D&D and Me: Part 9 (All in the Family)

[This is the ninth post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[Last time, I talked about fifth edition D&D (5e) and how its popularity surprised and delighted long-time D&D fans, myself among them.]

So now there was a new edition, a new attitude towards the game, and, most of all, a whole new type of content: streaming D&D games.  I tried a bunch before I found Relics and Rarities, which is what really got me excited about D&D again.  Once I found that, I started obsessively checking out all of them.  Well, except for the obvious one: Critical Role.

There are a number of reasons I waited so long to give CR a chance.  Their first campaign (referred to either by the group name of the characters—Vox Machina—or simply as “C1”) has 115 episodes ... that’s over 447 hours of video to watch (thank you CritRoleStats).  Even if you skip over all the announcements and the breaks and whatnot, it would be over 373 hours: if I did nothing but eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, and watch C1, it would still take me around 23 days to get through it all.  So that was one big reason.  But probably the bigger reason was just that it was the most popular (as I mentioned last time), and I have always resisted liking the most popular thing.  It’s a personal failing, I know.  But eventually I decided it was only fair to give it a chance, and I could start with their second campaign and not have nearly as much content to wade through.  After just a few episodes, I was hooked.  One thing I that I particularly loved was how Matt (CR’s DM) set up the story by running several “one-shot” adventures¹ for small groups of characters.  Though these happened off-screen, it was obvious what the ramifications were: each character got the chance to develop from their initial character sheet in a smaller, more controlled setting before joining together in a larger group.  It’s very common for a character to change somewhat, mostly personality-wise, from your initial concept once you start inhabiting them at the table, and it also generally takes a while before you become comfortable with all the features and powers on your sheet.  With these shorter, almost-solo adventures,²  all the awkward bits could be gotten out of the way.  The first episode of C2 shows this perfectly: a few relationships are established, all the players are comfortable in the skins of their characters, and rules-fumbling—the inevitable “wait, how does this work again?”—is kept to a minimum.  This was a big inspiration for what would eventually become the Family Campaign.

But the biggest (if most abstract) impact of CR on my home games were to remind me of the joy of D&D as long-form storytelling.  A lot of streaming D&D out there consists of one-shots (like Lost Odyssey) or limited series (like Relics and Rarities), and many of those are fantastic.  But what CR (and also the Balance arc of The Adventure Zone) reminded me was just how awesome it is to have that open-ended, anything-can-happen storyling going on, where every character’s backstory somehow ties into the overall plot, but there’s also some world-threatening evil to be addressed, and quests to resovle, and intermediate character goals (like needed items or researching new spells or just becoming more financially self-sufficient) to achieve, and the DM’s job is to weave all these disparate threads together to form some unexpected coherent whole.  Matt Mercer (of CR) and Griffin McElroy (of TAZ) are two of the best in the business at this, and it reminded me of the times that I had tried to achieve such things ... always with less success than these guys, of course.  But one of the benefits of getting old is that you can often look back and see where you went wrong in the past, and, between that and just learning from the examples that CR and TAZ were providing, I started to get excited to try it again—this time using my children as guinea pigs.

Now, as I talked about two installments ago, I had been mainly running pre-published adventures for my kids up to this point.  Premade adventures can be short, or they can be long, but either way they’re quite different than the long-form stories I’m talking about now.  They’re not customized to the characters of my players, and though the best DMs will certainly extend a published adventure to include such things, it’s never the same as a story that’s been built from the ground up to be about your characters.  For years, I had been thinking that all the prep work and the frustration wasn’t worth it; now, listening to The Adventure Zone and watching Critical Role, I was changing my mind.  I was seeing the benefits being reaped before my eyes (and ears), and I knew I couldn’t deprive my kids of that joy.  So it was that, while streaming D&D didn’t ignite my love of D&D, it did rekindle it.

I’ve already talked about my youngest bringing me her first idea for a D&D character, so I won’t rehash it here.  Corva Ravenstone was extremely animal focussed—a tiger for a guardian and a monkey as a constant companion—and my middle child always plays druids, because they think that shapeshifting is just the coolest thing ever.  When my eldest proposed a custom barbarian subclass whose “rage” was actually an uncontrolled transformation to a werewolf form,³ I knew that this campaign needed to be all about animals.  Always fascinated with the concept of a beastmaster-style character,⁴ I decided to dust off my attempts to create a class that could do this without breaking the action economy; my beastmaster class would end up being the basis for my eventual GMPC,⁵ and also provide the basis for Corva’s monkey companion.⁶  This echoes my very first experience playing D&D:⁷ making new rules so I didn’t have to say “no” to any part of a kid’s character concept ... it just happened to be my daughter instead of my brother in this case.

My middle child wanted to play a changeling, which is a race which can change its appearance at will.  (Yes, a changeling druid is basically doubling-down on the shapeshifting power—that’s what’s attractive for that particular kid.)  And, to up the transmutation factor even more, I gave them a custom magic item that allows them access to many of the coolest shapeshifting-related spells.  The problem was that changelings are from a world known as Eberron, and this campaign was definitely not going to take place on Eberron.  How did this changeling (whose name is Zyx) get from Eberron to the Forgotten Realms (the default setting for 5e)?  For that matter, my child decided to complicate my life even more when they saw and fell in love with the amazing dinosaurs of Ixalan, and decided that that was where Zyx learned druiding, so that they could turn into dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts.  Now I had a whole third world to work into the backstory.  But I took that on too.

My eldest, of course, has been playing D&D (and other TTRPGS, like Pathfinder) for years at this point, and is a GM in their own right.  I didn’t need to do much besides taking their custom barbarian subclass and making it a bit more polished.  But they also had an entirely new deity in their backstory, and I had to work that into the plot.  No problem.

Stealing Matt Mercer’s idea of one-shot adventures for the individual characters before the main story starts, I came up with the idea of “flashbackstories,” which were “flashbacks” (in the sense they took place 2 – 5 years before the main storyline starts) and also “backstories,” because they set up the plot.  See, instead of “you all meet in a pub,” I decided that there would be a mysterious benefactor (more of a “I suppose you’re wondering why I called all of you here today” situation).  Each character owed a big debt to this person.  But how did they become indebted to him?  Well, instead of just writing it out as a story, let’s play it out ... as a flashbackstory.  I wanted to give each character a guide: an NPC to help them out and introduce them to the man who would perform some valuable service for them in exchange for “a service to be provided at a later date.” I hit upon the idea of using my old characters for this purpose.  My old druid Sillarin would be an excellent guide for new druid Zyx.  Bowmaster and nature cleric Ellspeth was a natural fit for the young jungle girl (and archer) Corva.  As for burgeoning werewolf Isabella, who better to help her achieve calmness of mind and body than a monk?  So she ran into Jin.  Exactly as planned, each character had a chance to explore both personality and mechanics and feel things out.  The time gap also provided a perfect excuse for changing or evolving personality traits: your character just “grew up” a bit in the intervening years.

For the role of mysterious benefactor, I wanted someone colorful (both figuratively and literally), who seemed really out of place but also really in control.  I achieved this by inventing Hervé, a Vedalken rogue with the mastermind specialization.  Vedalken are an almost scifi race, originally from D&D’s sister game Magic: The Gathering.  They’ve been imported into D&D in two versions,⁸ and they have a feel almost like a cross between Spock and Data from Star Trek: obssessed with discovering new things, and for the most part coldly logical about everything else.  The mastermind is of course a fantastic subclass for a villain, but in this case it works well for someone who is basically a “finder” character: rich people hire him to find or obtain things for them, and he always know exactly the right combination of people (adventurers, specifically) to put together for a mission.  And he knows them because he’s “collected” them—basically, he wanders around bailing people with certain skills out of trouble so that they’ll owe him a favor when he finally runs across a job that could use their particular skills.  A character such as this is perfect for driving the “little” plot of a D&D campaign: he can be mysterious, and opaque with his motivations, or he can be open and offer lots of details to the characters, if he thinks it makes them more effective in doing jobs for him.  So he’s a mission generator and a font of information.  This is what you need to keep a campaign moving forward on a session-to-session basis.

For the bigger picture, though, you need a mystery to drive each character to search for something, and preferably a way to tie all the mysteries together into one big mystery.  Two of my characters (Corva and Zyx) gave me one of the best gifts you can give a DM: the gift of missing parents.  They might be dead ... or then again they might not.  Isabella’s story is more complicated: her father is the one who turned her into a werewolf in the first place, as part of some freaky cult thing.  Still, after reading a veritable shitload of old D&D lore, I came up with something that would satisfy all the backstories—even tying in the one for my own GMPC, Thurl—and also explain a bit of the world-hopping that Zyx apparently experienced at a young age into the bargain.  I won’t go into too much detail here (it’s rare that my kids read my blog, but better safe than sorry, I suppose), but it involves Planescape factions and secret societies (shades of both A Series of Unfortunate Events and Marvel’s Runaways) and, naturally, lots and lots of animals.  I call it the Family Campaign, both for the obvious reason, but also because there’s a deeper familial connection that will be revealed as time goes on.

And that brings us up to the present time.  Next time, in what may well be our last installment, I think I’ll talk about what D&D can mean in the context of learning, and of teaching.

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1 A one-shot is a very short adventure that’s designed to be run in a single session.  Although sometimes a one-shot might end up taking two sessions, in which case it’s really more of a two-shot.  But that’s more to do with the pace of the characters playing it than the adventure itself.

2 CR had 7 characters, so it was more practical to do them in groups of 2 or 3; for a more typical game of 3 or 4 characters, it would be perfectly fine to do proper solo adventures.

3 To be clear, this was before the Path of the Beast was a thing.  Although they’re quite similar, naturally.

4 You may remember that I went into some depth on that topic in part 4.

5 I still haven’t written my post on what this term means to me, but, for purposes of this discussion, let’s just say it’s a “full” member of the party—that is, not a henchman or a guide or a pet or a more experienced mentor type—who happens to be run by the GM instead of by a player.

6 If you remebered that Corva is a ranger, you may wonder why not just make her a beastmaster ranger and call it a day.  All I can tell you is, he’s not that sort of monkey.

7 Which we covered in part 2.

8 Specifically, in the Kaladesh Plane Shift supplement, and the official book Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica, which represent the two different Magic worlds that feature them.