.
However, (from the same campaign in fact), it doesn't help when what your character is trying to do (leaving the party in the lurch, right as the campaign is coming to a climax), even if there is a perfectly reasonable in-character explanation for it. (Which is different from a party member leaving the party in the lurch AFTER the climax has mostly been resolved because they got a better offer from the BBEG. Which also happened.).
It's so weird seeing Travis without a beard. It's like watching Commander Riker in season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
No beard and with glasses? Hell yeah!
Right… who?
This is why i rly love it when liam says "it's a game" no matter how tense things get. I want to be That kinda player bc i think that's rly hard
yeah i honestly envy him so much, to be able to both be in the story, in the character and at the same time keep yourself from taking the game too much to heart is something phenomenal and I wish I could learn to do the same. It often seems like either one or the other is possible sommetimes
While the main Orion issues don't occur here nearly as much yet, I do think it's good to note that, the moment Vex killed the Beholder, Orion was packing up his things, ready to leave. Clearly not having what was happening. Not exactly the most important part of the episode, but it does show the seed growing, so to speak.
I do think he learned the wrong lesson from this episode, unfortunately. We do enter a new phase of his behavior with episode 13.
@@SupergeekMike Indeed so. What's sad is that in one of the later Tibs Episodes, the Vox Moochina one, he's legit great. No shenanigans, or anything. And then the Old Woman happens...
The entire group was responsible for killing her. There are other vids out there presenting the evidence they are all guilty.
I loved Dungeon Craft’s recent video on the subject because he totally pointed out the issue of the Old Woman - yes, they all killed her. But when local law came knocking and said, “Hey, you killed an old woman? That’s messed up, that doesn’t look good and you’re already in hot water…” Tiberius dug his heels in and refused to acknowledge that their actions might have unintended consequences regarding their status in the political/legal world.
@@wolfox7776 Vox Moochina was the response to the Old Woman - it was Uriel's and Allura's admonishment that drove them to go help the farms that were losing livestock.
Another point of miscommunication is that Orion thought that as the quintessential d&d monster, a beholder was just too difficult for their party to kill. In reality, they are a difficult monster, but with 8(!) party members, they could handle it. To me, Orion seemed actually scared to face kvarn, which made his side of the plan-making just seem unreasonable.
8 party members plus 2 NPCs.
That is exactly what people mean by metagaming, though. Its possible that Tiberius has maybe heard of a beholder before, and I'm sure he's heard that they are strong, but they're Vox Machina, and have faced innumerable powerful foes up until this point. It's Orion's out-of-game knowledge that would lead him to be this scared of a beholder, and that fear is exacerbated by the fact that he very obviously doesn't trust Matt to not throw them against a creature that they're incapable of facing.
This was around the time Orion got some medical news and thought he was going to die irl. From this point on he gets kind of protective of his character, gets kind of edgy, and just slowly starts devolving into "that guy."
@@Demonrifts Which is pretty funny considering Matt is literally *the* softest DM I've ever seen.
@@TheDapperDragon I'm curious; what makes Matt soft in your opinion?
Communication is very important. Don't just assume that what you are describing makes the same image in everyone's heads. In a recent game, my character was almost killed by a mining cart. The way the tracks were described, I was thinking subway tunnel, with tracks in the middle and walkways on the side. It was not. It was tracks filling the entire tunnel with no space on either side. If I had realized that, I never would have suggested walking down them, or at the very least, I would have said I was paying more attention. I thought I was perfectly safe to the side of the tracks, and then got nailed. Sucks, but the only thing you can really do about it is just be more clear about what you believe you are seeing, and just verify.
Honestly this is why I put luck rolls in my game. you you think a feature of the world might be there and make sense, roll a d20 on a 1-10 that feature doesn't exist on a 11-20 it does. So say your ducking into an ally to try and escape some and you ask is their a trash bin roll for luck. Now a Dm might increase or decrease that success or failure threshold based on how likely they think a particular feature is to be in the world so trust and things still need to be there like any table but I find it's a fun way to incorporate a cool feature into the game.
yeah that’s a massive pet peeve, especially if the DM says “Nope you said it” when you realize you misunderstood what was being described. Sure _I_ misunderstood, but my character would have seen there’s no room!
to quote a great DM "Asking questions is a great way to improve your standing in the game of dungeons and dragons"
This is very true. I am reminded of when Matt killed Keyleth when she dove off a cliff, misjudged, falling toward rocks, then tried to save herself by changing into a goldfish. It all screams to me that what she was imagining was simply NOT what Matt thought he was describing. This is the kind of situation where I think the DM has to step back and ask themselves, would the *character* have been able to see how (blatantly) dangerous it was, since the character is supposedly seeing it, while the player is trying to imagine it in their head. The fact she turned into a fish to save herself instead of a bird is basically proof that she wasn't imagining the same thing as Matt at all, but Keyleth the character would have seen it in stark detail as the rocks rushed up to meet her. This is where there really should have been a little retconning to avoid a ridiculous, credulity-straining scene, since Keyleth really *wouldn't* have done what Marisha made her do, if she had really been there and seen what it was Matt intended her to.
"Matt killed Keileth".
I think it's more likely that Marisha initially misjudged the situation and then decided to play around with that misunderstanding, instead of retconning the whole thing. After all, at that level, death is more of a discomfort. You can afford to get yourself killed for the lolz.
Also, it's not like Matt went and said: "Nope, what's done is done, now die". He instead reiterated the cliff's description, and Marisha could have chosen to change her course of action. Luckily they went for the wacky option instead, since the whole thing was funny as hell.
Not entirely related, but they all look so young! Except for Liam. He looks older in the beginning episodes.
Glad I'm not the only one lol
It's the beard and mullet combo
@@MollymaukT He also just sorta looks like he's balding in the beginning lol
Wasn't Liam going through some pretty heavy stuff at the beginning of Campaign 1 ?
@@telarr9164 yup, he sure was
Matt has said before that successful persuasion won't make someone completely go against their nature. The fact the mindflayers let him be with a 25 is LUCKY.
Matt says that and the DMG says that, too. I believe almost word for word, even.
And I agree, except I wouldn't put it as lucky, more that Matt was anticipating Orion to throw a fit/derail things even more and found a way to shut things down without giving him angrier by having things backfire
@@niedude Matt is a good dude so he would totally do that but he wasn't cutting anyone a break that fight. Grog was restrained for mostly the entire fight and Scanlan and Pike were almost killed via their brains being extracted if I remember correctly. I genuinely think Matt was prepared to psychically blast him out of the sky but who knows
I really appreciate your videos. Because of how unfortunately sour things really turned with Orion towards the end of his time with the show, I feel like many find it difficult to look back on earlier episodes without that lens of what he eventually became clouding over everything else. But you're looking at these episodes as they come and judging them in a vacuum, and I feel that you come away with much more nuanced and useful critiques and commentary as a result.
I've just always found it a shame that things got as bad as they did. Watching Critical Role for the first time and not knowing what was going to happen with Orion/Tiberius, I really just saw the rough spots as the same rough spots everyone else had. Over the course of these years of campaigns, every player has grown and become much better players by learning from their mistakes. As just one example, Sam Riegel has openly admitted that it wasn't until late in campaign 1 (towards the end of the Chroma Conclave) that he actually started taking Dungeons & Dragons seriously. It's just a shame that I can't live in a timeline where things didn't get so bad with Orion and I could actually see what an Orion who similarly had years to improve looks like.
I'm with you on that. I for one am quite fond of Tiberius as a character and it's a shame that irl troubles had to cut that short.
@@forfaerghus8092 Yeah Tiberius the character is great. The real shame is that Orion claimed Tiberius so he had to be removed from the comic adaptation series. It would've been neat to at least see more of the dynamic there.
@@smoogieboogie1694 I cannot fault Orion for that since he did create Tiberius and probably still cares a lot about his character. And if I may add, what Matt did in episode 64 felt just plain spiteful.
@@forfaerghus8092 I disagree. He had to write Tiberius out somehow and he and Orion talked about it beforehand.
@@forfaerghus8092 It's not spiteful at all lul wut? It was super respectful and gentle, with the cast and their characters getting a chance to say a real goodbye to what was their friend for a large part of the beginning. Spiteful would have been completely ruining his memory by like having him get absolutely destroyed a couple episodes after Orion left. 30+ episodes (like >6 months) later is not spite.
I’m mostly on board with your point that Orions behavior in this episode wasn’t THAT egregious, and it really only stands out now in hindsight. The communication and planning aspect is a big part of what went wrong.
I do think, though, that while what he was doing wasn’t “metagaming,” he did engage in another common player behavior that can bug DMs: attempting to resolve a relatively straightforward combat encounter by recruiting an army of NPCs to fight the battle for them, basically subverting the whole quest. I’m sure plenty of people have seen it: “my character has a noble background, let’s just go to the King and ask for him to send his Paladin retainers with us?” And yeah, Matt kinda set himself up for that in this instance by putting K’varn in the middle of a city of Mind Flayers, but as an experienced player it does come across as a bit… unsportsmanlike on the player’s part, because either the DM has to shut it down (ruining the player’s fun), or go along with it and run an extremely anticlimactic, one sided final boss fight.
Also worth pointing out that Orion tried to do the same thing during the Briarwood arc, sending a message to Tiberius’s father asking him to send the Draconian army to fight them. So it’s not just a one-time thing.
I’d say requesting the Draconian army to fight the Briarwoods is probably worse in comparison because that is _Percy’s_ character arc. Sending an army to do the work for you robs Tal of agency as a player.
Not to mention Delilah is a necromancer and Sylas is a vampire. What is the Draconian army going to do against an army of the undead and an immortal creature that can only be killed by sunlight or the equivalent spells. If they don’t have the necessary resources available Tiberius would be sending them to their deaths and potential use as puppets against him and the rest of the party.
Of course I can’t remember if the intent was to send the army to do the work while they sat back and did nothing (with the argument being that they can’t leave the city to go fight the Briarwoods themselves) or to have the army join them in the fight. Either way it’s still Percy’s quest and really their strategy of quietly sowing the seeds of rebellion and taking down the Briarwoods’ generals one by one was probably better than broadcasting their arrival with an army of hundreds at their backs.
Maybe I'm just more oldschool in my sensibilities (even though I basically started with 5e) but to me, part of the game is using every resource at your disposal to make sure you win a fight. Now, that's just my style of game -- Matt likes to run a more cinematic game with big setpiece encounters, and that's fine. But I like when players color outside the lines to give themselves an advantage because it means they're invested and actually thinking about the game, not just running in and using whatever they have on their character sheet in an all-out brawl hoping it'll work out. They found a creative way to eliminate the mind control. It seems silly to not reward the same level of creativity to make the fight easier just because it might not feel as epic or climactic. I'm sure we've all had encounters that we designed to be these big, harrowing action sequences, only for a cheeky player or a series of bad rolls to end it faster than expected. It's a learning experience. In the meantime, I don't see why a small army of Illithids coming in like the Riders of Rohan at the battle of Helm's Deep wouldn't be cool as hell. I love Matt Mercer as much as the next TTRPG nerd, but I smell a little bit of DM pride coming through here.
@@Boundwithflame23 Oh, that was way worse. Rallying people to rise up against the monster oppressing them is completely legitimate, and the party was invested in the arc of getting Clarota a redemption arc with his people (even though he was a monster himself who was likely always going to betray them). That's a justified character journey. Trying to call in a squadron of knights who have no connection to the plot and your character hasn't been closely connected to and asking them to ride in makes no sense in the world and no sense for the campaign. Vex even said, "Uhm, I wasn't aware we had an army we could just call in this whole time," because of course they didn't, that would make no sense.
Despite that, there's still a way you could let your character try it in a way that fits. They needed an army, but they couldn't use the connections they'd build up in Emon to help because Uriel was under control and the party had burned their local political capitol. So have Tiberius be more tentative about his proposal. "It may be possible to convince my father to aid us, if we can find evidence. Should I try to call him in?" Matt was super generous about letting the players start an insurrection with very minimal effort because it was the overall plan. If they'd had to plan to come up with evidence to send to Tiberius' father to get the army, Matt might have allowed it. But Tiberius tried to draw them in by sending off a single letter-he was trying to shortcut major issues instead of putting in a bit of team effort.
In short, don't just have your character say he's solved a problem and pretend it's going to fly.
Matt gave *very* clear indications that the other Illithid were not going to be friendly. He also clearly held back when Tiberius ignored those warnings and went in, he stated that he could have mind blasted him three times in that round, and most DMs I know would not allow someone to Persuade out of an attack in that situation, given that he was clearly trying to deceive them, neither speaking Undercommon nor communicating via telepathy while in the guise of Clarota.
Sending Cannon fodder against a master necromancer might not be the best plan of action. Might aswell abuse his arrogance now before the mind flayer consolidate the city.
"Nothing beats a failure but a try." That's my new favorite quote.
Yes, there was miscommunication. Which wasn‘t on Orion alone.
But that explains why Tiberius acted in a way he wasn‘t exactly helpful and messed around somewhere else entirely.
HOWEVER:
It neither explains nor excuses how ORION dealt with the situation:
He gets angry. Mostly at Matt as it seems. And sours the mood on the table.
There is a situation where somebody describes the battle as a scene from a specific movie (don‘t remember, might have been „Transformers 3“ or something…). And Orion‘s response in anger, with Matt on the table, is something like „Yeah. And that movie sucked!“
I have little patience for a player disrespecting a DM like that, especially during the game, at the table. Critique a DM when he has made a mistake or a session that sucked. But don‘t throw something like that at him while the game is still running.
The atmosphere at the table wasn‘t bad because there was miscommunication, it was bad because Orion pulled down the mood.
And while this can happen to all of us, and nobody will always be perfect in how they handle a session where they feel like they have been screwed over (as Orion might have felt for good reasons in this one), I really don‘t think it‘s a coincidence that it was Orion who this happened too.
Lot‘s of blame to go around, why there was clear miscommunication on the table. That‘s not on him.
But it IS on him, that it then escalated and turned so sour.
Right, that’s the biggest lesson I discuss in the video, you have to be in control of how your frustration manifests at the table.
(It was Iron Man 3 BTW, although I don’t remember the context of why Taliesin referenced it, but it was yet another example of Orion’s frustration manifesting in really aggressive and unhelpful ways at the table.)
This is the episode Liam makes a callback to, regarding Percy's last words to Vax
It's been a while since I've seen this episode, but any time someone tries to do "social" encounters in the middle of combat it shows a big disconnect. Five rounds is 30 seconds of real time, and while I get that DMs/Parties sort of mess with the space/time continuum when it comes to conversations that happen during combat (although most of it is not in character), going somewhere far away and trying to convince a bunch of people to join you in a fight that started 18 seconds ago and will be over in 12 more seconds just doesn't really work at all. At some point the plan that was in his head broke down and he didn't really adapt to what was actually happening, and I think that sort of explains one of the problems with the player overall. He always had his own plan that he never articulated to the group, either by choice or subconsciously. In isolation when looking at just this one episode it's honestly no big deal, but when added to the totality of all the episodes it shows a pattern.
I agree with everything you said, however I disagree completely that it's a disconnect. That is to say, yes, when one player is not on the same page as everyone else, THAT'S a disconnect which should have been handled is Session 0, and obviously Tiberius/Orion was guilty of selfish tunnel-vision. But not every group takes the timing of combat rounds literally. And I don't just mean _"Okay a round is six seconds, but we're going to fudge the numbers for certain exceptions",_ I mean _"Homebrew: a round is NOT six seconds, it's an ambiguous period of combat that happens CLOSE TO simultaneously but plays out narratively just like any other scene"._ This is most games I play or GM. The (accurate) reasons you're describing are exactly why we DON'T want a round to be six seconds. An "epic" 24 second battle feels dumb and realistic. You heard me. DUMB and REALISTIC.
D&D is a form of escapism. The rules are designed to bring foundation and consistency to the game, while simulating any possible action a character might take. The real disconnect is trying to make as many rules feel "as real as possible" instead of "as fun as possible", despite 99% of the rules absolutely failing to do this. ESPECIALLY rules which measure time/distance. Move Speed, Travel, Falling, Drowning... when put against a drop of scrutiny, they fail miserably to simulate real life. Why force them to, when that has little-to-nothing to do with gameplay? Especially when everything else about D&D is absurd, and hand-waved for the cool factor? It's attempting to do the GM's job for them.
I _want_ the witty banter between the villains and the characters. I _want_ the "Desperate times call for desperate measures" wildcard plays. I _want_ the dramatic pause when a beloved character is run through unexpectedly. I _want_ reinforcements to show up and turn the tide of battle. I want these things without tiptoeing around "realistic" rules which cause every encounter to feel like it's happen inside a time vortex. If the Fighter is engaged in combat against two brigands, they are CONSTANTLY exchanging blows. The hero is backpedaling to keep from being flanked, swipes are being dodged, swords and shields are clanging against one another, a near-miss leaves a small cut on someone's face. A fireball scatters the combatants, burning one to a crisp as the other two, scorched scorched and bleeding, gather themselves and continue their deadly dance. Who gives a shit how long that takes? (INB4 other than tracking the duration of longer spells, which are never relevant to a single combat anyway, and whose currency is fungible regardless of how it's measured).
The actual attack roll represents a moment where someone shoots their shot, takes their chance to land a deadly blow or miss badly and re-position. You know, like cool fantasy battles which have NEVER been realistic. A hero can survive being stabbed fifteen times and exploded three times, but they can only endure more than a minute of swashbuckling because "that's how fights work"? Hard pass.
I'm not saying that consistency is bad - far from it. Consistency is key. Six-second intervals suck narratively AND for consistency. It's okay to let them go - they don't serve D&D.
Bo every combat where they make fun of her by saying "and that's your turn."
If anything this also highlights the problem with six second rounds, it's completely unbelievable by any metric. Number 1, how can dozens of individual turns occur in 6 seconds, I've heard people argue that it all happens at the same time, but that doesn't make sense when the wizard's fireball takes into account all movement in turns before. Number 2, most of the actions described in spells or even attacks can't happen in 6 seconds without superhuman speed (I'm not even gonna get into movement speed) Number 3, if you scale this concept up, every large-scale combat in the d&d world would end in 2 minutes or less. (Armies of thousands of men collide on the battlefield, and after barely a minute, one has lost). The 6 second round concept has and always will be one of the biggest problems with RAW, because it just doesn't make sense. Just adjust spell durations to be round based and have time be a DM judgement.
@@Eshajori a Session 0 isn't solving the issues that Orion had in the rest of the table. Session 0s aren't a panacea that preemptively solves all issues, especially when I guarantee you Orion never believed he was in the wrong. Sometimes you have to play with someone to realize they aren't a fit at the table, and at that point you need to react accordingly which I what they eventually did.
It's been a whiileee
Unfortunately, initiative does end up ruining any chance at diplomacy later on in another episode: Campaign 2, Episode 104: "The Ruined Sliver". And in this instance, it's Matt that jumped the gun by prematurely calling for initiative, thinking that the group wouldn't trade blows right away.
Sadly, at that point the players had it ingrained in their heads that initiative = combat must start, therefore words are useless.
As such, it leads to a VERY uncomfortable moment of misunderstanding... and a lot of guilt-tripping for poor Marisha, who in the moment acted based on that aforementioned instinct that diplomacy was done. And Matt kept thinking that what the players wanted was what he intended.
He DOES end up mentioning on Twitter later that he 100% handled the situation poorly and unintentionally kept perpetuating the guilt-tripping that had kept going on until it finally stopped.
And I'm glad that Matt acknowledged his own culpability in the heat of the moment. He had caused discourse that wasn't meant to happen and hadn't realized it until later on, due to pre-recording it.
The way initiative reprograms players’ brains will definitely be the subject of a future video for exactly this reason.
@@SupergeekMike And thus a lesson that all DMs should learn: don't declare initiative unless you know for certain that ALL other options have been exhausted OR unless the players themselves resort to aggression.
Case in point...
SPOILERS FOR C3, EPISODE 29
The standoff with Yu. Initiative had been held off, diplomacy was still in effect... until Fearne took aggressive action with her Flame Blade. THEN initiative was called and it did not deescalate until efforts were made to do so.
THAT is how you handle diplomacy and weigh it against conflict: when efforts are made on both sides as to whether the aggression is perpetuated or quelled to a point where diplomacy takes the floor again.
@@AdamEspersona ...which emphasizes that, even Matt still grows as a DM based off of the experiences and examples of others. He demonstrates the grace of humility often not spoken of for being a GM.
@@theargawalathing Hell of a lot better than all those “Never MY Fault” DMs you hear about a lot in RPG Horror Stories. The kind that are the actual “That Guys” instead of the typical “problem players”.
@@AdamEspersona Good example. I was thinking of C3E30 myself where Matt even more clearly states "you have made a (very) aggressive move, so now we move to initiative", because the group has actually physically attacked the NPCs.
The fight against K'Varn was awesome and unfortunately it's been mostly forgotten by now. I do wonder if one of the things Matt is holding onto to this day is the other Horn of Orcus. What a callback that would be! But maybe he won't because this Underdark plot was pretty much erased in the animation.
They’ve also been building their own lore and their own artifacts, which I think has made them less reliant on going back to the second Horn.
I had a theory about it, but I'm wondering if it's actually even plausible since this arc might only be loosely considered canon at this point. When Clarota told them the name of Yug'Voril, he referred to it as the "city of secrets." They also later figured out that the temple that housed the elder brain was probably actually one of Ioun's ziggurat temples. A ziggurat located in the "city of secrets" is definitely reminiscent of a certain lich. So the question is, if you were a lich and you were aware of your one main weakness, that you would die or at least be vulnerable to death if your phylactery was destroyed, what would be an ideal item to use? Maybe an item linked to a fiend who was the closest being to claiming the title of god of undeath, had the useful ability to enhance necromantic abilities, and was indestructible? Maybe in the past Yug'voril was inhabited by Ioun's worshippers, but was taken over by Vecna. Maybe when K'varn was possessed by the horn, he was actually possessed by a certain soul connected to the horn, and was drawn to that city and driven to create an army to march on the surface, coincidentally around the same time that the Briarwoods were also making plans to build up an army of their own in preparation for Vecna's return.
Matt's clearly building towards Tharazdun at this point. I think that's the ultimate big bad Matt wants to work towards. As with the whole cult arc in C2 and the ending with Kingslys dreams revealing Tharazdune was behind the corruption of the Somnovum.
Love this Demystified video of yours! It's so easy, when we are looking at something connected with other problems, to just assign all the bad things we know are problems to every time we are looking at that subject. Thank you for looking at this episode objectively and laying out the actual issues and what we can learn from them. This is such a great series, thanks so much for all your hard work!!! Love the content!
It's a bit disheartening hearing the reputation that this episode has within the fandom, considering it's the episode that convinced me to keep watching Critical Role. I knew absolutely nothing about D&D before I started watching CR, and this episode made me realize how CINEMATIC D&D can be. I honestly didn't notice the stuff with Tiberius (until it got uncomfortably obvious at the end) because I was so enthralled with the story. I really hope that newcomers to Critical Role give the Underdark arc a chance, as there are a lot of really cool and fun moments worth watching.
I agree. I didn’t notice a lot of the earlier Tiberius/Orion problem player behavior at first because as someone who only had rudimentary D&D experience, I was so enthralled by everything else going on. I had noticed some things that annoyed me from him, but a lot of the players had done things that annoyed me too so I just saw it as my preference vs. theirs. It wasn’t until I started reading the comments sections of this episode foreshadowing the bad behavior to come that I realized how many early signs I’d missed and started looking for the bad behavior. I’m glad I started with the Underdark Arc as well because not only did I enjoy it it did create a contrast to just how good the briarwood arc was too and how much better it could get
Agreed! I really, really loved that first arc and especially that fight against K'varn because everyone was so terrified. Like, the players were visibly shaken up by going up against this beholder. It was definitely one of the things that cemented the need to keep going with this series because it was so powerful.
At that time I really wasn't that irked by Orion/Tiberius yet. Sure, I understood how the others were annoyed because Tiberius was so adamant not to step into the lair of this beholder and ended up barely being helpful in a moment they all thought they'd get wiped out by this thing they were going up against.
I really liked this arc when I first watched it. If I ever get around to rewatching it, I hope beyond all hope that I'll still be able to enjoy it.
I love the Kraghammer arc so much. I really really love it. It’s a shame things went so wrong at the end of this arc/the beginning of the briarwoods arc because it’s really really good.
Vax's foot. *(mic drop)* no more need to be said about how great that arc was.
So glad Percy's quote "I want my final words with you to be indignant and irritated." made the cut in this video.
They were.
😭😭😭
Oof.
This one definitely hit home for me. I recently had a situation where a plan wasn't followed and it killed my character. Without getting into details, we were a party of level 4s, and I was both the only heals and the only tank (paladin) and the scenario is that we needed to sneak into a villain's lair, rescue some prisoners, and get out. I used a one time use item to fly into position as a butterfly after the bard (also as butterfly) and I scouted the area and came up with the smash and grab plan. We were going to stealth to the side door, I'd hold off the guards, and we'd grab the prisoners and run. I had really good AC AND had misty step via a feat so I was really confident I could hold the guards off for long enough, then burn my misty step and dash to get to safety.
What ended up happening was a full on fight where my character was all on his own and got taken out by the boss who was definitely too strong for us. I really felt like my party let me die. And in retrospect, probably should have abandoned the plan and burned my resources to regroup, especially because I know that the group I'm playing with is tactically... not great. But also it was really hard to walk that line of expressing "hey remember the plan" without telling anyone how to play their character.
The silver lining is that my PC's death was 100% in line with their character, and that was the exact kind of cause he'd have given his life for. But that frustration when you're feeling like everyone agreed to a plan and then left you hanging out to dry is definitely real and only amplified when you end up paying the price for their failures. (doubly so because a party member looted a magic item from my previous PC and didn't politely pass it on to my new PC)
See this is where you and orion are different. He never would have let his character get into a position to be killed at all, let alone killed while his teammates lives. Why do you think he would not engage and only ran scared vs. Khvarne?
Texting and driving? I always pictured Sam Riegel having a chauffeur.
Honestly I think I’d be more surprised if he didn’t lol.
Regal is in his name.
But you see, its Sam Riegel, so his chauffeur is clearly just going to be Sam in a comically fake moustache. Possibly with a mannequin of himself that he swaps with in the back seat.
@@MrRusty103 So Sam’s chauffeur is his Bert Reynolds persona?
*ahem* Grammy Award Winning Sam Riegel lol
What I found interesting is that Tiberius actually started as one of my favorite characters. He was quirky, he was obviously intelligent but socially/culturally inept, and seemed to be playing the "I come from a noble house, why doesn't that impress you?" character. I enjoy those.
Then Orion started TELLING the other players what to do. He would try to take inventory from characters when their player wasn't at the table (Scanlan's circlet). He always seemed to have "just enough sorcery points" or "enough gold" no matter the situation or shopping spree. Orion clearly wasn't reading the room of his fellow players (Travis was DONE multiple times...)...
Honestly, I felt like Marisha was trying to pacify the situation when she was giving Orion some mild backup during planning. When she yelled "Run" during the fight, I don't think it had anything to do with Orion's plan, but as a 'self sacrificing' moment to get her friends out of a fight they may not win. Orion's dogged determination to negotiate with the mindflayers when it started to become obvious (the carpet only flies so fast per round...) the fight would be over one way or another before reinforcements would make any difference is what most of the people I have talked to point out.
The way he tried to enter the Thunderbrand Manor in the first episode was the first red flag for me, second red flag was his reaction after Scanlan killed the Medusa patchwork creature. Ep. 11 was third strike for me. I agree on the whole communication problem with there being not a clear plan. What annoys me is that he wants to stick to his plan no matter what and it needs a fail with a 25 on a persuasions role to make him take a useful action in the fight. Which brings me to my biggest problem with Tibirus. How little he uses his spell variety for combat specifically in this episode despite being a lvl 9 sorcerer. He neither used Firebolt, Ice Knife or Scorching Ray he rather cast Fly, Invisibility and/or Stoneskin on himself and is upset that he doesn't do more dmg. Meanwhile Percy altough unhappy with the relative low dmg from Bad News switches tactics and starts consistently going for the debuff instead of dmg and became de facto MVP. Rolling with the punches and making the best out of it is in my opinion what makes a good player/DM and thats were Orion ultimately failed.
Don’t forget when they are planning he continues to iterate how he doesn’t want to face Kvarn, yet they ask him in character why don’t you want to face him. Instead of saying something he says nothing.
This video convinced me to subscribe. Not because of the 7-year old drama. Because of the thesis statement or 'lessons learned' at the end. Solidly analyzed, I've just joined a group that records sessions so I plan to apply similar analysis to my own playing as I find myself also in the camp of being a strategic player who frequently tries to help party members. I've frequently found that other people at the table try to help players who struggle and their help is accepted but my contributions are often taken the wrong way because I word it strangely or too emotionally. I can bring my ADHD/ASD into the conversation but controlling my behavior and tone is on ME.
I have such a vivid memory of this episode, because I only listened to the podcast version a few years ago. I had no influence from the comments or the community, and I generally liked Tiberius as a character. Until this episode. It wasn't until midway through the fight, when Tiberius was still flying around on the carpet, that I thought, "What are you doing, man? Your party needs you!" For me, the problem is Orion's stubbornness and desire to follow his own plan, rather than deciding (as we all have to do sometimes), "I think this is dumb, but this is the situation we're in, and I need to help the party." But I also feel for the guy - I've been frustrated at a table before, knowing my attitude affects gameplay, but I just can't shake myself out of it. I always apologize once I calm down, but it doesn't make the experience any better.
In my current campaign, our gnome artificer speaks only broken common, and has a habit of pulling out a phrase-book that he periodically adds to, and more often than not coming out with something very crude, the wrong thing for this particular context, or both and it is a delight to see.
I haven't watched this episode in years but I agree with you that I don't think it was "main character syndrome" or metagaming that was the issue.
You bring up a lot of valid points but what always stood out to me about Orion, especially in this episode, was his unwillingness to "buy in" or accept what the situation had become. For example, after his first round was spent doing nothing but moving, combined with the fact that like half the party was already in/heading into Kvarn's lair, it seemed fairly obvious that it was too late to go through with the Illithid persuasion plan. I honestly think Matt did this on purpose so he could specifically get everyone on the same page of "the boss fight is happening here and now"
This is further reinforced that by the time his second turn had come around and too much had happened and they were already like waist deep into the fight. Its also where Orion made the poor decision to stubbornly try to stick to the persuasion plan. Basically he should have just accepted that the fight was happening now whether he wanted it to or not. He absolutely would have been justified for feeling a bit railroaded and disappointed, but the rest of the cast just put it behind them and accepted what was happening because they realized that not everything can always go the way you want it to.
Instead, while the narrative and actions of the story are all flowing one way, Orion stubbornly sticks to what he wanted to do and fights against the current no matter how much that will bog down the story or game play. I remember being frustrated at him watching it and you could tell how the table was frustrated as well.
Was there miscommunication and did they jump into the plan before everyone was 100% on the same page? Yes
But I think it ultimately came down to Orion being stubborn and uncooperative because he was upset things didn't go how he had envisioned it.
Yeah I think if he hadn’t been totally locked into his plan he wouldn’t have been as frustrated and hostile here. And who knows how the campaign would’ve been different if that had happened… Ah well.
@@SupergeekMike I think you perfectly pointed out how he didn't respond in the best way here and how he could have been much more civil/understanding. In the end it is what is and his later actions were still 100% his own fault
Honestly it's just kind of a shitty situation all around because not only did the cast end up losing a great friend but Tiberius is still absolutely one of my favorite characters from the Vox Machina campaign.
Thank you for giving such an extensive breakdown, It was a great video!
I feel this episode in some way was the beginning of the end. Probably because everyone felt the pressure of delivering a great product. These are after all seasoned veterans in the entertainment industry. They have all i am sure both seen and heard of how quickly things can go to shits. And now they sit there, more or less "live" live... Not even the slight delay that TV uses to save them from a cockup. With a live and pretty abrasive studio audience. Orion was pretty much run over by the circumstances. He was full on eating his own and everyone's stress. That does not excuse some of his actions. But i have some understanding for his fall form grace.
I want to commend the empathy on display in this video, and in your other ones as well. I know that my reading of Tiberius through my time in Campaign 1 was colored by the ~vibes~ of the other players and the almost combative tone that was taken by them and the community in response. In retrospect, yeah, Tib's first 3 turns would've been more benificial if spent fighting K'varn, but he tried his best to make the best of what he had; it simply wasn't enough. Him wanting to go faster on the carpet shows that he knows this is a risk and that he wanted to be back with the group as quickly as possible, but it often gets characterized as him leaving and bumbling around for a bit.
I'm super glad that this series exists and I'm appreciative of the wisdom that it imparts. You're doing good work :)
For real like this session wasn't that bad to me after all the notoriety
I skipped it my first time through the campaign 6 years ago because I was bored by the underdark
But a lot of his 'Problem Player" issues are stuff we all do which might be why it upsets us seeing our worst habits
It's true most of what he did really wasn't that bad, some of it was but most of it is pretty normal just made to look worse with the back drop of excellent players.
That being said their is plenty of evidence that he's a problem person full stop who was a straight up abusive boyfriend.
C1 e27 is the biggest problem player episode
@@yaboijdg6312 it and the first Briarwood fight episode definitely showed the most significant of it
But something it seems viewers forget is we were all problem players at some point; you don't just start TTRPGing perfectly. It takes self awareness, intent to be better and dedication but eventually you evolve.
@@doesntmatter2467 I can't say anything regarding his personal life beyond internet hearsay I find as reliable as thyme but it definitely seems it had more than just his cheating and MCS that led to his being booted. Things behind the scenes that likely be best left to the people involved respectfully for their privacy
Wrong. Marisha and others do plenty of the same mistakes, and people aren't as up and arms about it. You should also stop insulting people's intelligence with your pseudo-psychoanalysis, people are better than that, most people aren't "that guy", not being perfect doesn't mean you were as terrible as Orion.
" I can't say anything regarding his personal life beyond internet hearsay I find as reliable as thyme "
So you aren't actually interested in the actual screenshots, videos and further proof of what happened yet you claim it's unreliable? You're just being really disingenuous at this point. People are still talking about Orion because he was that bad, if you still don't get it it's because you are willfully trying to stay ignorant about it.
Communication is the best way to make a good session. Explain, that even if you think it's too much, your table will appreciate it. Perfect video to explain how, thank you
Something I've learned from DnD, is that it's very much like BDSM, as in the fact that you *have* to communicate: communicate intent, communicate with the players, communicate with the dm, check up on each other, make sure everyone is alright, all that good stuff.
Orion always seemed disinterested whenever there's a scene going on that doesn't involve Tiberius in any way. Semi-understandable, when you have nothing to do at the moment, especially in long scenes, it can get boring. But, it seemed like everytime he wasn't "on-screen" in a sense, he didn't look engaged like the other players often do. Maybe that's an aspect of it, comparing him to the others, who usually look deeply interested even in scenes not about them, makes his lack of reaction stand out more.
I might be reading too much into it. I don't like when people use expressions or body language to jump to conclusions, especially to say "they clearly don't like each other because one of them rolled their eyes at this part in the video," or something. It was just something that stuck out to me.
I think the difference between assuming interpersonal relationships from ONE moment of interaction versus Orion's constant disinterested body language is the difference. He would ALWAYS seem like he's rather be elsewhere when scenes not involving Tiberius were happening....the vast majority of the time. So because of that consistancy...it's hard to not notice it when it happens, I think. Because he really does stick out like a sore thumb in those moments compared to every other actors body language. The only time Travis has those moments is during shopping episodes and he has explained that's due to his disinterest in shopping in-game and IRL and also his ADHD.
Sometimes you can see he is texting under the desk while Matt had a very clear no phones on the table rule
@@MollymaukT to be fair Sam also breaks this rule and will sometimes check twitch chat while they are streaming...but yeah, I think Orion did it more frequently than Sam does.
@@AnxietyRat I think that's also early on enough before they had a dedicated team to track chat. And that goes for Orion, too; I'd wager a lot of it was keeping track of chat
Also Travis is always everyone's biggest fan, which is great. Nobody is more into the show than him sometimes
I think there's another really valuable lesson that goes hand in hand with the communication one, and that is: follow up. As several people have pointed out, a lot of the legend of this episode is colored by the perception of Orion's behavior in other situations, because over time he built a (deserved) reputation for bad table etiquette and unacceptable behavior. I can make no claim to know what was said after the cameras were off, but I know what it looks like got said: nothing. You can't go through any part of life assured that you will never be irritated or irritating, but you can choose to be mature about following up afterwards to talk clearly and responsibly about what occurred and how it can be ameliorated in the future. It really doesn't look like that happened at all, or if it did it was done in a way that was ineffective or even counterproductive. Miscommunication will happen, but hurt feelings are less likely to
You're right; if this was a one-off situation, people/viewers might have been annoyed but probably wouldn't have thought much more than 'miscommunication/a bad day'. the problem was this player continued to have worse problems
@@liizumi3337 And it doesn't look like anyone really talked to him about it. That's the biggest thing that I did pick up on this whole situation is that there wasn't really a in between session talking of things out that connected with him.
@@leadpaintchips9461 I don't think we can say that; we have no idea what happened off stream, what conversations they did or didn't have. We weren't there, and they haven't said anything.
@@liizumi3337 All we can see is what is in the streams, and it _is_ obvious that his behavior only annoyed people more as time went on, which is why I said nothing connected, because nothing changed positively. His behavior didn't change.
We don't know what was happening when the cameras were not on the table, which is why I specifically didn't say no one tried. But I can look at the results as to when the cameras were rolling.
Absolutely my favourite video of this series so far. Such an important topic in the lesson section, nuanced discussion. I've run into this problem to some extent several times with my gaming group, but I still recall one time where tensions got incredibly high, worsened by a failure to conclude the situation one week and background discussions (and turning things over in minds) until the next session - it also boiled down a lot to communication and taking the game so seriously that players were having a hard time rolling with things or even dealing with other players.
Oh, and your point about evolving and growing as a player: perhaps the most poignant thing said in a thoroughly poignant video. Thank you.
I greatly appreciate the clips of the show edited in for reference. If I'm honest I felt your other video about Tiberius could've benefitted greatly from some clips from the show added in for context. Great video, Mike.
Thank you. There aren’t any clips in that episode because I felt it could be frustrating and potentially triggering to people, and unfortunately I felt it wasn’t worth it. I also try not to include clips of Orion’s misdeeds in these recaps for the same reason. (It’s also not my content so since I am at G&S’s/CR’s mercy about how I use it, I try not to use those clips.)
I also just personally don’t enjoy seeing those clips over and over, which I’d have to do if I include them, so that’s another reason I try not to use the worst clips in the videos.
@@SupergeekMike It's understandable to choose not to use specific clips, especially negative clips, but for reference sake, *Fair Use* covers this sort of usage: "Section 107 of the Copyright Act provides the statutory framework for determining whether something is a fair use and identifies certain types of uses-such as *criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching* , scholarship, and research-as examples of activities that may qualify as fair use."
I'm honestly not 100% sure how this applies to critique of a *person* rather than a *fictional work* so there might be nuance there (though news reporting has its own interesting set of guidelines). But using clips from something, without seeking or requiring permission from the original creator, for the purpose of critiquing or teaching about that thing, is a bona fide usage and part of the core intention of the Fair Use doctrine. If we had to seek explicit permission to use clips, we'd never get the permission of the people whose work we intend to criticize, so this is a crucial nuance to the very nature of copyright.
in my last session i unknowingly avoided a player having the tiberius experience commented on this episode, the paladin and the barbarian were in a tavern brawl, attracting a lot of attention of the town, meanwhile the rogue wanted to infiltrate in the ruins of the baron's house to snoop around, instead of making him act during initiative I "edited" the fight like a movie, every round we switched back and forth from turn based to real time, I think that would have made the flying carpet ride much less frustrating
Okay so I'm using this series as a way to recap the first 20 or so episodes so I don't have to sit through the first bit with Tiberius in it, so I haven't actually watched the episode and can only really go from what you've said but... While yes, the whole situation is caused by miscommunication, I'd say that by round 3, seeing everything that is happening and the way things are going, continuing with what you *thought* the plan was is definitely not the play. I mean, at that point you just have to go "Ok well this was not what I had agreed to, but if we're fighting now, we're fighting now" rather than stubbornly following your own plan all alone. An inability to adapt to the situation was absolutely also the problem here
I remember when I watched this I got very frustrated at Orion's actions during this episode being so confused about what he was doing, and it was easy to forget that it wasn't entirely on him. Watching this campaign as someone who started with Campaign 2 the cast as a whole were still rough in how they communicated at the table although their chemistry was almost always on point and quickly came together in a satisfying way, at lest for me.
I appreciate that this series isn't just dunking on Orion though because that would be easy and appease people but no one would learn anything, it'd just allow people to externalize all the issues on their game onto the "problem player" and not a collaborative issue. That's not to say that Orion's behaviour later was justified but it's nice to hear someone look at the situation without looking for a villain.
I just watched this episode vod with reactions from MegaphoneMan0 and OMG I had to come back and rewatch this. The ending… and oh man Tiberius/Orion telling Percy/Taliesin to basically shut up since he killed him had me fuming 😤
Thanks for not villanizing anyone in CR and made this a true educational video. ❤️
I always thought Orion in these earlier episodes didn't really deserve the hate he got, sure he wasn't a perfect player or anything but at this time he seemed to just have a bit of tunnel vision that got in the way of the game which is pretty common in DnD so I'm glad you took the time to say with your full chest that it wasn't all his fault.
I do think this is probably the episode that began his downward spiral though.
Agreed, I think he learned the wrong lesson from this experience, and started communicating less with the other players.
I came into CR late after orion was out, and from what I saw when I joined in was that he wasn't that bad in the show and a lot of the hate was community spiraling and off screen drama
@@digadigado it really wasn't until the last few episodes he was was he really bad. But a lot of his problems came to light later on and he's done quite a bit of bad stuff over the years.
I'm glad he never came back to be honest. Hopefully he's turned a new leaf and doing better now he's clean from the drugs etc.
I think he did deserve the hate. His constant attempts at cheating and generally being a poor team player were worthy enough of hate. He always seemed to bring a tension between the players that I think was inimical to what makes the show (and D&D proper) work. The stealing and harassing and other real life stuff should similarly not be hand-waved away.
Omg at first I was like where Travis I hear grog but where is Travis....omg he looks so different back then forgot how much he changed
Right? You never see him without a beard anymore. Imagine starting with C2 or 3 and then randomly coming across a clip of C1 with pre-beard Travis. You might think it was a completely different person whom Travis replaced if you weren’t told it was him.
(“Who is that guy sitting next to Laura? Is it someone who left the group?”
“Nah it’s Travis.”
“That’s _Travis?!_ Really?!”)
@@Boundwithflame23 lol right like I watched all of campaign 1 and thought ok this might have been a guest I don't remember lol till I noticed grog was speaking lol
I always enjoy watching your videos because I can usually find something I want to have in my games. My first ever session 0 as a DM is coming up on the 10th, and I added the "try not to lose sight of the fact that you are playing a game with your friends" to my session 0 notes.
One addl thing I think is a major contributor. In the q&a aftwr ep 10, Orion and Matt agree that Tiberius is a “Kaiser Soze”. I think Orion believes he need to be the plot twist and that he shouldn’t reveal his motivations to the audience. Great episode and thank you for taking a balanced, detached look at what you think was really happening
I agree with you on a lot, though it is hard to really understand that when you binge the next canon episode only to see worsening things with tiberius/orion. Great vid though, glad someone is speaking about things like this.
The first time I watched this episode I was very new to dnd and I didn't notice anything bad or toxic. I was completely into the story, I realised there were two plans going on, but as you said Tiberius and Keyleth both seemed on the same page with getting the other creatures help, so I didn't see it as wrong in any way. I saw Orion's frustration, but I thought that was fairly normal under the circumstances (high stress battle, and things not going according to plan) and that it was part of Tiberius too, he's a red dragonborn, having a temper seemed normal. It's only later when I looked into why he left CR that I learned there was more coming to a boiling point there.
Another thing you touched on, that I think played a huge role, is the fact that as much as they were trying to keep it like their home game, it very much wasn't at home. They were all very aware that cameras were rolling and they felt like they had to keep the ball rolling constantly. Matt has become very good at judging when it's time to change the rythm of story telling a bit and the others too know how to switch things up to keep things interesting too, that's where their acting careers shine. But at the time they were learning how to translate those acting skills into dnd for a public skill, and sometimes they overcompensated, and maybe were still paying too much attention to negative feedback. Looking back this episode felt a bit frantic.
I will say that Matt seems very aware of his own part in the mismanagement of their early games, every time someone asks for DMing advice he hammers in the COMMUNICATE message and I've always thought this is where his mind goes when he says that.
My favorite thing about Orion was his name. It made the whole cast sound like they were an adventuring party, Taliesin, Orion, Travis, Marisha, Liam, Sam (okay, Ashley and Laura do just sound like two girls who randomly stopped by), but everyone else sounds like character names.
Orion Acaba is an improbably great D&D name
I always thought his real name sounded more like a DnD character's name than his actual DnD character did
All while subject to whims of the Creator God: Matt.
My favorite part of a dnd game, both as a DM and Player, is the plotting of the plan. As a DM, it gives me time to do some last second prep work for the upcoming trial, and put in some wrenches in those wheels of the plan, as well as giving all that planning some payoff.
And as a player, i like to be prepared and have contingencies for all the things i do, and sitting down with the rest of the party and co operate on a plan is so much fun, espensally when i can just pull out some random rubish from my bag and make it relevant to the adventure.
Pulling out some random rubbish and making it work for a plan is the BEST.
I think language is such an underrated element in DnD roleplay in general. I would argue, it's because the hobby mostly started in native-English speaking, monolingual cultures.
I might agree that language is an under utilized element of DnD role play, but I think that’s for practical reasons, not cultural ones.
At their core, tabletop rpgs are games about talking: to players and NPCs alike.
Because of that, there are very few situations where language barriers can be used to actually produce fun play.
Commonly, they’re used in two different ways.
1. To block off most players from communicating in a social encounter so that a character who isn’t high charisma gets to take on the role temporarily. (Like a half orc negotiating with an orc chieftain)
2. To add flavor to a lore dump. (Like having a secret letter encoded in abyssal so that one specific character can read it.
And while those situations can be fun, it’s on a once or twice per campaign basis.
I know half a dozen GMs who tried to emphasize languages in their games and wound up dropping the idea after just a couple of sessions.
Common was literally introduced to provide a mechanic for tables to ignore languages.
Totally agree and it's come up a lot in my current campaign with my party not having the languages to speak to their foes. It is really fun!
In one of my group’s campaigns my second/backup character was the only one who could speak goblin (I gave her the outlander background and reasoned that maybe she just kinda picked it up) so she effectively became the party translator and designated negotiator.
Bonus was the goblins couldn’t understand common so we could discuss plans freely in front of them but it also meant my character might have to lie. Which put a lot of weight on me cuz I’m not all that confident when it comes to RP. Im getting better at it but it’s still intimidating when I have to improv something on the spot and have and no clue what to say. 😅
These videos are interesting to me, Mike, because I agree with your premise in large part that the all the 'oh this was the moment that Orion royally f'd up and is the worst person ever' usually landed to me as 'oh that was it?'... but I also instantly from Episode 1 of watching the whole thing from the start was just moderately skeeved by nearly every single thing Orion did. I did have the backstory coming into it, so that may have actually blunted the worst moments while amplifying some of the stuff, but just watching Episode 1 and Orion's attitude (meandering off on his own completely solo, butting into other people's events) it was easy for me to point out 'yes this is the problem player at the table', and then it just slowly and gradually gets worse from there, with this as one of the major turning points. There's definitely a lot of rough about the early episodes in general, but ultimately the real problem seems to be that Orion Acaba took things personally and held grudges, and even when the rest of the cast has issues or conflicts their conflicts are in character or they're briefly annoyed but within a week have smoothed things over because they talk it out out of character between episodes (like the Keyleth wind walk roughness)
That’s a subject I’ve seen some folks bring up - some audience members just had bad vibes early. Like you said, it’s possible some context of what happened colored their perceptions, but everyone also has different thresholds for bad behavior and stuff that bothers them early on. Some commenters never noticed any of Orion’s poor behavior, and boy I’m envious of their experience with these episodes of CR lol.
I think another factor is that the tone of the game changed a lot when they started playing weekly, and that’s why a lot of the cast members do some of the same things as Orion early on/why his behavior doesn’t seem that bad to them. But as they changed, he didn’t.
@@SupergeekMike I don't exactly regret watching the early episodes, I really wrestled with it but I wanted to see it for proper historical value. But then after going ahead and doing that, with my wife when she got annoyed that I kept laughing at stuff she couldn't hear we just watched Legend of Vox Machina on Amazon and then restarted started on episode 39 or so, and I highly recommended avoiding watching the roughness at the start, other than the Slayer's Take so she knew who Zahra was. I'd say this is a really solid way for people to get into CR now and have context without getting really turned off by the shaky start.
I agree with you that it's a transition thing, I suspect if Orion wasn't aware that a bunch of people were watching he could have been a lot more chill about things, problems wouldn't have happened so much, etc etc. Also monthly to weekly is a big shift too where there's less time to cool down, when added with the pressure of actually playing your game as a business and a true audience show, it was tough. And despite not liking Orion and often not liking Tiberius because of Orion, there was the occasional shining through of excellence and comedy like the whole section where he keeps getting shuffled to middle manager to middle manager, but then again things like that were when it was just Tiberius riffing off of Matt (and vice versa) and didn't happen as much when he had to interact with his fellow players.
I remember when listening to this situation that I wasn't overly annoyed with Tiberius but his wording about the dangers of the lair did sound out of place, which is something players can struggle with (the age-old hit point question is another example).
However, the big part for me was actually Laura asking Tiberius why he was being "such a dick", and it didn't sound in character at all. While I think Vex might've had some grievance, it sounded very much from Laura's heart. That really perked my ears up to the drama.
The other big point was rewatching the HDYWTDT and analyzing Orion's body language. It was pretty disrespectful imo and betrayed any semblance of teamwork. It portrayed, instead, an idea of childlike annoyance that they should've died because they didn't listen to them, rather than a relief that they skirted death.
That unspoken element really made the negativity for Orion for me and others, I think. Still really liked Tiberius though; and this entire scenario was badass and extremely engaging
There was a lot of miscommunication, but the fact that Orion was being so abrasive really is the problem, and honestly it felt like he was ALWAYS being abrasive, especially with how flippantly he'd use Silence on another character not once, but twice. Casting an offensive spell on another character without at least some communication beforehand is a red flag for me; I've been there, and that player is no longer in the group for multiple reasons. Maybe it wasn't metagaming, but I do feel like he wasn't reading the room, still, and being angry at the party for going into the fight feels incredibly misplaced. I have trouble not condemning him for this episode even if the particular issues people site may not have necessarily what was happening, any good will of that being the case is still soured by his behavior in general, not just in this fight but in all of the episodes he was in, especially right before he was removed. Snapping "It's my turn" and saying "I know, but we need to do this as quickly as possible so I'm going to try" aren't really sending the same message to me; "it's my turn" sounds a lot more selfish, whether he meant it that way or not, and considering his behavior in other episodes, that's hard not to still hear.
Yeah, the path of becoming “That Guy” has to start somewhere, and for him, it was this episode. And the cast did try to remain civil and friendly… only for him to just get worse and worse until it came to a head.
@@AdamEspersona I more so think the path to "That Guy" started in the previous episode, and now 11 is where he began full on powerwalking it.
While he had some troubling behavior prior to this episode (like one instance of silencing Vax and then answering his question anyway), I think this is where he learns the wrong lesson and starts communicating even less with the other characters/cast members.
That incident had a HUGE net positive though. When Scanlan moves to dispel it Orion counterspells it to which Sam says “countercounterspell” and Orion points out Bards don’t have it. Because of this when they leveled up he used “Additional Magical Secrets” to learn the spell and we all know how clutch that was later on
@@MollymaukT I don't like thinking that it's thanks to HIM that Sam had Scanlan learn Counterspell. It makes every single Counterspell used by him since feel so wrong.
No, he could have simply picked it on his own.
As a first-time DM who is usually completely overwhelmed with everything, the series is so incredibly helpful! It gives me certainty, it gives me so many tips and I'm looking forward to learning a lot more. Thanks
I was waiting for this episode. Two weeks are a really long time man !
Disclaimer 1: I truly love the CR cast (minus Orion)
Disclaimer 2: yes, "no plan survives contact with the enemy"
Now that those are out of the way: the CR cast/party are infamously, horribly flaky when it comes to planning. I am often frustrated as a member of the audience; it would be worse as a player at the table.
So, I can empathize a little with Orion.
I do think it gets worse later in the campaign (curious if I’ll be able to see the plans that went wrong and caused the issue? I dunno!), and they seem to have forgotten the other quote: “The plan is nothing, the planning is everything.”
@@SupergeekMike It definitely gets worse later in the campaign. There are a couple episodes specifically in one of the future arcs that you could skip entirely because they literally spend the entire session planning and/or bickering about said plan but never committing to anything. Let's just say there's a reason that the phrase "At dawn, we plan" has become a somewhat notorious running gag for CR.
Fun fact I have since read some heart breaking and bittersweet fanfic that references Percy telling Vax he wants his last words to him to be annoyed & indignant and oof 😭 my heart.
I think some of this (not all) is also due to how new they were at doing things live. They get better by campaign 2 and 3 Matt tends to call breaks or end of episodes (which is probably also time thing but it demonstrates a point) when the players planning starts to go in circles and they just need to go away, think, and do some above table talking which not every viewer likes to watch. Personally I also love watching them plan but I respect the creative process that goes into making the show fun for all people and that role playing planning is hard and not fun for all. I think Travis and Grog shows this because Travis is a great planner but Grog isn't due to the way he is built.
Very insightful, i really like this type of breakdown regarding over table relationships alongside an episode breakdown
Thank you!
Your advice about communicating ooc why your character is doing something is a good one as it’s important to keep player and character separate in your mind; it’s possible and perfectly fine liking a fellow player while hating their character just like how it’s possible to like an actor but hate the character they play in a movie. One caveat I’d add to this though is that while doing so, it’s important not to fall into the “but it’s what my character would do” to try and justify your character acting like a jackass trope.
More on that in Monday’s video 😉
Orion definitely has worse moments in the show than this, which personally I never saw it as all that bad to begin with, but I think people aren't recognizing that, back then, the cast was all kinda a lot ruder in general. Maybe it is a carry over from their days as "The Shits" but they all are kind of assholes to each other. Could be spurned on by outside situations like the background problems with Orion for sure, but when you are in game, trying to work together, and you have half your party making fun of you in a relatively rude and condescending way when you're already frustrated with what's happened in the encounter in general as nothing has gone your way, it kinda makes sense he'd be a bit rude in response. Compare the pranks and jokes the players played on eachother early on compared to anything they do now in C3 or during C2. Everything was more sexual, ruder, sometimes to the point of being what most dnd horror stories writers would label as "That Guy" behavior, excessively antagonistic towards your party members for the sake of the laugh. Some of the players took that shit in stride but it's important to remember not everybody wants to experience that kind of humor, especially not in front of an audience of thousands of people you don't know.
I do think one of the big reasons he left the show is because the culture of the table changed around him, and he didn’t. That’s not a bad thing on its own (although it manifested in some pretty gross ways), it’s natural that playing every week would change the game. And it must’ve been isolating to feel like you’re the odd man out who isn’t a part of things anymore. But I do think this is one of many reasons we start seeing his behavior get worse starting with episode 13.
This really came to a head with Scanlan's death and daughter arc. It is interesting to see them learn to walk a line in public vs private play.
We have/had a similar issue in a game I was in. Where the characters are all pretty morally grey which means that the player feel actions are justified and the rest of the table sees the character as a dick. Which we have had bleed over to bad feelings out the game. We didnt even notice how rough it had gotten until an outside person went “Man… yall are horrible to each other. Why do your characters even hang out anymore??”. So now we are taking a break to figure out what we want to do about it. We are playing some other games until then. Bc we have played so long we are all really invested in those characters, but we will have to openly ignore past actions and feelings in a lot of areas to justify new behavior.
@@slktool could you elaborate what you mean by that example?
U mean there young
I think the best option at this point would've been to ask for a short break so you could cool off. Sadly, when your plans just keep getting foiled you're going to be frustrated as hell--or when you keep getting bad rolls. Other than that, communication was probably the hardest part through-out season 1 of CritRole. There were massive growing pains for everyone--Matt included. The other problem was that the group is 8 strong--9 if you include Matt--, it gets to a point where it is like herding cats. I'd argue that this was one Orion's/Tiberius's stronger episode because he was trying to be a team player. Travis's/Grog's moment with the cask of ale was priceless, and reminded me why I loved Grog so much, and ironically shows what happens later on in the episode on a much smaller scale.
There was this one time I was playing D&D3.5 with one of my older group of friends, we had a group about 6~7 players, and I wanted to cast Obscuring Mist around our riverboat so that we could stealthily get past an encounter. I was apparently the only player that didn't know that the DM was using RL Logic for the mist--or they all just wanted to side with the DM out of frustration with my choice and how the DM decided to interpret the rules--and make light carry through and be amplified, and it ended up in a massive verbal fight between me and everyone else because communication just didn't happen when it should have.
You'll find that the sweet spot for D&D is around 5 players in-person, 4 for online, because it makes these communication breakdowns happen less frequently. They'll still happen, but they typical tend to be over smaller things instead of something that would typically change the course of an entire encounter.
I don't defend Orion's shenanigans but he wasn't at fault either against a hydra when they travelled to that capital city full of temples (can't remember the name right now).
Matt was a bit ambiguous on how much space the hydra occupied, Orion thought it occupied 20-feet so throwing a Fireball at it would certainly not harm anyone. Matt then said "ok, these players take damage" and Orion was quite jaded by that.
The problem I always had with Tiberius was simply two words: Power. Gamer.
Basically, as time went on, I tried to accept the eccentricities of Tibs, back when I first found Crit Role.
However, there were some in-game moments that started to make me question Tibs' motives in all things, the first was the fight with K'Varn. I felt like he should have helped, should have been there to be more of a distraction. But no, Tibs ran when combat started, and Grog almost died. For me, that was a huge red flag -- especially at a D&D table. You don't just abandon your friends when the heat gets turned up. You sweat through it like everybody else.
After the K'Varn fight, I noticed other things. To mention them here would be very, very spoilery. Needless to say, Orion, Tibs' player, tried to basically do what the other PCs were doing, and then was trying to one-up them. And that was while conventiently "forgetting" what his magical items could do, or when he tried to buy a set of magical armor, and Matt basically told him no, checked the book, and then emphatically told him that sorcerers don't wear armor.
While I liked the concept of Tibs as a character, Orion's power gaming "Anything you can do, I can do better" attitude nearly made me stop watching. It was only because people in the comments said things would get better that I slogged through the cringe that Orion started doing on the regular.
And I completely got why the other players, Laura Bailey in particular, started being very uncomfortable around him on-screen. I think right before the end, they started hearing rumors of what was going on with Orion outside of Critical Role, and that was the driving force to get him off the show. The very last episode Orion is on, at the end you can see visible relief on the face of the players that the game had ended. The first episodes without Tiberius, they aren't sure how to act, not knowing if Orion was coming back. And then when it was finalized that Orion was permanently gone, the table gets much more at ease, and you can tell that the stress Orion put them under was gone.
Yep. Had a power gamer guy similar to this in the last group I played with. He always had to be the leader, the smartest guy in the room, the one with the coolest items, the one who dealt the most damage. Which I kinda could have lived with if he wasn't also a manipulative snake, both as a player and in real life. I always felt like was only being nice to people to get his way or to get information he could use against you behind your back. Sadly the DM was his best friend and enabled him all the time.
thats... not power gaming tho?
There's nothing wrong with power gaming. The problem comes when roleplaying takes a backseat. He never took a backseat in roleplaying, his style of RP just never meshed well with the groups casual bullshit. To be fair, I only really watch Critical Role for Matt, as the players themselves not remember their classes most of the time after years is... stupid.
@@Adanu191 : I find power gaming to be something that inherently divides a table, though.
Every person who plays in a group wants to have that optimized situation where their character gets to shine -- like Pike taking out over half of the undead in Whitestone in one shot. She was a Cleric, and Clerics are the bane of low-power undead. A Rogue wants to have that assassination kill.
But when you have a power gamer present, they want to take credit for what other people do, in terms of solutions they didn't think of themselves. Or, barring that, they become narcissistically angry at another character succeeding. My own tabletop experience shows this.
Over a decade, probably 15 years-plus ago, I was playing in a Star Wars campaign with people who I had been friends with for few years. My character was a Solustan, who, in the rules, got a bonus to Dex. This translated into being better than humans and most other races when it came to Dex-based things (Solustans in Star Wars struck me as being similar to Elves in D&D). This includes piloting vehicles, whether speeder bikes or ships. I also had taken Weapon Finesse to use my Dex instead of Strength, and had a double-ended lightsaber like Darth Maul from Episode 1. Anyway, early on in the campaign, I won a speeder bike race by rolling 4 nat-20s in a row. This got us some upgrades for our transport we were using. Later on, the Gods of the Dice gave me a nat-20 against a Yuzhon-Vong Corvette (Corvettes are small scout ships), when I fired a concussion missile and managed to hit the Corvette, despite a gravity well that had been deployed as a defensive tactic.
I say all this because the one guy who was the power gamer thought he was just as good as a pilot as I was, despite his stats being nowhere near as focused in Dex as I was, and the fact I was pulling off seemingly impossible feats in various situations. It was garnering support and attention away from him, and I didn't know this, as I thought I was helping the group succeed. It was only a couple of sessions later that I was told not to come back, and some BS reason was made up, as what I was told made 0 sense. I respectfully accepted what I was told, rather than argue and disagree with it. I just felt that it was not justified to kick me out, when I knew I had done nothing wrong. It was at that point I started thinking about why it had happened, especially when I had another friend who knew the same people I did, who then told me a couple of situations he had been in that had been power-gaming situations. For this mutual friend, it wasn't the first time he had pulled something like what had happened to me. So, after examining the information I knew, particularly behavior, I came to the conclusion that this friend who I thought was a decent game player was a power gamer. I haven't played any RP or TT games with him since that time, and for good reason.
Power gaming isn't a playing style or a character traits of a character in-game. Power gaming is basically one person acting like they are the ones that get to have all the cool moments, and everybody else is just minor supporting characters. I find that power gamers are the kind of people who read a book which centers and focuses on only one character, the main character, and they take that focus and bring it into a collective group tabletop game, where the story centers around a group, rather than a single, character. And when a power gamer fails to understand this, or fails to realize the game group isn't a high-powered gaming group, what they do ends up breeding a severe dislike and resentment among the other players in the group. And if the power gamer senses this, it's either, they'll do everything they can to ruin everybody's fun, because they sense that their time grows short playing, or, they'll do what they can to kick out the biggest threat to their dominance. In my case, because the power gamer I dealt with, knew I wouldn't stand for the inherent bias from the GM that was allowing him to do what he was doing, he convinced the GM to just kick me out of the game.
The situation with Orion was the former reason for letting him go, not the latter. It also didn't help that the main cast of Critical Role had probably been hearing about the various things Orion had been doing outside the game.
Not to excuse Orion's faults - in time it became clear he was the square peg in the round hole - but in my opinion one can't raise "anything you can do, I can do better" without also noting, in the interests of balance, that others around the table weren't always innocent of this... specifically around RP elements (which probably shouldn't be a surprise; pro actors and all).
Example: revisiting these early episodes it's striking to count the number of times, after Matt's rebuffs someone's persuasion attempt, Laura follows in with a substantively identical argument; feeling less "appeal to an alternative bond or flaw of the NPC" and more "perhaps they'd be convinced if someone just did a more epic job of asking". Have no doubt there are tables out there where this'd rub people the wrong way as much as any other 'power gaming' moves.
Yep, there were times Orion was an ass and yep, it was totally understandable why Laura and others became uncomfortable. Unfortunately though, when people have different expectations and are looking for different things from their D&D, it isn't always possible to lay responsibility for dysfunction and miscommunication in a group solely at one person's feet. It's a tough situation.
Good video and commentary. One thing I always try to keep in mind during any personal interaction is the fact that I cannot control the actions of others, but what I can control is my reaction.
"If you don't include the Just Dance Portion."
Frankly I'm a little upset you didn't, but that's okay, still a great recap.
Had a recent moment of frustration where a player grew upset with an encounter that went south and the players failed at it within about two rounds. I had to stop the game to break down the mechanics that showed that it was just die rolls that shifted the encounter to allow for the environmental effect to shift things so dramatically. That, per the player, was more than enough to change their demenour from upset to content.
This was great. I watched this episode live way way way back when and so looking at it again in this video was really fun (and honestly, much less painful than rewatching the entire season). I think the advice at the end is great too. Speaking as a player and a long time DM, the idea of explaining your actions and ideas, is genuinely valid.
I began watching the show this year and I remember watching this episode, and without any context at all, after watching it and read some comments I didn't think at all about all they've accused Tiberius all this time. It's true that I believe this is his turning point, after this episode it starts getting more annoying, but in this episode I still liked him.
Yeah I unfortunately think he learned the wrong lesson from this experience and started sharing less instead of more. Episode 13 really does kick off a new pattern of behavior, unfortunately.
i am so very grateful for these episodes, i immediately click when i see them uploaded :D thank you for your work, your insight is very valuable and your presentation is really nice!
Stopped on this video because it always brightens my day to see a critter wearing my t-shirt design, and stayed because I found myself really enjoying your thoughtful perspective. ❤
Thank you so much, Melissa! I really appreciate it 😁♥️
Beardless Travis isn't real. He can't hurt you.
Beardless Travis does not wait for you when you go to sleep. Beardless Travis is not watching you as you dream and feeding on your nightmares.
@@SupergeekMike no that’s Taliesin
I figured out how to time the uploads. Thursdays of the opposite weeks to my D&D games. My group meets bi-weekly on Sundays. Starting session 1 of our new cyberpunk D&D game this coming Sunday (last session was session 0 of course) Wheee.
What Orion said after ripping the horn out says it all. "Yeah, I just killed it, don't tell me what to do"
Everyone at the table was looking at him with shock and disgust. Not a team player, and taking credit for all the work that everyone else actually put in with him doing nothing but getting the killing blow.
Orion's problem isn't and never was communication, it was his toxic personality. Even setting aside the charity fund he stole from, the people he threatened, the crowd funding money he stole, the cheating, the badgering Sam to take an item from him, and all the other things the man has done, he can't even be decent with his own friends.
The worst in-game thing he ever did, that I can recall at least, was the situation with Vex's arrow.
This whole situation with him was terrible, and it wasn't even the worst thing he has done in the game. That just speaks to what a problematic person he is. Don't forget the time they fought a Rakshasa and he wasted all his magic trying to show off in front of everyone and was pouting that he didn't get a chance to recover his spell slots and pouting that Rakshasas are immune to most magic, so he just literally sat on the ground and did nothing. I really do not like this man and the happiest moment in all of CR history was when Matt said he wasn't coming back, especially after the last 2 episodes he was in.
That shit with the arrow was so irritating. She hit a nat20 man, let her have the glory.
@@highspeedstrongstyle9061 I know... Orion is the worst. I did not like him at all as a player, but finding out the real life things he did just made it all so much worse. Absolute trash fire of a human being.
@@highspeedstrongstyle9061That’s by far the most egregious example of him butting into other people’s moments but he did it several times in the few episodes I’ve watched (just finished episode 11 today) to the point where I as a new watcher noticed it without even knowing to look for it. It’s like the “Here’s your equal attention cake” meme from Family Guy.
There’s a moment a few episodes behind that, where the group need to get passed a Boulder and Grog being a gigachad lifted it over his head and out of the way for them. Even after it was clear that Grog had cleared the way, Tiberius needed his equal attention cake and “helps” by magically pushing it even though Grog had already passed the strength check and solved the issue.
There was that time where Scanlan grappled the giant with a spell and everyone was impressed at how cool that was. Guess who immediately needs to also try to magically grapple the giant moments later?
@@Duckman_Drake just keep pushing through. You’re almost halfway to the cast visibly being happier and Sam and Tal being more willing to speak.
@@highspeedstrongstyle9061 Oh I'm still very much enjoying it, I even find Tiberius has some genuinely charming moments despite some of his negative behaviour. It's just hard to not notice his "What about me! look how cool I am guys!" attitude, but it's only mildly annoying at worst, at least so far.
I really enjoyed this video! This makes the feelings of dislike of this episode make better sense. I thought the episode had problems but never to the point people talk about it today. There’s so much I want to say here but it’s been covered by others already.
I wish more people would watch these episodes and do so with a open mind. The early CR episodes are much better and memorable than current fandom seem to think, in my opinion. The player who left is a problem but for the most part it isn’t completely out of hand until the last few episodes of the group episodes leading up to the Brierwood Arc. There are also other problems/issues going on but also great stories. Some of these we can learn from and I’m enjoying your attempt to do so.
I would like to point out that the words "I want my last words with you to be indignant and irritated." were reversed and used much later in the campaign. It took me a while to realize that but it's an amazing detail that I LOVE!
Great channel, great series, I'm loving these.
Great take as always. I remember watching this a couple of years ago, and seeing Orion get annoyed that no one was following "the plan". It was really hard to watch, like when a couple has a public argument.
Then when Vex gets the kill, everyone cheers and Orion scowls. That was the moment for me when I skipped to Episode 27. I have no desire to go back and watch them, so watching your breakdown will be interesting.
“Watching a couple have a public argument” really does match the vibes of this episode.
It’s going to take a long time… but I can’t wait until you explain Scanlan’s meltdown and leaving episode. I feel like I did not get what was happening there… and never connected with Taryon as well
SPOILERS and OPINIONS here:
Sam built in a lot of issues with his character that none of the other players caught on to. Sam loves being a troll, but he also loves playing deeply conflicted, complex characters, and Scanlan was still mostly just being seen as class clown. My impression is that he wanted Scanlan to have as much emotional weight as the others, but no one was picking up on it, so he conspired with Matt to have a big epic "You guys don't appreciate me!" scene and then bring in another character. It freshened up the arc they were in, it made the other characters appreciate Scanlan more, it let Sam do a LOT more trolling, and it also rejuvenated the players - whatever the fans thought of him, you can see how much everyone both loves and hates this new addition, and then how overjoyed they are when Scanlan comes back. Matt also loved every minute of it. We have no idea how long they'd been planning it together.
Communication is a big part of why issues occur within a party. Especially if it is a large group. Remember to give everyone a chance to speak and be willing to listen.
Honestly, it's very refreshing to see a different a take. I was absolutely one of the audience members who saw Orion as the main villain there, and while i still think his behavior wasn't great, it's good to see an alternative.
Notification squad. Love the content
I find these videos interesting cause I had to remove a player from my group for alot of these same reasons. The big one was that he had sex with another players girlfriend while they were still dating which was terrible. But this was also around the same time I found out he repeatedly fudged die rolls and just straight up lied to me about what he rolled. He also constantly argued about every rule in the book, trying to get me to be lenient on the players so they had an advantage but never corrected me if I made a mistake mistake that helped them. He also got very upset with me when I threw a difficult encounter at them exclaiming that I was being ridiculous and trying to kill them which was never true. I think the cherry on top of this shit sandwich was at the start of the campaign he sent me a backstory which was two sentences: "My parents died in a house fire and now I'm trying to find whoever is responsible." Ugh
Going back to Orion's worries about struggling with the idea that Matt -isn't- trying to kill them, I think I get some of that communication problem. I've had similar thoughts myself sometimes. When you feel like the GM is against you, you don't want to voice or explain a lot of your actions. There's this weird instinct to hide it, play your cards close to your chest as they say, and then surprise the DM with your big GOTCHA.
Because, at least in your mind, if you announce your plan, the DM will just think of how to counter it and make up something to do that. The problem with this, of course, is that the DM is the one who has to interpret your actions as well, so if you don't say what you're trying to do they may not know what to call for, or might ignore it entirely.
So, I can at least understand not vocalizing a lot, and the hesitation to share information with the party more librally. Especially if you think everyone's on the same wavelength as you.
I felt that a lot with Tiberius. Lots of misunderstandings, poorly resolved.
The thing that I saw was that it wasn't all his fault. I don't know what was going behind the scenes, and with how much they just didn't talk about the whole situation and wanted to move past it not a whole lot of other people do, but from what we were shown this was honestly a failure on all fronts pretty much consistently when it came to him.
I do know that his life had extra baggage at the time. I do know that there were flashes of frustration and confusion from everyone towards everyone during this time, but the only time where it seemed to fester was between him and the rest of the table.
People have been absolutely villainizing him since he left the group all those years ago, even before some of the other things started to show up (like his personal life stuff became public).
@leadpaintchips9461 He did threaten to sue a fan of the show for showcasing her artwork she was going to sell and saying she wasn't a "critter" but that was the only thing I saw besides his personal life and during games. I remember Matt and Travis having to go online and make an apology and etc. to smooth things over
My recollection after seeing this episode for the first time was that Tiberius had pretty much missed the entire fight, so when I rewatched a few months ago I had been surprised that he had actually gotten back earlier than I had thought and been more involved with the fight than I had recalled.
When I watched this session I just enjoyed the combat and Orion's behavior really didn't' seem like that big of a deal. The only thing I remember thinking is that he would have been more useful casting a fireball or two. I love that no matter how carefully they plan things it always immediately falls apart upon first contact with the enemy. That would probably happen anyway, but they seem to so willfully embrace it and the ensuing chaos.
I thought I remembered that after it was pointed out it was a bad idea to recruit the mindflayers, that part was dropped
This is perhaps the most important video of this series.
Thank you! This is a big one, for sure.
@@SupergeekMike I thought you belabored the Tiberius problem a bit too much at the beginning of this playlist, but you backed off after you made it clear that the character (and player) became a problem and exhausted the reasons why.
You then made a point (intentional of not) of showing that early on Tiberius was a good character and a benefit to his party. But when he started to go off the rails (as by this point he has) … it's important to point out that he's not the only one who's not on the same page with everyone else.
The issue is that while everyone else is going to start working together and communicating with one another, he's going to be the exception to that.
Just finished watching this episode for the first time and honestly, up until pissy Orion after persuading the mindflayers doesn't work, this was one of the best episodes so far. The entire first half with Grog and the ale and trouble communicating was pure comedic gold. Percy being the MBP of the boss battle and having the badass "I ignore ¾ cover" was so awesome. But man that last 40 or so minutes are so bad, though I found some enjoyment in the cast making fun of Orions childlike behavior
When I was catching up to the campaign however many years ago, this was the only episode I skipped because I saw comments discussing a vague tough spot and I already was put off enough by Orion and the table vibes. Now I feel like ive finally TRULY caught up haha.
Glad I could help!
I must admit I agree with you. I had seen some videos about Tiberius before watching this episode, and most of them were about meta-gaming and main character syndrome. That doesn’t seem to be what is happening. I feel it would have gone much smoother if he had told Matt what he was planning “I want to see if I can travel down and recruit mind-flayers”, and possibly Matt would have said “it will take a full turn to get there” or something. I think Tiberius is so frustrated by the time he has his first real action because he has essentially wasted 3 full turns.
I just wanna say I’m glad I stumbled across your channel, I love how you break things down and try not to take a Biased approach. Keep up the awesome work. You got a new subscriber for sure!
Thank you so much!
I definitely think that, like your earliest video said, Orion was feeling the sting of the change from Pathfinder a little too much in the fight, so he decided Tiberius was going to get a big moment "bringing in the calvary", so to speak.
He spent 2 turns hearing Percy give everyone advantages, Vax swinging in very stylishly, Grog jumping straight in and ending up on K'Varn himself, and everyone getting a badass moment while he was just slowly floating down.
He reaches the bottom, gets ready to lead a Mind Flayer charge and... no one follows him. He just goes back in, alone, and Vex gets a kill shot.
Anyone would be more than a little peeved if they missed the entire boss fight trying to do something cool, especially if they're used to being a main damage dealer of the group, so it's understandable how upset Orion feels with how the fight turned out.
Yea, but that happens in D&D don't know how many fights my rogue has gotten dropped by an unlucky crit early in a fight to just basically wind up taking a nap while the party cleans house
@@chrisbennett9048 The difference was he had agency still, he was still taking turns. If he was unconscious, he would be resigned to saying "well, it's out of my hands!", but he was trying to do something cool and be a hero and it just didn't work out.
@@MorningDusk7734 yea once again that happens. Unlucky rolls or someone else's rolls get some lucky crits or whatever. Yea it sucks you talk the DM try to adjust and hope it works out better next time. I understand it can be aggravating sometimes, but it's to be expected sometimes. Plus yes he had agency, so he could've abandoned it at any time when he realized it wasn't going to work as quickly or as well as he thought it would, but he chose to be stubborn and stick with it so unfortunately that was his end result.
I think, if it just was a bad persuation roll from Tib's that let to the mindflayers refusing it wouldn't have been a big issiu, but rolling high and still go back empty handet after loosing 2 Turns, had to sting a lot more. I could see how Orion could think that Matt is just "blocking his idea becaus he didnt like it", specialy given that Orion is more in a Player VS GM Mindset. I Personaly would probably given Tibs one ore two Mindflayers becaus i tend to reward hight rolls and ressource investment (But that is MY gm style and Matt has clearly a different one than me and that is fine). So i can see why it got worst mit Orion later on, if i have the feeling that that the GM seems to decide against me if i think i have a good idea i just stopp communicating. I'm not excusing Orions beheavour I just try to give my explanation for the worsening of his beheavour
I never was really annoyed by Orion. Sure, there were times when he was really...abrasve...but yelling at each other happens sometimes during play at our tables (and not "in character"...), and for me and my friends, this kind of "discussion" has always been a part of having fun: we don't hold grudges for this kind of silliness. But I guess it might be a cultural thing, since I'm french :)
Anyway, thanks for your series of videos. I tend to think that focusing on others things than Orion makes better content, though.
Honestly, I’m glad I found this video.
I’m not the biggest fan of Critical Role. I’ve never actually watched a single episode. Big podcasts that eat away hours of my time isn’t how I enjoy content. Some people might be able to have it on the background while doing other tasks, but I can’t do that. But, as someone who is a big fan of D&D. It’s impossible to avoid the impact that Critical Role has had on the game. Not to mention it is a fascinating study as well. A game of D&D, played by voice actors, and they shared the world they created online.
Because of this, the status of Orion, the person who left Critical Role, is something I have only heard by the stories of others, and there is a lot of hatred and bile towards them. A lot of anger and spite laid directly at their feet. Because of this, videos like this are absolutely essential in my mind. I have no doubt that Orion had his faults, especially during the later stages of the game, as you and others have mentioned. But the fact you are able to look at one of the instances that people bring up, and realise that actually, it was the fault of the whole group, instead of just Orion. And that by not discussing the situation properly afterwards, that the group did not try and fix the situation and make sure that everyone was on the same page, just meant that the wrong lessons were learned and Orion ended up spiralling until he ended up leaving the game. I am glad you are able to recognize that, and I hope this video gets many, many more views.
... And I guess, this video means a lot to me, because I feel like I’ve been in this situation before. That I’ve been the person considered ‘Orion’, where I am seen as the person at fault, when it’s an issue of communication as a whole.
After the gaming shop I was going to went bankrupt, we tried to make a gaming group to continue playing. Except, during the second session, a bad choice and bad rolls had my character vomiting during a celebratory meal. Which was then mocked to the extent that a far more experienced player than me had their gnome artificer make a clockwork figurine to replicate this moment. Needless to say, I was not happy with it, and despite the fact I tried to wave it off and roll with the punches. I still ended up being asked not to come back to the game afterwards. And it really feels unfair as I was the one having my character being relentlessly mocked and being made fun out of, and I was struggling as a player due to my inexperience with live-action games. Yet I was the one told to leave.
I guess it’s not exactly the same situation. But my point is that I’ve been the ‘problem player’ several times in the past, and almost every time the situation has been more complicated than people give it credit for. So videos like this, where you look at a situation and point out the mistakes made on ALL sides, not just the side of the ‘problem player’... they really do mean a lot ot me.
Thank you for sharing your experience. As someone who has already made a video laying out the many issues Orion had at the table, my goal with these individual videos is to actually try to push back against the commonly-accepted narrative. Yes, he definitely had personal failings and poor behavior, but we as DMs and players can learn from the circumstances of each instance, and see what we can do differently in the future.
And as you mentioned, and as will often be the case whenever I bring him up on the channel… almost all of these issues can be solved with better communication.
My goal isn’t to fully absolve him of his role in events, but to try to be as fair as possible. Hopefully by doing so, I can invite more mature discussions of these issues.
@@SupergeekMike Aye. Mature discussion is what we need in order to grow and get better as players and dungeon masters. So I am thankful for your efforts.
We don't need Orion absolved. Just the discussion made fair. And I thank you for that.
And thank you for the reply as well.
As much as I don’t like critical role this really helped me come to terms with me leaving a game that I got kicked out of due to this exact thing and I am certainly going to try and not due these things next time I’m in a campaign of any