Something I really appreciate about Sam as a player (that makes a lot of people on the internet really mad) is his absolute refusal to meta game.
To be clear, the goal of DND is not to make The Correct and Strategic Choice all the time. Critical Role isn’t just DND either, it’s Actual Play, which is using the game as a medium for storytelling. Actual Play is a performance, it’s telling a story, and stories are so much more interesting when you make messy choices.
Wick going to find Teor even when he knew Teor was dead made so much sense because
1. We’ve been shown that Wick, as a character, is excellent at denial. His entire religion was revealed as a farce and he’s still a believer. That’s consistent characterization! Being told Teor has died was of course going to be met with a ‘no! It can’t be!’.
2. Wick knew there were other party members with Teor, of course he’d be concerned about them. For Wick to just assume Thimble and Co. would be fine wasn’t realistic!
It takes a really good actor to be able to see a piece of knowledge offered to them that their character could benefit from, and continue to act according to only their character’s beliefs.
Every time Sam does this (Scanlan deciding to leave the party because fuck these guys there’s no cosmic force saying he has to stay, Nott high out of her mind trying to cast a spell she doesn’t have) it makes the story he’s participating in telling better! Funnier! More interesting!
Wick became a killer because of these choices and it spun his entire character arc in a different direction.
Sam Riegel is GOOD AT HIS JOB and that job is to cause problems in the narrative.
thinking about how c4 seems to have the oldest pcs so far, and then got curious about age distribution among the pcs, so for anyone else who wants to look at it, have another chart from yours truly!
due to various timelines and crossovers, characters are placed at the age they were around the start of their story (in most cases, this is the start of the campaign they were in, though there's a couple weird ones - and bertrand bell was impossible to decide so i put him at his search for grog age)
a star on the character portrait means we only have an approximate age for this character, so my best guess may be a couple years off. i also haven't watched c3, so apologies for any mistakes there, i am using the wiki!
conclusions i can draw from this:
c4 has the most middle aged characters
but c3 has the eldest distribution overall
27 is apparently the ideal age to start adventuring
@elliesgaymachete some of them are from now unavailable talks machina episodes, but yeah i can give you those!
under the cut to spare dashboards
in age order:
alex confirmed occtis was 20 on his fireside chat, and then said it several times in the campaign
the chronicles of exandria art book states keyleth left home at 20, when we meet her in the campaign it's been 2 years since then
taliesin mentioned percy being early-mid 20s in a vox machina q&a, matt also mentioned during the campaign that percy was underage when the briarwoods took over, 5 years before the campaign starts, so presumably 17 at the oldest. i think if he was younger than that then 21 is a bit young for early-mid 20s (and yeah whitestone could have an age of majority higher than 18, but again, limited range to qualify)
beau in the campaign says she's both 24 and 26 at points, but marisha on talks confirmed she lies that she's older than she is, 22-23 is more accurate
the mighty nein origins comics give two different ages for jester, one where she's 18, one where she's 28, so nothing confirmed, i picked around 24 because that feels about accurate to me
sam said veth was 25 (and did the whole small town get married right out of high school thing) on talks machina
vax says in the campaign he's 27, vex is only a few minutes younger than him and therefore also 27
azune is mentioned in c4 as having been 15 12 years ago
dorian says it in the campaign
tary calls himself "a young 28!" when vax asks how old he is
wiki says ashton's is calculable based on when his home village was destroyed
imogen says it multiple times in the campaign
sam says wick is roughly 28-29 a few times in the campaign
julien has the famously argued over "about to crest into his 30s", and the various ages people think that means. additionally aranessa who is 44 (listed in ep 26) brennan called "about 15 years older than [julien]", so yeah, 29-30
travis listed fjord as being about 30 in one talks machina, then "early 30s" in two other talks machinas
caleb says 33 in the campaign, this also tracks with the timeline of him being 16-17 when he killed his parents, 11 years in the sanatorium, 5 years on the run by the time we meet him
liam mentioned orym's age when he first saw vax on 4 sided dive, we know when that was, can calculate he's around 36-37 from that
ashley used to say a lot of different ages for pike early on in the stream/before the stream, but settled on early 40s by the end of it (which is about a year and a half to two years after the stream begins, so, 40-ish)
kattigan my estimate is based on brennan's descriptions of roughly how old he was each time we see him in a flashback
murray my estimate is based on the flashback from 25 years ago of the penteveral being founded. we can presume she was an adult (so at least 43), and we know her upper age is that she's younger than bolaire (says it in ep 4), but she feels like a young adult to me in that flashback, so i'd guess early 20s (and then +25 years for her current age)
thaisha and hal are 48, they were 19 in the flashback 29 years ago
laudna mentions being 50 at one point, but also mentions being 20 33 years ago, so somewhere in there
bertrand bell i wanna say travis mentioned his age during search for grog? but wiki doesn't list a source so can't confirm
tyranny being six months is mentioned a couple times in the campaign
molly being 2 is mentioned both in campaign and out
sam at the end of the campaign listed scanlan's age as almost 71, and then had to prompt people to get the joke of what age scanlan was at the start of the campaign a little under two years ago (he also confirms in talks machina, yeah, 69 is the entire bit)
bolaire tells us he was created a few days before rauwyn died, which we're also told in the campaign was 73 years ago
taliesin mentioned caduceus was anywhere from 80-120 on talks machina, i took the middle value and added an ish
fearne's age is listed in exu
chetney being a little over 400 is mentioned multiple times in the campaign
fresh cut grass is older than the divergence, which was over 800 years ago, though some have also noted on this post (since i haven't watched c3), that as far as his consciousness goes, he's also in the babies section!
vaelus being 800 and some is also mentioned multiple times in the campaign
In every way this is set up to be a joke like any other short video, it even uses the trope of main character in a wig to represent their mom, but it isn't funny at all. It's just sweet and nice
i really appreciate seeing all the posts on my dash recently to the effect of "shutting down conversations about race/gender/minorities in fandom spaces because 'fandom is meant to be fun' is just an excuse to not think critically about the bigoted behaviors you are exhibiting". i hope that this energy carries over into the gaming sphere next pleaaseee
pokemon is a series about building Your own team and going on Your own adventure with creatures that You collect and befriend, and is designed from the ground up to be personal and immersive. i have never been able to look like myself in a pokemon game. if i bought pokemon z a today and booted it up and tried to customize myself, i would not be able to look like myself. just fuck me i guess.
Actually, no, I don't think that friendships dropping like flies in your late 20s and early 30s because no one has time for that between overwork and family obligations and marriage and kids and partners and the ritual of the time slayer is normal and ok. No I don't think deep conversations and spontaneous adventures being replaced with a tired coffee every six months is a normal part of growing up. I don't think that emotional intimacy and soul bonds disintegrating in the face of practical inconvenience is a fact of life. I think that means something is deeply deeply wrong with our society and I will never forgive it for the friends I've lost
Another entry into the category of "conceptually cool game design decisions that are in practice completely insane but in the early days you could just do it anyway", aka my favourite type of game design.
The burning question of course is whether everyone is mice, or just the humans. Like are the salarians little frogs or is it Mice and Mice With Blue Tentacles???
80s misogyny saved the Star Wars galaxy because Darth Vader wasted all his time and effort trying to convince his starry-eyed gayboy empath son to become an evil space fascist when if anyone had any point asked his daughter “hey do you ever just want to KILL these people” she would’ve been shooing lightning out of her hands to prove a point in like 10 minutes
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