#please understand when I compare it to feeling like a DnD campaign I mean it in all the best and funnest ways

[ibrithir-was-here]

Back from vacation! And instead of fixing my sleep schedule properly I made two fan covers of @tkingfisher ‘s fantastic fairytale book ‘Nettle and Bone’ cuz I have no self control xD

Also I haven’t drawn in a week and that’s waaaay too long for me. Anyway go check out the book!

It’s really fun and spooky and has the feel of an epic fairytale DnD campaign; with the fantastic cast of motley heroes—a sort of a nun princess, a fay stolen soldier, a dust-witch with a demon possessed chicken, a comfy fairy godmother who’s more then she seems and The Best Dog who happens to be made of bones—all off to save a princess from a wicked prince, while traveling through a deliciously creepy Goblin Market, a forest of sympathetic cannibals, and one of the most incredibly scary dungeon crawls I’ve ever encountered.

[transgaypiratesanta]

I know that you did not ask for anyone else’s opinion, and I’m not asking for you to listen to me. In fact, feel free to completely disregard this if you so please.

but I would like to share my own opinion on this.

I personally think it is important to acknowledge that the silly, rules-light style of roleplaying is, partially, the point of the oxventure’s first dnd campaign.

I love that they have made things more serious, and I think that the storytelling in later series is absolutely wonderful, but your complaints of a lack of rules-heavy gaming falls partially flat when you consider that;

At first, they had no plans to create a long-running campaign, and thus may have found it harder to have any proper worldbuilding or plot planning.

they never claim that their campaign strives to be serious.

Johnny and the players were new to the game (to some extent) when they first began, and to complain that the thematic tone is off isn’t fair, when they don’t expect it to be as close to the rules as possible. (not to mention that to a beginner, the rules can be daunting. Mistakes are easy to make, and the way that you have talked of the players feels unfairly judgemental. Just because you understand them, doesn’t mean everyone will, or has an obligation to follow them to an extent that may make the game less enjoyable or easy to get into for them, or might confuse audiences who are new to the game. If someone enjoys something, even if that thing is ignoring rules, that should be allowed. (Not to mention the fact that some might not have time to delve deep into the rules, nor the memory to retain the information well enough to recall it when on a stage, both metaphorically and literally.).). to complain that their series is not as serious and high stakes as you would like feels comparable to complaining that a fantasy book doesn’t have the horror elements that you want, when it never claimed to be horror. If you enjoy more serious dnd media, that is fine. But please do not complain when you don’t find it in every dnd show.

The oxventure crew do not aim to be perfect when it comes to the rules, and claiming that this takes away from the show is downright unfair.

of course, that does not mean that you must love the show for what it is, nor that you must watch it.

I believe that you said that you stopped watching it, which I think is good. You have no obligation to engage with media that you do not care for.

however, personal distaste for the tone of the show doesn’t give one the right to judge it, and the people involved, as heavily as you have.

please acknowledge that this show does not have an obligation to be serious and have high emotional stakes.

(also, many people, including me, enjoy the show for it’s lack of stakes. It is its own tone, and that is okay. You don’t have to like that, but please don’t discredit it for not being to your personal tastes.).

with that said, I would like to say that I have no dislike for you, and I did enjoy seeing someone else’s opinion on the oxventure.

have a lovely day!

I Was Right (Oxventure Wyrdwood Thoughts)

In the past on this extremely low follower blog of mine, I've talked about how I liked Oxventure for the first few sessions before it deteriorated into unstructured nonsense with no emotional stakes, no story, and no interesting gameplay and I stopped watching after they started to become repetitive, derivative, uninspired and a lot of other mean words. The reason that I fixated on its problems is because I genuinely thought everybody involved was extremely talented, I could vividly imagine a slightly better version that I would've loved, if only they had greater ambitions than just doing gags for six years like they were writing The Beano. I've been thinking on this a lot, but I remember that I quickly emotionally connected with the five player characters in the early campaign and some of the early NPCs, and my villain origin story for my many frustrations with Oxventure was that I felt embarrassed for emotionally investing myself when the campaign progressed and it became clear that there were never going to be any emotional consequences for anything.

I think everybody should play D&D the way that they find fun, even if, no especially if it's a campaign that is being filmed and broadcast, but it irked me that they never engaged with a lot of the fun parts of the game, which are fun and designed specifically to be fun. I'm trying to not sound like I'm gatekeeping, I sincerely believe that they simply never read the books in any amount of detail and never became aware of the interesting parts and would've enjoyed it if they did, because I just don't see how you can be a fan of a game system if you have to remove more than half of the rules to enjoy yourself. I've long held the suspicion that when they started playing they were instructed by Johnny to not worry about understanding all of the rules right away, and the players held the belief for years that the rules were extremely complicated, when they continued to not learn them. Mike in particular makes jokes about how he doesn't understand the rules, like in the lead-up to Orbpocalypse Saga where Johnny explained what spell slots were, Mike made a joke about how the explanation would take several hours because it was so complicated despite the fact that it's literally just a few rows of boxes that you tick off when you spend them, the Paper Mario games have a more complex magic resource system than that and Mike is supposed to be a games journalist.

After not watching the main campaign for several years, I decided to give Oxventure Deadlands a try, and I was surprised that Andy ran a campaign where he was willing to say no sometimes, and sticks to a consistent emotional tone without sacrificing the all-important comedy, and I said on this very blog that if Johnny were to run a campaign in this style where the players were willing to take things seriously that would be absolutely perfect, because Johnny has established their strong storytelling chops in basically every way possible other than during Oxventure Prime.

And I was right!

They were all capable of the kind of D&D campaign I wanted to see, and thought would be more deep and enriching than just going for the cheapest gags every time, they decided to take that leap and Johnny just casually, offhandedly created one of the all-time best campaign settings in episode one of a new campaign. Oxventure Wyrdwood, based on only one episode is absolutely brilliant and everything I've wanted out of Oxventure for the past six years, the first time Johnny actually wrote a story in earnest it was so creative, so inspired, so rich with lore, and unlike some seasons of Dimension 20, they did it in a way that was concise.

All the players are great too:

Luke Dob was a seminal moment for me in my experience of the D&D hobby, the simple combination of half-orc and bard was such a brilliant combination that it inspired a five year long campaign in which I played a character inspired by that same combination. Happen is a very fun concept, I always love it when a player mixes and matches classes and backgrounds, Acolyte is an interesting background for a Ranger that gives Happen a lot of fun depth, and I enjoy the Cadence Dice system so far.

Jane I knew that Jane was going to go for the logical opposite of Prudence, I definitely called that Jane would be a Life Domain Cleric months and months ago. What I liked about Willowfine from the offset is that Jane doesn't play her superficially, she isn't just a healer, she is actually, genuinely kind, her first healing action being to save one of the episode's antagonists was a brilliant tone setting moment for the character and the campaign as a whole.

Ellen Like Jane, Ellen made a brilliant choice of playing against type for herself, but I really like that Ellen's way of playing an extremely selfish character is distinct from the way Jane did and has some obvious nuance to it. Prudence was obsessed with violence and evil magic and generally likes amusing herself, whereas Cressida seems to be more interested in her image and personal pride. Related, I don't think I would've called Prudence actually evil, she didn't do that many obviously selfish things when compared to say, Corazon, she was basically just a dramatic goth who likes the aesthetic of evil. In contrast, Cressida has a selfish motivation that is easier to accurately roleplay without becoming a liability to the party.

Andy It was very obvious that there was some secret gimmick to the way Andy was going to go about things and the way things turned out intrigues me greatly. He was the player that surprised me the most, I love the idea that Robin genuinely has a commoner's stat block until the evil side takes over. Aberrant Mind is a fun subclass, and it looks as though he gained Cure Wounds from his Magic Initiate subclass to fit into the witch aesthetic a little more.

Mike With Mike, this is where my one nitpick lies, I don't think Mike is the best roleplayer of the bunch. The fact that Mike doesn't understand extremely basic parts of the rules at this point has long stopped being funny and genuinely just reflects poorly on him. Why does he still not know how proficiency and attack modifiers work? It's literally a sum consisting of adding two single-digit numbers together, and it's a sum that you're supposed to write on your character sheet before playing to eliminate the brainwork of doing it mid-session. And if doing two minutes of homework to prepare your character sheet before playing a two-hour game of D&D is too much, why doesn't he just use D&D Beyond which adds the two numbers together for you? That's exactly how I learned it, and also the fact that I just read the rules recreationally because I thought that they were fun.

I was surprised that he read what Rage actually does, but then Mike gets confused when Johnny doesn't do the maths to half incoming damage for him, despite the fact that it's not Johnny's job to use Mike's character abilities for him. To put this as nicely as possible, I knew Mike was going to choose Barbarian because if you don't like the game system as Mike seems not to, you at least don't have to interact with it much if you choose the class with the fewest abilities possible. Mike seemed to shine the best in Blades in the Dark, which seems to be designed to have as few rolls as reasonably possible.

Roleplay-wise, I think Mike portrayed Lug as different enough from Egbert that I was happy with the character in concept, but like with his other characters, there is no second layer below the obvious quirks that are on the surface like everybody else demonstrated.

Johnny Johnny was always my biggest problem with Oxventure Prime, I found their DM philosophy and storytelling choices completely mystifying. Why when Luke established that Dob was looking for his sister did this plot get resolved offscreen by an NPC? Why when Andy said he was searching for a pirate treasure did Johnny forget about this plot for two real years and have Corazon find the bulk of it offscreen between episodes? Why did Johnny not write a plot or do any worldbuilding the entire first campaign when not having anything set in stone created massive problems in the final story arc when their farewell tour gets cut short because the players can't remember more than one notable location and only two NPCs? Why did Johnny constantly ask the players to roll for things that were not optional, and then when the player rolls low, just ignoring the result and saying they passed?

In this campaign, with a mere few months of doing actual legwork, in Oxventure Wyrdwood, Johnny crafted a beautiful, immersive and unique story setting. In the first boss fight at the end of the first session, the monster was consistently doing enough damage that it could have killed everybody other than Lug in one hit if they didn't fight smart, and fight smart they did, it made perfect sense for the monster to quickly go down when the other members of the Folkmoot arrived. There were a couple of rules-aberrations, but my problem isn't getting rules wrong, it's not using game mechanics and everybody was definitely engaging more with the gameplay and not treating it like an unwanted obligation this time I feel.

In addition, I love the "Magic Will Have Its Due" mechanic, it's not just cool sounding words that Johnny plastered over the marketing, it's an intrinsic part of the story, and therefore an intrinsic part of the gameplay. This is probably one of the only ways you could outright play anything resembling a horror campaign in D&D, where there isn't so much a consistent looming threat and the stakes take a different form. The main horror module in 5E, Curse of Strahd, is a very well designed story and game experiences, but the horror aspect pretty much doesn't exist in the gameplay after the players level up a few times.

I was cautiously optimistic before this first session, but now I'm actively excited in a way that I haven't been since Critical Role campaign two. I desperately hope this quality remains consistent throughout the remainder of this story. Also, I'm glad the episodes have proper titles and not things like "Water Wonderful World" or whatever.

[hdawg1995]

i just realized i have 2 dnd campaigns where the big bad manipulates/out ranks a snake man who is very charismatic.

imma ramble about them now.

first we have Poetic who started out as a lovecraft/eldritch themed OC and got boosted to DnD NPC cause i wanted to.

he is in eldritch abomanation jail for nearly breaking reality itself. He appears to be a well dressed male elf/human. he loves suits and thinks they are the best thing ever created aside from snakes. he loves snakes. snakes are neat. his tongue is a snake. his snake tongue is his "true self" so when he like. sticks his snake tongue out the elf/human "body" starts to swivile up and the eyes roll into the back of the head cause he isn't using the eyes or guts or veins of the body anymore he is using the ones in the snake.

for a while i thought maybe he grows tusks and stuff when he did this as kind of a protective cage for the snake to duck back into but he doesn't have this as a D&D NPC.

as a OC his whole deal is he isn't a fan of humans but he befriends one and adopts them as a sister (he doesn't understand gender and thought sister meant younger sibling and he refuses to learn thats not what it means). something happens to his sister and its down hill from there. the whole "i was right, humans suck, they would be much better as snakes" and basicly turns everything he sees into a snake.

as a D&D NPC i gave him a friendship metter and if it ever maxed out he adopted that pc/npc as a sister. in the campaign he is in he has scooped up the party like "yes hello they fed me frogs and tucked me into bed when i went into food coma, i love them, touch them and i'll eat you."

Poetic gets manipulated/out ranked by another eldritch being who bullied him into a corner and is immune to Poetic's transmuting venom (the thing he uses to turn things into snakes).

then we have Regis who is a medusa buisnessman with a art hobby in painting. he is slightly inspired by another medusa NPC i had who was a sculpture who tried very very hard not to turn people to stone. Regis turns people into stone when he gets pissed off by them or his boss tells him to. he just wants to run his 3 diffrent buisnesses and manage his 2 trade companies and later paint or sculpt in peace. but he can't, he has a mindflayer hivemind to obey or they'll eat his brain.

he also likes snakes but where Poetic likes them and imulates them Regis likes them because he relates to them and finds a kinship in them. snakes are misunder stood, he feels misunder stood, snakes are deadly, he is deadly, he has snakes for hair, snakes are his hair. you know how it is.

he uses glamours to hide his snakes and scally skin and wards to prevent his petrifying gaze from turning people to stone but like i said before piss him off and all bets are off. he had a pet viper whom he takes very good care of and appears in much of his art. he likes sculpting and hopes to one day create a sculpter so perfect, so exact, so beleivable that when compared to someone he turned to stone no one would tell the diffrence. he has gotten pretty close! however he suffers from the well known curse all artists suffer... he can not draw the other eye. most of his sulptures either cover the eyes, has the eyes closed, or the subject is winking. his current passion project is a sculpture of what he thinks is his idle mate- however he is struggling with the face and is afraid to actually give it one because he doesn't want someone to see the finished thing and go "thats my face!" and think they have a chance with him.

Regis has high standards and those standards are Big Muscle and Don't Beg For Art Please And Thank You.

i did a thought exersice thing and thought about what these two would do/say if left in a room together and:

Poetic: you and I are a like. we love change.

Regis: no.

Poetic: hear me out. you're a artist. you turn simple paper into works of art. i'm a eldritch being who bites things and turns them into snakes.

Regis: ....

Poetic: okay, listen. Artists don't like this world. they see it and they draw what they see, and its diffrent. its changed. its beautiful. its stranges. diffrent. you turn hunks of clay into people, you take a empty canvus and fill it with life. you change one thing to another.

Regis: I... see your point-

Poetic: you're also a medusa and you turn anyone who pisses you off into sto-

Regis: and you've lost any respect you may have had.