I've seen a few things about Brennan's DM reputation being tough or full of consequences and I don't think I understand. I've mostly only seen him DM CR stuff and all his EXUs were brutal by design but so far in c4, I've thought he's been very generous. The abundance of information and signaling to help recalibrate the cast's instincts after c3 and the way he adapts scenes around bad rolls to keep the momentum going feels like generosity to me. What am I missing?
This is an excellent question. I don't think you're missing anything. I do think Brennan's DMing is full of consequences, and I think he makes things challenging enough to be interesting and for everything to feel very earned, but "consequence" is a neutral term. It is just as important that you get good consequences for good choices and rolls as negative consequences for bad ones, and Brennan provides both.
I also think you are correct regarding the abundance of information: because Brennan will bring down the hammer if deserved, and will make an encounter potentially lethal if that makes sense, but like. There's no fun in people losing an encounter because it wasn't clear what was going on. Like, I'm not saying you can never hide information from your players - obviously you can - but I think I've mentioned before that because all the players have to go on is what information the DM tells them, there's no honor or victory in refusing to tell them information a person who isn't a complete moron would know or figure out. Trick your players by saying Yanessa Halovar appears to be making death saves; don't trick your players by not telling them what the fucking room looks like, or withholding obvious information a person who lives in this world would be aware of.
If I may. I keep dividing people into blorbo and story people. I am obviously quite biased towards the latter. I think that the idea that Brennan is very punishing comes a little from the fact that the Critical Role fandom has seen him DM the three epic-scale Calamity/Downfall/Divergence miniseries, the first of which was designed in both plot and mechanics to be lethal, the second of which was designed in both plot and mechanics to be one of the darkest stories Critical Role has told thematically, and the last of which was designed to do one million points emotional damage to Matthew Mercer but also have a sense of overwhelming scale for very low level characters and thus was hard to not make lethal. But I think that even more than that, Matt, while obviously an excellent storyteller in his own right, is, deep down, a little more of a blorbo person, and Brennan isn't.
This is not a judgement. Matt tends to excel with character. He is an actor. He is an extremely accomplished voice actor, in fact, and his entire job is to be able to evoke a character's emotions while he is sitting in a recording booth. I would be surprised if he didn't lean towards character a bit over story, because he needs to embody character more than anything. I think this is why the most lauded campaign Matt has run was the deeply character-centric one, in which both he and his players explored significant internal arcs which all wove together in a narrative driven by them. I think this is why Campaign 1 is similarly quite highly praised; the plot is good but nothing groundbreaking, but it is lovingly crafted around his friends' characters and their interests.
In addition to DMing from an incredibly young age, Brennan's educational background after philosophy is screenwriting, and he has done more as a writer and improviser (which is often using a throwaway character for the larger goal of a coherent narrative, often though not always a brief one) and DM than an actor of characters outside the context of DMing. Obviously, characters are immensely important to stories, but in the context of TTRPGs, it is rare that one character is so important as to be irreplaceable or impossible to kill while keeping the story.
So: I think people used to Matt's style, which I think is actually especially generous even in his more hardass moments because it is so nurturing towards his friends' characters (and his own NPCs at times) are a little taken aback by the fact that Brennan will, in fact, kill Hannan or Gaya on the spot if it fits the story, and is willing to put PCs on the line because the larger narrative will survive even if they don't.
I think the people who think Brennan's style is specifically punishing are often people who are flinching when he says "gonna kill that dog". He will put a character in danger without hesitation. But he won't do so unless it makes sense, and he tries not to let people walk into a death trap without giving them multiple opportunities to realize it is a death trap. Which, if you approach the story as not a simple character vehicle, but as a full interconnected story, does not appear punishing but rather compelling. Of course there are heavy consequences, good and bad, because that's how you tell a story. But they are not unfair, and they are not unearned.
(The funny thing is: If you have heavy consequences? you might kill a blorbo, but people will love the ones who survive like nothing else. Speaking as a Story Person, the fastest way to turn me on a character is for them to get special treatment and pulled punches. This sounds unhinged out of context but like. you have to say "gonna kill that dog" and mean it because people will love the dog more if they know it can be killed).
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