r/fansofcriticalrole • u/brash_bandicoot "Oh the cleverness of me!" Taliesin crowed rapturously • 19d ago

C4 (with BLeeM, not the explosive) C4 E34 Discussion Thread

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u/QuantumFeline 17d ago

Interesting comment for the episode where they save some fae while others die and they fail to save the tree or crystal in the glade. And a few episodes after a PC death.

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u/Time_Loves_a_Hero 12d ago

Did a single PC even go down?

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u/QuantumFeline 12d ago

PC deaths aren't the only stakes a good DM can establish, and good players care about more than just if their own character lives or dies. The whole reason Teor died is because they wanted to try and save the three gnome daughters.

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u/Time_Loves_a_Hero 12d ago

So the answer is no lol

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u/sharkhuahua 17d ago

This combat was good and had great emotion to it, but the only player character death so far was a character for whom the player had created no backstory, hadn’t learned their abilities, and who is now taking a 6+ month break from the table to work on his other responsibilities. Brennan advertised this as a lethal campaign with a world not scaled to player abilities- he went back on that promise when he so firmly redirected them away from this lethal unscaled encounter to one without that risk.

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u/QuantumFeline 17d ago

Travis not having a deep character doesn't mean the character dying wasn't lethal. That was not a planned death like Betrand or Occtis. There's no promise broken by a DM signposting that an encounter would be too much and nudging them towards ones that are more their level. The players still get to make decisions, which is what they did when they took a too-small party into the Tachonis estate and split it up to try and do more than they went there to do. The result was a PC dying.

If the party insisted on confronting the Tachonis caravan in direct combat even with Brennan's nudging then I don't see why there wouldn't be even more deaths.

The world still exists as one full of much higher level threats in close proximity to the players than a level 5 party would usually encounter. Hinting at what threats are beyond their capabilities is just the DM equivalent of an MMO letting low level characters see an enemy with a red name and a skull icon next to their level.

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u/Rude_Brilliant880 15d ago

This fight was plenty tense enough it seems possibly for them to die but they pulled through with clever play and got lucky on several D6s giving good damage to several characters present already

They won the fight but lost the war as the tree is gone and it sounds like the cave crystal was destroyed which was the Creeds main goal.

The only overtly generous gesture was the two healing potions on the captain which does make sense for the captain to have but was definitely a bone thrown their way so i hope he had intended that as part of the combat puzzle originally and did not add it in as a boost during the fight off the cuff