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"Game Masters of Exandria Roundtable" (Sx69) is a special episode produced by Critical Role. Exandrian GMs Matthew Mercer, Aabria Iyengar, and Brennan Lee Mulligan sit down for a roundtable discussion of their experiences and best practices for game mastering in Critical Role's world of Exandria.
Synopsis[]
Announcements[]
- The Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn is available now. A handy resource filed with lore, creatures, character options, and advice for running a campaign in Tal'Dorei.
Summary[]
PARTIAL
Session Zero and character creation[]
- Matt: It's recommended to have a session zero with your players, but not absolutely necessary if you already know your group well. Either way, it's always a good opportunity to make sure everybody understands the tone of the campaign and change expectations if needed.
- Aabria: Especially setting the tone and expectations about safety tools and boundaries, such as lines and veils.
- Brennan: Session zero is very important for Dimension 20, the seasons are short and a lot of work needs to be done beforehand for their smooth running. Particularly railroading vs player agency is a false dichotomy: in a campaign with strict time, plot, or location requirements, you can use the session zero to make sure the PCs are carefully developed, then build a plot around that so the players would want to be on those rails. It's not that important for a longer-running campaign, because you have the time and space to mess with your characters, but for shorter campaigns, maybe a few session zeroes might be necessary and it can be helpful to do character creation as a group.
- Aabria: He used this method for Exandria Unlimited: Calamity's character creation. Laerryn Coramar-Seelie was well-thought through before the show started. That meant Brennan knew how to motivate Laerryn via the story.
- Matt: When the Vox Machina campaign began as a home game, most players came with their separately created characters, but even back then, some players built characters with pre-existing relationships, like Vax'ildan and Vex'ahlia for example. For the Mighty Nein, each player had an individual session zero with Matt to develop the character, then group session zeroes with a few of them to see how they interacted and explore the characters. For EXU: Calamity, since it was planned to be shorter and the characters already knew each other, session zeroes were vital to show the intricate groundwork.
- Aabria for Matt: What is character creation like for the Critical Role main campaigns? Matt tries to help the players figure out what interests them rather than telling them what to play specifically; however, he also keeps in mind the party balance. He lets people know they're not locked in if they don't like the character or the build, and that it can be changed down the line.
- Brennan: What do you do if you can't have a session zero for a last-minute one-shot, for example?
- Aabria: Ask people why their character is here, and other broad questions to ground them in the setting.
- Matt: If there's not enough time for a session zero, email the players and asking them a few key questions about their character background.
- Brennan: Often, when a player isn't having fun with a character, it's because the character isn't properly connected to the world of lacks motivations and history.
- Matt: At the very beginning of DM-ing, he had player character with a minimal backstory, that character was still searching for power and didn't know what had killed his parents. Those were hooks that allowed him to find the character through gameplay. It's important to know where the character is coming from, but a huge backstory isn't always necessary, though it's helpful for some people.
- Brennan: In improv, this is called having justification for the character's behavior. The player should know why their character does something out of the ordinary, and if they have that, it's often enough.
- Matt: It's also worth noting that all backstory doesn't need to come up in game.
[Through approx 19:00 of the conversation.]
Quotations[]
- Aabria: I just wanted to add a bunch of vowels. That's all, that's it.
Matt: I mean, that's honestly the trick. Add vowels, add apostrophes. Make it look fancy.
Brennan: You're not going to get a more solid GM tip than throw an apostrophe in there.[1] - Matt: (about Exandria) As it took on a life of its own, nothing has been more fun and more exciting than watching it grow beyond me. I feel like as a person who's not a parent, this is the closest thing I have to a child, is this world. And watching other people become family to it as well, and adding and developing it in their own way, it's really special.[2]
- Brennan: I got three months between seasons, okay? Welcome to Biggityburg. Here we go. It's the new town. This is the new season.
Aabria: Here's the problem. The only thing my brain's going to remember from all of that is Biggityburg.
Matt: I think it's the ruins of Avalir in the Shattered Teeth, Biggityburg.
Aabria: Go home, play that in your worlds and tag Brennan on Twitter when you do it.
Brennan: Let me know how it goes in Biggityburg, #Biggityburg.[3] - Brennan: It's okay to fucking snack, all right? Some of us sweat from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep. Some of our bodies are betraying us constantly. Would I have chosen this paper white, fur covered, constantly sweating body? No, I wouldn't have! Does it require constant almonds? Yes! Almonds all the time! Okay? And I'm not gonna apologize because these two fucking elevated beings, these two hovering-- What are the pre-Skeksis, pre-mystic light beings from The Dark Crystal? Oh god! You two! Some of us are pod people, okay? I'm a little podling and I need to snack! If I could have another mouth in my back... The biggest obstacle in my GM-ing, all right, is that the same place I talk from is where the food needs to go![4]
External Links[]
References[]
Art: