So, one thing I've seen a few times in the short time I've hung out in Critical Role fandom is almost every round of dashboard swallowing discourse is kicked off by a player or character making a mistake. Things like Occtis setting off all the traps in the Manor (or the party not sending enough people there in the first place), or Julien leaving Teor and Cyd behind, or the players/characters not realizing the play ritual wasn't evil, or that time Kattigan yelled at Tyranny, or every time the players panic because they didn't roll high enough and their dice hate them.
Like, the fandom tends to treat dnd like an optimization problem where there is an objectively Perfect decision you can make and every time the players/characters don't metagame hard enough to get it, it's a failure.
The thing is, this creates two issues. The first is that playing under such a hypercritical microscope is actually not fun and *will* cause the kinds of circular arguments that typically pop up at the Critical Role table because obviously there must be a perfect decision so we need to stall until we find it.
The second is that this clashes with Brennan's style. Brennan loves players who take big swings and commit to them, and if you don't believe me, check out every time Lou Wilson flubs a speech because it's what his character would do, because it's often.
So, like, basically, if you want the good character juice, you *have* to give the players more leeway to fuck it up, or otherwise you cause the exact kind of choice paralysis that makes characters weaker in the first place because the player is too afraid to make a choice and stick with it.
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