I saw a post earlier joking about how all the nines in the Mighty Nein will seem a little overplayed or heavy-handed to non-stream fans, which is true and amusing—like, have a bazillion nine-related things happen to a group called the Mighty Nein in a scripted show and it’s deeply heavy-handed foreshadowing; have it happen in a game of chance where the party name is a joke about dice rolls and you’ve got one of the coolest twists of coincidence in the world. (Side note, can’t wait to see how or if they even try to explain the party name in the TV show.)
BUT this also got me thinking more broadly about the challenges of adapting a game of chance into a TV show—how you keep those coincidences and lucky rolls, which are some of the very coolest moments in the campaign, from feeling like easy outs or lazy writing. Some of them seem easier than others—like, you don’t need to know how goddamn lucky the rolls were for the blueberry cupcake scene to be incredible, because it’s also such an incredibly clever beat—BUT. I’m thinking about Cad’s divine intervention in 140.
A zero-two. He rolled a zero-two. When fate said no, Caduceus said please. And it worked. Fate said okay, you can have this one. They’ve earned it. And it felt the way it did because it wasn’t just an inspired story moment. In a scripted show, whatever happens was always going to happen. But CR isn’t scripted. It was chance and fate and luck. It was a prayer that reached the Wildmother and that prayer was a d100.
And luckily for purposes of adaption, it’s a campaign—hell, an episode—that shows you the way divine intervention doesn’t always work. (Jester calling out for Artie, my heart.) So they’re well set up to keep it from feeling like a deus ex machina. But god. God. How do you replicate the feeling of that moment? Of knowing it‘s over, and then suddenly it isn’t?