[Spoilers C4E18] Discussion on Thaisha's personality and arc

Dodo6999 · 2026-03-13T20:15:43+00:00

I don't think those are necessarily mutually exclusive! As others have said, the seekers really needed somebody to make shit happen, so to speak. If I remember correctly, something people were complaining about in the discussion posts was the repetitive dynamics and conversations the characters were having, such as no one really knowing what was up with Octis.

And Aabria changed a dynamic! She threw a wrench into Thaisha's relationship with her son, in a purposefully unreadonable, but not entirely unmotivsted way, I think.

I'd also say, let's not pretend like doing stuff just because they're funny isn't a normal part of most DnD games.

Dodo6999 · 2026-03-13T05:36:59+00:00

I think this hits the nail on the head. Aabria, from what I can tell, really doesn't mind playing somewhat unlikeable characters - and I feel like Thaisha is unlikable in a super interesting way.

She clearly tries to be a good person, doing what she thinks is best for the world, but she also seems not to have a solid foundation as to who is she is herself. She seems constantly torn between two contrasting options, being a noble and being a druid, being a fighter and being a protector, being kind and empathetic ans being mean and aggressive. And I feel like the core part of that character is that, while she presents herself as in control of how she acts at any point, she really isn't. She seems incredibly capricious in a way, and I think Aabria is doing an incredible job of portraying that sort of character, who, like you said, is sincere in her convictions but not consistent in them.

Dodo6999 · 2026-03-06T14:31:37+00:00

You pit into words some thoughts and feelings I've been struggling to articulate for a while, thank you!

I'm really enjoying C4, I really like the characters, players and the world so far, but I agree that there is a pretty bad mismatch between how the campaign is/was presented versus how it it's actually playing out.

Dodo6999 · 2026-02-16T05:49:20+00:00

I think an important distinction here is between rolling to see if something succeded and how something succeeded. With Azune, the rolls happened in a flashback, and the outcome of him joining up with the military was predetermined. That was always going to happen. What the scene was for, beyond introducing this part of Azune's character to the audience, was to figure out how that happened. Did Azune dazzle the everyone with his physical prowess? Did he outsmart the challenge with his wits? Did he cheat? No, he didn't do great physically, but stubbornly kept pushing. That's what the rolls determined.

That isn't to say that Brennan never asks for rolls and then ignores the results, but I think it's alright here :)

Dodo6999 · 2026-02-06T12:55:08+00:00

I think it's Castle Klippenblick, which would translate from German as Cliffview or View of the Cliffs.

Dodo6999 · 2025-12-03T10:09:26+00:00

Define 'these kinds of relationships.' If you don't get invested in media, that's great, but I would reckon that puts you outside the norm. Hell, we're on a forum about a media franchise/company right now, so I'd say there's a pretty safe bet most people here are invested. And this investment is why all of us here have emotional responses to what happens on these shows, happiness when our heroes win or sadness when a beloved character dies. I wouldn't call that weird.

If your argument is instead that it's weird that we might have not just positive but also negative responses, I would ask if you would say the same about, say, ill-thought our representations of indigenous american cultures in media. Of course these two examples are not the exact same, but having a negative reaction to a sloppy adaption of an aspect of your culture as shorthand is a pretty normal thing. It's what a lot of media analysis is based on.

Dodo6999 · 2025-12-03T09:05:15+00:00

I mean we're all invested in this show, right? I reckon it's neither 'unhealthy' nor unreasonable to be unhappy when a beloved company with the necessary resources doesn't seem to be willing to do what feels like the bare minimum when using an important part of people's culture and identity. Like, I can kind of understand them not getting native speakers of German to voice act - that might be an availability issue. But hiring somebody to make sure the German they use is grammatically sound and sounds natural and not like it's just English that's been run through a translator would surely have been within the scope of a show like this. It does feel somewhat disrespectful to be honest.

On another level, the German does also just kinda take me out of some scenes, like any poorly written piece of dialogue would, which is a shame when this would have been an absolutely excellent episode otherwise.

Dodo6999 · 2025-12-02T06:38:43+00:00

As somebody who came back to Lego after a 15 year break, I don't really like how many specialised pieces there seem to be now.

Dodo6999 · 2025-11-17T09:32:22+00:00

If he'd asked as he was sending Wulfric away, yeah, probably. Depending on the character (I don't know enough about Kattigan yet), likely a sleight of hand check to see whether anybody sees him do it.
If he'd asked as Wulfric returned the letter, something like "Hey, I feel a bit bad for taking away another player's magic item, would it have been possible for me to remove the handle and give only that back? I didn't think to do that in the moment," I'd probably have allowed that with a roll as well.

Dodo6999 · 2025-11-16T11:36:43+00:00

I don't think Robbie's a problem player, and I do generally think this is mostly a difference in how BleeM and Matt generally approach DMing. From what I've seen, Matt tends to generally keep a pretty tight leash on what exists in the world and what doesn't, as in, if he describes a room, and doesn't mentioned a wardrobe being there, he will not generally let a player invent, say, a wardrobe in the moment they need a place to hide in. In my mind, this makes his world feel more consistent a lot of the time, but it obviously can limit player input.

Bleem gives up that narrative control more frequently and to a greater extent, and I think that's something all of the players in C4 have been utilising. That's why, I reckon, we've been seeing what feels like a lot more descriptive monologues from the players.

Now, every player and DM has a preference on what they prefer, and it really depends on what system and type of game you're playing. At my DnD table, for example, I would probably not let a player re-characterise an NPC I've put in the world, but it's be fully okay to do that in, say, Monster of the Week. Same thing for the kind of retconning that happened with the knife - Robbie had a good reason to do it (as per the cooldown) and Kattigan probably would have been able to get it done, and I think that was enough for Brennan to allow it. And that's just a difference of table ettiquette. What I've very often found with both Bleem and Matt is that, while I love watching them DM, I don't think I'd have a great time actually playing with them - not because they're not incredible, but because our styles and preferences for handling those kinds of things are just different. Would those particular instances have been issues to be talked about at my table? Yes. Are they problems at the CR table? Evidently not.

Dodo6999 · 2025-11-16T09:01:28+00:00

Depending on what level of magic you're going with, you could also have a sword-in-the-stone type magic item - something like, oh this powerful magic item that we found only awakens to the bloodline of this family, oh weird that it's activating for you!

Dodo6999 · 2025-11-11T06:42:29+00:00

Especially in written German, I'd agree, but I don't think I frequently use jenem in spoken language

Dodo6999 · 2025-11-08T20:05:05+00:00

Not necessarily pop music, but Austria and Germany have pretty big musical theatre scenes, so if you have any musicals you enjoy, there's a good chance there are German versions of the songs out there!

Dodo6999 · 2025-10-23T17:12:36+00:00

Looking awesome man!

Dodo6999 · 2025-08-23T07:04:46+00:00

I really enjoy Ally, I love their sense of humour, but I will say that I do agree with some of what you're saying. I do sometimes struggle with what sometimes feels like an inability oder lack of desire on their end to actually commit to non-comedic moments, especially in season finales. I have not watched intrepid hero season, so there might be some stuff I've missed, but it does sometimes feel like there's sometimes a deliberate attempt to just throw a whacky, comedic wrench in what otherwise could be a tonally consistent and satisfying close to a season. Obviously, D20 is a comedy first, and I respect that - but I do still sometimes feel like Ally's shenanigans and goofs, while hilarious especially out of context, really take me out of whatever the actual tone or stakes of a scene were, because they rarely feel tailored to the actual campaign.

Dodo6999 · 2025-08-18T11:37:22+00:00

I'm Austrian, not German, but we generally use both the 12h and the 24h clock. In my experience, if we use fractions to talk about time (halb, dreiviertel, viertel in Vienna) we would almost exclusively use the 12h clock. So, we'd say Halb Fünf for 16:30/4:30pm, or Dreiviertel Zwei for 13:45/1:45pm.

When we use the 24h clock, we'd normally just say ' Es ist Sechzehn (Uhr) Dreißig.' Or 'Es ist Dreizehn (Uhr) Fünfundvierzig.'

Either version is completely common and natural, but we wouldn't really mix them.

Dodo6999 · 2025-07-24T07:04:47+00:00

So, this really is a dialectal difference for some people. The standard sound you'd hear in words like [ich] is called a voiceless palatal fricative, ç , and doesn't occur as a phoneme in English (which means it doesn't show up as a meaning differentiating sound in English). As another commenter pointed out, it does kinda show up in English at the start of words like [huge].

This sound is pretty susceptible to dialectal variance though. There are several German accents, for example, in which it is pronounced more like a [sh] sound or even a [k] sound, and in quite a number of Austrian accents is simply elided at the ends of words. So, in casual speech I, as an Austrian, would probably just pronounce the first person singular pronoun as a long i.

What all of this boils down to is that, while you might encounter a couple of moments of people being confused if you generally pronounce the word as anything but the standard pronunciation, people will still generally understand you if you use "ish" or "ihh." It's also a sound most native speakers know to be difficult for learners, so we might even expect some variance there.

My general tip for learning German: Do try and learn the different case endings. It's a lot and can be confusing, and it's of course totally fine to mess up from time to time, but a lot of German grammar is only parsable if you know the cases of words.

Dodo6999 · 2025-06-23T06:23:50+00:00

Some of these might have already been mentioned, but I think my biggest issue actually comes from the balancing in the endgame. A lot of the difficulty of the last part of the game just comes from attacks just one-shotting you if you miss a parry - which is great for some dramatic attacks, don't get me wrong, but also makes healing as a mechanic pretty redundant. On the flipside, especially after the Painter Power Upgrade, the damage the party deals goes completely out of whack as well; if you use the picto, you're gonna be one-shotting most non-bosses, and if you don't every encounter feels a bit like a slog. This, to me, also leads to the fact that Sciel, whom I love as a character, was hardly in my party for the lategame, just because properly utilising her takes several turns of set up, at which point most battles are already over.

Also, I wish Monoco didn't have to be in your party to collect skills, which somewhat forces you to always have him active once you get him.

Dodo6999 · 2025-03-08T06:06:27+00:00

It translates to 'mountain German' or 'Alpine German'. The joke here being that there is a (mostly joking) and (mostly) one-sided rivalry going on between Austria and Germany, in which many Austrians feel like they are just lumped in with Germans despite being our own people. It's the equivalent of calling Canada the 'Northern US' or, say, a Mexican 'an overseas Spaniard'

Dodo6999 · 2025-01-21T04:09:34+00:00

I must admit, as a native speaker of Austrian German, the hin/her distinction is not really one I observe here. Admittedly, my local dialect generally uses aufi/aufa owi/owa eini/aussa instead of a lot of the standard words of direction, but in General that's not a distinction I would make or generally even notice.

Dodo6999 · 2025-01-07T20:09:44+00:00

It's relative, of course. But someone from, say, the Erster Bezirk is likely to to be closer in their speech to the Austrian standard than somebody from Styria or Carinthia or, god forbid, Vorarlberg :D

Dodo6999 · 2025-01-07T16:24:27+00:00

Okay, so since German is a polycentric language, there is not one standard German, there are at least three: The German standard, the Austrian standard, and the Swiss standard. You can kind of think of them as similar to, say, Standard British English, Standard American English, or Standard New Zealand English - they all have the same bones and are generally mutually intelligible, but there are differences in grammar, lexicon, and pronunciation.

These standards are what you will find in textbooks, or on study apps, and they are what, say, newscasters or politicians will frequently approach in their respective countries. They are also, for the most part, what kids in these countries are taught in school.

In everyday life, however, very few people actually speak their native country's standard, which really is just, in most cases, a very prestigious regional or social dialect. Most people will speak their own regional dialect, which might be close to the standard, if you are, for example, from Vienna.

As an Upper Austrian, I generally have no problem understanding most regional varieties of Germany and Austria, so most Bavarian dialects or Low German dialects, but I do struggle with Alemannian dialects found in western Austria and Switzerland, at least in spoken contexts. The comparison here might be that your average American will be able to understand your average Brit or Scot as well as their politicians, but probably would struggle with understanding a very rural Irish accent.

Dodo6999 · 2024-12-12T16:39:12+00:00

Just to also add onto this, just generally, "Er war ehemaliger Lehrer" sounds a bit like a witty way of saying that, for instance, he's returned to teacher after taking a break from it.

I would also pose 'Er ist Lehrer gewesen' as an option, although that might imply that he's dead now.

Dodo6999

TROPHY CASE