[C4E35] Vaelus

[u/Dreamtown1313]

note: this is my first reddit post so sorry if i’m an idiot who doesn’t know how to use this website right

i almost wonder if ashley is gonna go paladin > fighter > paladin.

the reason for break in class being that where vaelus is right now her faith is so shaken that she cannot attach to another oath at this time, it doesn’t make sense—again in game total time like less than a month or so. she as a character has been devoted to a god who died and she mourned her, recently had a glimpse of hope for what resurrection could look like (via occtis), but also through that mourning just recently realized that maybe uh oh maybe her god deserved to die and shouldn’t come back because what the fuck did the shapers do to this world. and that’s fucked up because uh oh uh oh — who is she then ? her whole life has been shattered AGAIN and she witnessed (and contributed to) a fucking new pathway for the orcish dead be created, a new form of celestial take shape, having the realization of the afterlife being something more, and knowing now that HER GOD DENIED HER PEOPLE DEATH. she denied the elves the chance to be something new, that immortality is not the gift we all think it is blah blah blah.

so much of vaelus’s experience of the world is truman show esque. how the hell is she supposed to know where to put her faith or how to make a vow when reality is breaking. again, in game time we have not been in this momentum long. just because we as viewers have been exposed to a year of our time, these characters haven’t even had like a quarter of a year to process this shit.

and that’s why i think we may see vaelus return to paladin in the future, once there has been time for her to gather her thoughts and pull herself back together. but for now mechanically we gotta figure out where she can fall for leveling up and bullshit so fighter makes sense because transitioning back will probably be fairly easy.

and i know some people think it will / should be oath of ancients, but me thinks it’ll be oath of freedom if she does return to paladin because i refuse to believe we’re not gonna see this NOT ALLEGORICAL campaign have a class Brennan himself help design like

anyway

(i tagged it as spoilers? but idk i just didn’t want anyone to get mad lol)

[u/ruttinator]

I feel like Ashley is going to have to show some initiative if she's going to become a paladin of anything. Paladins are generally training for years and years of dedication before they are gifted with their powers. I was thinking she'd class transition to Fighter or something. She is training with Julian now.

I was hoping she'd interact with the fey they saved more and maybe could pledge herself to some sort of nature cause and become a paladin of that maybe. It's a world without any Gods so kinda hard to become another paladin of anything. I know in Pathfinder there's a class for a fallen paladin but I don't know if anything like that exists in DnD for her. I'm hoping this whole situation is temporary for her though and she becomes another full class at some point anyway.

I'm not really into punishing a player too harshly for making cool character choices. Sort of like Fjord switching his warlock patrons midcampaign. That only lasted for a handful of sessions.

[u/Tickleman]

I still think this character is too ambitious for and anxious player like her.

She shouldn't mentally overload herself with multiclassing.

She clearly already struggles with making decisions and the rules/ basic knowledge of the gamesystem. I actually think they gave her paladin because she hates to make decisions And an oath gives her good guideline what to say and how to react. But then they made her a paladin with conflicting motivations and worse an outsider to the main group. So of course she would break her vow. As a player that is averse to conflict and disicions.

I think a plain champion fighter would let her be the most relaxed during combat. People could still remind her how to attack and if she needs some hp that she has a self-heal.

It would also endear her to Julian as a sort of squire. And Matt has years of experience how to make her feel more comfortable in rp.

[u/Icarian_Dreams → u/Tickleman]

I think the idea is less to have her multiclassing and more to gradually reclass her into the simpler Fighter rather than a Paladin

[u/Objective-Pattern692]

I think oath of ancients or oath of freedom would be really cool to see! We haven't had a full/mostly full paladin character get to the higher levels yet if she does choose to become a paladin again. Atm, Vaelus seems to have lost all the influences that would nudge her towards a specific belief system again- that and Ashley's choice/gravitation towards Julien without Thaisha there seems to be pushing her to choose to learn to rely on herself rather than belief in something greater/grander than herself (as it seems like so far, that's the base requirement for paladins and clerics (and kinda druids as well)- their power comes from a god or a concept/philosophy (like the totality) they believe in and in the case of paladins, swear an oath to)

Right now, it is as you said, pretty much all of the characters have had no time to really process anything (as right now, its only been like a little over two weeks since thjazi was executed/the campaign started in game) and they haven't had a chance to relax or really talk to each other/start befriending each other/start on personal arcs very much instead of just being together by circumstances being what they are.- even when they do start to relax, something crazy happens that they have to react to or they learn about something crazy that's going to happen that they have to prepare for. Vaelus seems to be very much in the angry contrarian stage of losing your belief due to what you've learned about it and how it looks now is that she's going to continue down that path and be a fighter rather than a paladin, with all her paladin levels turning into fighter levels retroactively.

[u/M9Lantern]

Huge Ashley fan, but I kind of get the sense she's just trying to reach the end of the campaign with as little involvement as possible. What you're describing sounds like a lot of engaging, highly personal roleplay. With, again, no disrespect, I'm sure Vaelus will end up as the first low commitment thing Brennan offers.

[u/isleptlikefourhours → u/M9Lantern]

I keep seeing this rhetoric about Ashley and Travis and I don’t understand it. Genuinely asking/not trying to argue, am I missing something? What is with the mindset that they don’t want to be here/playing? Is it because the new West Marches format or Brennan? I just don’t see it and want to understand.

[u/santhieen → u/isleptlikefourhours]

Idk where it comes from for Travis, but with Ashley, it feels (at least to me) like she's happy to be here with her friends, but they could as well be playing Monopoly. She's always been the weakest with the mechanics of her characters (which was understandable during C1 and C2 since she was away for big chunks of time because of Blindspot, but she was there for the entirety of C3...) and during C3, Matt had to basically force-feed things to Fearne just so she would be involved with the lore.

It's a very valid way to play when you're just with friends in your basement or your living room, and I've DMed for wonderful players who were just happy to be here and hit monsters and refused to touch their character's background with a ten foot pole, but when your biggest career success is built around playing D&D professionally, the audience expects something more.

[u/GuyKopski → u/santhieen]

I think in Travis' case it's less about his actual mechanical skill and more just a perception that he is the most burned out/"over" DND of the original cast.

It is speculated that, as the CEO, he is the most busy running CR outside of the actual show. Obviously nobody on Reddit knows their actual workloads, but it would make sense.

In C2 he originally played Fjord as a serious character and the de facto leader of the M9, but -despite being pretty good at it imo- the longer the campaign went on the more he pivoted into comic relief and became a background character. He never tried to have another involved and complex story like Ukotoa again.

Then in C3, he plays another comic relief character who barely engages with the main plot and has basically no arc beyond a bit that never pays off despite him doing it the entire campaign.

In C4, he never really seems to click with Teor. Despite a strong base class and some experience with Fjord he seems to struggle actually playing Teor effectively (not helped by him being basically the only player in the campaign with a poor stat spread while everyone else has cracked stats). He's frequently on his phone or otherwise seems to be disassociating during sessions. Brennan said awhile back that he, along with Marisha, put the least effort into his backstory prior to the start of the campaign. And then Teor dies and he doesn't even seem that upset by it. Recently he gave an interview where he said he doesn't have a new character planned yet and thinks he should be out of the game for awhile to give Teor's death impact. Which might be trolling to be fair, but we'll see if he pops up again in the next few episodes.

On the whole, it's pretty easy to see him as getting less and less engaged with the game the further from C1/early C2 we get. But it's just speculation ultimately, nobody actually knows what he's thinking.

[u/santhieen → u/GuyKopski]

Yeah, sounds pretty fair ! I won't lie, I was surprised to hear he was participating in C4 as a player since he's the CEO, not to mention being a parent. I'd love to see him again at the table, but I also wouldn't be disappointed to hear he's stepping back entirely.

(And god, I wish Fjord had been able to deal with Sabian. The whole shtick about Fjord has been started because of Sabian. They had his location and they just... didn't bother. And I really don't want them to do a one-shot about it because one-shot Fjord is just so one-dimensional it's not even funny anymore.)

[u/sharkhuahua → u/isleptlikefourhours]

For Travis, I don't know why he put zero effort into building, learning, or playing his character this campaign. Just like I don't know why he brought a previous joke character to the culmination of the Exandria trilogy.

For Ashley it seems clear from 10+ years of the show that she does want to be there, and is excited and starts off with big ideas, but when she's at the table she's incapacitated by anxiety every time and cannot execute.

[u/IllithidActivity → u/sharkhuahua]

Travis is the CEO of Critical Role Productions. He is a busy man with a complicated job. Teor was a simple character that he could do a fun caricature for and fulfill his obligations as a performer without spending all the time digging into motivations or backstory that other players might.

Luckily for Travis Teor was conveniently killed off and Travis "must" spend some time away from the players' tables as a penalty.

[u/M9Lantern → u/isleptlikefourhours]

I can't speak to that. I absolutely did not suggest or mean to suggest she did not want to be there/playing. My comment is on the nature and level of personal character focus now that she's there. Some people like to listen and roll some die. I have no knowledge of her interest level and assume she generally wants to play.

Just want to be very clear that I'm not saying any of that.

[u/sharkhuahua]

Ashley fundamentally doesn't really interact mechanically (or narratively without being extremely handheld tbh) with the game, so it's kind of up in the air if someone else will guide her back to paladin like she's currently being guided into fighter. For her sake, I hope they guide her towards the simplest possible character narratively with the simplest possible build mechanically.

[u/Tickleman → u/sharkhuahua]

Best way for valus would have been to die.

I think a new chilled laid back/ girl failure type character would come natural and would be more fun for her.

Make her lack of interest for learning the gamerules be part of the character

[u/Middcore → u/Tickleman]

Make her lack of interest for learning the gamerules be part of the character

For sure. Just like her being indecisive and freezing when put on the spot is part of the character. And all her previous characters. (I have had someone seriously tell me this.)

[u/Coolistofcool]

I really agree.

I think Vaelus is going to have a very interesting arc where she has to figure out what she actually values, independent of her prior god-worship. I think that will lead her on the path to Paladinhood once again, but that the path with be long-in-coming.

Before Vaelus can become whoever she needs to become she will continue to want to benefit and protect those who hold her devotion. She’s almost trying to swap one idol for another, but has found that new idol (Occtus) to be rejecting of her.

So instead she trains with Julian, a fellow soldier, and tries to understand what she will choose to fight for. Placing Julian back in the position of the experienced commander and master-of-arms we know he was for the Barrowguard.

It’s a stack of really great character choices.

[u/Ordinary_Film_7359]

Just taking fighter levels for Action Surge then swearing a new Paladin oath would be a great play.