"4-Sided Dive: Fun Scary" (4SDx07) is the seventh episode of 4-Sided Dive, discussing episodes of the third campaign up through "Pyrrhic Return" (3x35) with guests Laura Bailey, Matthew Mercer, Marisha Ray, and Travis Willingham.
Synopsis[]
Provided with permission by Loquacious Quark.[1]
Good evening, spooks and ghouls! It’s a Halloween edition of 4-Frighted-Dive, and Matthew, Marisha, Laura, and most excellently Travis bring us into the season in the very dramatic costumes promised by the cast last episode. Travis wins host for the first time and his plastic fangs make him almost entirely unintelligible. There’s an enormous coffin set up at the front of the heavily decorated Halloween set, and while pondering whether we should celebrate Halloween without her, we all ask What Would Laudna Do? Pâté de Rolo arrives at the set door with a delivery: a letter read by Travis in a cockney accent telling them to go on and do the show.
What the Fuck Is Up With That?
The Otohan fight was complicated by unexpectedly struggling with the gate/crawler and accidentally getting Otohan’s attention. When Laudna went Spider Climbing up the wall, she was not at all anticipating finding Otohan right on the balcony at the top. They all agree the darkness was clutch. I’m so distracted by how Matt’s head barely pokes out of his robot box.
The attacking force was not actually intended to break into the fort, just to be a distraction. If BH had managed to escape more quickly and cleanly, it wouldn’t have been a fight at all. (There would have been a bounty on the unknown perpetrators, though.) The slow and cumbersome exit, the getting of her attention, and the leap to combat all triggered her deciding to directly intervene.
Matt thinks the infiltration on the first half was done really well. Getting Treshi was very smooth and the crates were a great idea.
Everyone speculates on if they could make a dunamantic fig tree. Matt has no idea what would happen if they tried to graft Possibility into a tree.
Travis says the Secret Word (Tempest) and must draw from the recently reassembled Tower of Inquiry. #41: How do cast members sent out of a scene avoid seeing spoilers on Twitter? They actively avoid social media! Episodes are still pre-taped, so they know when to avoid episodes and remind each other not to watch protected moments from the show. Great question!
Travis thinks Otohan knows who Imogen’s mom is. Laura has deliberately not tried to cast Sending on her mom. Everyone does think she is alive; that Imogen has a memory of her being alive when she was about a year old and other people saw her twelve years ago when she’d originally been told she died in childbirth – surely she must still be around. Everyone wonders how Imogen’s explosion managed to spare her friends yet destroy buildings. Did they go to the moon briefly? Matt descends turtle-like into his robot shell to avoid answering.
Marisha watched the last episode by herself. ;-; It was very weird.
Fan art of Matt's costume, by Lyadrielle.[art 1]
Everyone peppers Matt with questions about the moon. “Answer, Robot!” Matt: “I’m thirsty.” Marisha VERY clumsily tips a water bottle to his mouth and just about waterboards him. Her raptor hand gloves are too big, oh no!
When Orym, Laudna, Chetney, and Fearne all went down, everyone was convinced that was it–total party TPK. Travis is always looking at Matt’s fidget energy when stuff goes down, trying to read his face for lifelines and hints, and he noted that Matt was unusually stoic and calm. Matt knew Otohan was powerful and important; he needed to honor that. When he built the encounter, he did build in escape routes, including the idea of a hostage held to draw the others back. The group did a huge chunk of damage to her and a lot of her resources were tapped by the end of the fight; she did have a damage threshold where she’d leave, and they were close to that. They all wanted to run but couldn’t get away. The moment she did the 80-foot jump really scared them all. The fight reminded Travis of the Chroma Conclave attack in C1 where a 19 missed and took their breath away.
Laura says it scarily reminded them so much of Molly in C2–the villain was way beyond their means and the smart move was to get away. They just couldn’t execute it cleanly. Matt suggests the conversation could have continued, but the party choices were too scattered: run, hide, fight, talk.
Otohan was more interested in information rather than murder at the start, but when she recognized Imogen and realized her personal connection to the party, she wanted to push Imogen instead and was willing to be ruthless in the process.
Travis loved the brush with total hopelessness. For as large as their party is, it’s very rare to do the “advanced chess” and see no way out. They don’t get to experience that risk of TPK often.
Matt has to constantly adjust encounters to keep them from becoming a slog while still making them hard. He thinks the party is really smart and have found ways to decimate encounters he’d thought would be hard in the past, and he knows this party likes the challenge and the risk of real danger, so he built this to be very challenging. Marisha says everyone at the table was completely okay with the way everything went down at the table. This is still a safe space for them as players and they are okay with the possibility of loss.
They all had a stairstep of expected outcomes in the following episode, starting with Laudna’s die roll. Travis looked over to see the natural 1 and literally couldn’t believe it. She has so many ways to get back up, but the Ruidus die refused to cooperate. Travis lauds Matt for the choice of Otohan striking an unconscious Laudna rather than moving on; it was realistic and terrifying.
They had planned for the possibility of everyone getting back up: Laudna rolling well, FCG bringing back Fearne to bring back Orym. Then Laudna rolled a 1 and FCG barely scraped the DC for Fearne coming back, and everything got a lot dicier.
The trouble with the death spiral is that when people start going down, people have to spend their turns bringing back other people rather than attacking. With this many healers and revivifiers in the party, Matt has to really push threat to make encounters hard.
Marisha had a bad feeling the entire break between the episodes. She did not think Laudna was going to make it out. She whispered to Travis at one point that they should rez Orym. The moment Ashley flipped the Changebringer coin and told Laudna they’d find a way to bring her back, it was like a punch in the gut and fatalistically accepting at the same time.
Laura, on the other hand, had convinced herself Marisha would roll her way out of it, so her failing was totally devastating. She was convinced they’d be able to persuade Delilah to heal Laudna through the rock. Matt acknowledges that they didn’t expect Delilah to be so powerless.
Travis thinks Delilah was trying to take over Laudna’s body, which is what Gentle Repose interrupted. Matt refuses to answer.
If resurrection magic were readily available, death would be meaningless. Matt relegates it to powerful casters, heroes, and noble classes that can afford it.
Everyone agrees it must have been so painful for Orym to ask Keyleth to heal Laudna when he knows she couldn’t save his husband. Matt reminds us she tried to rez Will but couldn’t.
Marisha keeps imagining VM burying Delilah in an iron box and throwing it in the ocean, just for BH to somehow recover it and open it right back up.
Matt knew with this campaign’s characters’ histories that there was a higher risk of crossing over with VM, and he was nervous about doing it justice while still avoiding the Essek free-taxi situation. More than that, he NEVER expected Keyleth to show up as a means of taking the whole party to Whitestone. Matt tells us Pike is likely in Whitestone too, possibly Grog. Marisha is so excited to see Matt talk to himself as all their old characters for an hour. Matt is STOKED to be able to revisit old PCs down the line–he’s always wanted to explore this idea but has never had groups persist long enough in the same world.
Everyone got incredibly emotional seeing Keyleth and Whitestone.
Favorite scary movies? Laura: "The Descent" (we just watched this in movie night!). Marisha: "Amityville Horror". Matt: "Hereditary" or the original "Poltergeist". Travis: "The Exorcist" and "The Thing", which he watched in increments because they were too scary to watch all at once. He also hilariously apparently bailed out of a theater during "Jurassic Park" and "Neverending Story", haha! A concession stand worker gave him pity Reese’s Pieces, bless his heart. Laura bailed once out of her grandma trying to show her "Poltergeist" when she was like six. Matt bailed out of the "Ghostbusters". Marisha has never left a theater. Me either, Marisha! I paid for this ticket, I’m seeing the show.
Tower of Inquiry, Redux:
Minor character superpowers. Imogen never has to change a lightbulb. Chetney has super strong fingernails and doesn’t need tools. Laudna wilts flowers when she walks by and would probably be a good crash test dummy. Eshteross always bakes the perfect cookies. Marisha is directed to pull from the tower with her enormous raptor gloves, which she does with tremendous aplomb. Who in TV and film would complement your character well? Chetney + Bilbo Baggins. Laudna + John Constantine (Matt suggests Elvira). Imogen + Jean Grey/Scarlet Witch.
Deep Dive!
Matt can’t reach his tumbler with both hands and it’s honestly just sending me. He’s loved introducing C2 elements into this campaign; he’s been thinking about threads from the start of C2 and even into C1 that he’s now able to bring into the world.
Marisha: What is it like to see Keyleth back without being at the table? It’s like going into a fugue state. She thought Matt did a great job mimicking her more staccato mannerisms. “It was cute. It was good! Now do Vex.” Matt descends again into his box.
Travis didn’t recognize either name Matt dropped during the white out: Deanna and Frudell. He’s going to see if he can meditate and ring a bell. Imogen might deep dive into him herself if he wants.
Laura struggled with the gnarlrock situation and Laudna. She would have kept the rock on her if they hadn’t needed to move the body. She was going to leave it at Joe’s then didn’t; she was going to throw it off the airship then didn’t. The draw of power the first rock gave her is such a background thought now with everything else.
Matt has the same conversation with every player about what happens when a character dies. His purpose is to have the players enjoying the game, and if a character dies prematurely, he is willing to open avenues for the party to pursue to bring them back. He also offers the chance to make a completely new character, a new character with strong ties to the old to continue the story, etc.
“With Taliesin, I asked him that question, and he said, ‘No, Molly’s not coming back. I intentionally made Molly as a character that if he died, he’s not coming back, he’s gone.’ […]He said, 'No, I’m going to start working on my new character,’ and that’s where Caduceus came from. And that’s an example of character death being a very harrowing but important shift in story tone and character bonding and intense buy-in into a narrative. And then out of that, a great character like Caduceus that no one realized how badly the Mighty Nein needed him until he was there.”
When Matt asked the current three what they wanted right after the Otohan fight, Ashley and Liam both started talking to him about their next characters (Liam sent a whole email of his secondary character right away), but Marisha didn’t. Marisha wants to pursue Laudna’s story but isn’t necessarily invested in her coming back exactly the same. She’s interested in what Pandora’s box they’re about to open in Whitestone and expects there will be consequences. Matt is excited to give her new character choices.
The art team asked for Marisha’s backup to get character art going and she said no. She’ll sit out as long as she needs to and will not play another character in the meantime.
“That shit’s fucked up” that Laudna is being brought back to Whitestone to get resurrected. She has no idea how this will go.
Chetney is a sleuth because Travis played an idiot for his first character. He’s learned so much from watching the rest of the table play over seven years. The detection of Yu happened because he was watching a spy show where assassins are texted a picture of the target, and he realized while on a treadmill: “Oh!” Calamity wrecked Travis in a beautiful way; he watched everyone else scheming and wanted to be part of that.
Matt laughed that this little trinket Fearne has been carrying for years as part of her backstory was immediately smashed by Ashton.
Imogen does not feel like a superhero; she feels dangerous and guilty. Marisha lauds Laura’s roleplaying in the aftermath. Laura suggests that Imogen IS the moon.
Tower of Inquiry, Re-redux!
Before the campaign, everyone shared classes and affirmed they didn’t want to be as secretive as C2. Marisha and Laura both wanted to be sorcerers, so they paired up. Fearne and Orym were linked from ExU and Ashton and FCG matched up naturally. Laura’s original character had Feywild and hag connections and changed it to not overlap with Fearne. Travis originally had someone else drafted but wanted to get away from the buttoned-up captaincy of Fjord.
Oh NO, hahahah! Travis goes to pull a block and someone in a black cloak and long claws creeps up on him behind to alarm him. It’s hilarious and yet he manages to avoid toppling the tower.
Where did your character’s names come from? Chutney is not Chetney; Pock O'Pea is a sound Ronin was making when he first started talking, adorable! Marisha had a long list of possible names for Laudna and liked the reference to laudanum; she wanted something weird and hazy that messes with your head. Travis is still on guard after the scare, poor thing. Laura just likes the name Imogen; she wanted something soft and flowy.
Five Nights at Freddy’s in the OCULUS???
They want to kill this man, don’t they? He dies immediately on the first night before the announcement even finishes. I will say that Laura’s response to going second makes Travis look positively stoic. The editors also keep editing in a picture of Sam flickering in the shadows, and it’s hilarious. Marisha accidentally picks the sequel to play and dies on night 2 IMMEDIATELY. Matt picks Dark Rooms, the sequel where you’re in a house and have to play Red Light, Green Light with a monster coming towards you down the hall and by far handles the game the best. Travis gives a couple tries to the Vent Repair game and gets three of four lights on before being stymied by Simon Says. Good for him! The episode ends with the crew trick or treating and TPing the set. Adorable.
Great episode! Is it Thursday yet?
Quotations[]
Trivia[]
External Links[]
References[]
- ↑ Originally posted at https://tmblr.co/ZQDoXwcj8KHN4a00.
Art:
- ↑ Fan art of Matt's costume, by Lyadrielle (source). Used with permission.