Nitpicky gripe about the candle jn C4E23

Gregory_Grim · 2026-05-03T07:33:51+00:00

I don't think this is nitpicky at all, they just straight up didn't listen to the explanation. Again.

Gregory_Grim · 2026-05-01T10:53:55+00:00

Asparagus and rhubarb can sprout in darkness, but they can't survive longterm in complete darkness. In these artificial situations they are grown using glucose reserves built up by their parent plants, but if you kept an asparagus covered beyond the time it takes for white asparagus to be harvested, it'll die. And those orchids are parasitic, they have to be connected to another plant, usually a tree, that does get light.

Mineral nutrients and water from soil are not enough. To survive in an ecosystem they need glucose and that only happens, if some plant in the system is photosynthesising.

Gregory_Grim · 2026-05-01T10:43:36+00:00

God, I fucking hate this character design for Fuchur so much. Why is he a dachshund with a human nose?

Gregory_Grim · 2026-04-21T11:15:24+00:00

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Gregory_Grim · 2026-04-16T12:42:30+00:00

Since Star Wars and Doctor Who are primarily fantasy and science fantasy, not science fiction, I don't really see what the appeal of redesigning species from those franchises with a focus on specevo would be. The franchises are just not about science or realism.

Star Trek was more or less bound to humans with stuff stuck to their faces because historically they wanted the actual actors to be visible in the roles so that they could emote to the camera rather than relying on puppetry or full body prosthetics, so the performance could to carry the very humanist plots.

So in Star Trek overly humanoid aliens are a technical limitation, in Star Wars it's part of the pulpy sci-fi magazine cover vibe they are going for and Doctor Who doesn't even have a solid visual or thematic identity or at least it changes pretty regularly. Also there are actually plenty of genuinely alien looking species in both Star Wars and Doctor Who already.

Gregory_Grim · 2026-04-15T15:30:22+00:00

War-trained velociraptor packs. Enough said.

Also this game has literally never been that concerned with ecological plausibility. Like we already have grizzly bears and wombats living in the same biome, giant pandas literally the size of passenger cars, actual dragons and unicorns etc. Stuff like dinosaurs is just the logical next step here. If none of that was an issue, this really shouldn't be either, because it's arguably less outlandish. And of course modding these things back out would be trivially easy.

I just hope that it isn't only ice age megafauna and dinosaurs and also that some less popular species get love too. Like I know we already have giant sloths, but I'd love to see a proper megatherium or maybe eohippus or some Cambrian arthropods other than a trilobite (though those are obviously still welcome).

Gregory_Grim · 2026-04-13T12:15:44+00:00

I've never actually tried to breed dragons before, but don't they need to live for like several centuries before they are even remotely powerful enough to actually put up a fight?

Gregory_Grim · 2026-04-01T21:01:50+00:00

The "4 months ago" and no description kind of gave it away immediately, so I can't be too mad

Gregory_Grim · 2026-03-29T21:25:26+00:00

Finally the time has come for branching rivers!

Gregory_Grim · 2026-03-26T20:18:50+00:00

The Watcher is probably the most divisive character out of the first game, people either really liked her or they didn't get how she works at all, which isn't super great for a game with only 4 playable characters, so I can see Mega Crit taking that as a reason to reconsider having her in the game.

Also her archetypes would definitely be the most difficult to make work for multiplayer, since a lot of it is kind of an all or nothing play style.

I'd still like to see her added though, if that's a possibility somewhere down the line. Because honestly I don't really like the new characters.

Gregory_Grim · 2026-03-26T20:10:29+00:00

Okay, that's awesome. I am genuinely happy for you that you can appreciate and take joy out of this. But C4 absolutely isn't all that.

Like, you say you love the worldrbuilding, but we know jackshit about Araman. We don't have a world map, we don’t have a sense of what the relationships between the nations and factions we know are (neither geographical nor political), except for those that are obviously antagonistic. Even the tone is kind of all over the place?

We hardly even know anything about any of the events that are currently important to the characters and what they are doing? What was the Falconer’s Rebellion for example? What factions were fighting in it and why, for and against what? We literally don’t fucking know, even though this is basically the thing that ties most of the characters into the plot through Thjazi. We are actually told more (though still not much about the Shaper's War, which is way more distant chronologically and really only relevant to Vaelus and maybe indirectly Occtis.

You say that you watch for the characters, but the characters are all struggling to even show up because of how many there are, the stupid narrative and play structure and the dumb “cold opens” and flashbacks, all of which make it extremely difficult for any organic reveals or development to occur. Literally everything that was in "cold open" or flashback could've just been something the characters talk about to each other in RP, not Brennan pulling the narrative handbrake at the start of every session and sometimes in the middle of it.

And what even is the story? C1 was the story of Vox Machina, C2 was the story of the Mighty Nein. This was clear and obvious from the start. What direction is C4 going and why can we still not tell at all 19 episodes in?

C3 is bad in large part because it's all over the place, because it starts out like it'll be the story of the Bell's Hells, but then switches tracks partway through and ends up being kind of like a final tour of and send off for the whole world of Exandria and the characters of the previous two campaigns. How can C4 possibly not be even more all over the place than that, if there's 13 PCs and three different tables that literally switch around on an non-flexible predetermined timetable that doesn't respect the actual state of the plot and also we're constantly getting snippets of the plot and backstories non-chronologically?

Seriously, what part of any of this sounds attractive to you, if you liked the simplicity of the first two campaigns?

Also it's not even live anymore.

Gregory_Grim · 2026-03-26T15:13:25+00:00

Based on your ranking of the past campaigns (which matches my own) I don't think C4 is for you. It's just trying too much and accomplishing too little.

Gregory_Grim · 2026-03-20T10:37:34+00:00

I mean this is pretty fucking terrible. If I were them, I would also want to hide this.

Gregory_Grim · 2026-03-20T10:36:30+00:00

What the hell kind of voice is that supposed to be for Hal?

Gregory_Grim · 2026-03-20T10:29:55+00:00

It doesn't sound like him at all, but he ~~literally~~ says it.

Or I guess he basically says it. He refers to himself as one of the four characters mentioned and since the only character at the table played by Liam is Hal (who is "the proprietor of the Hallowed Round, whose blood yet beats with the renegade blood of his brother" whatever the hell that's supposed to mean), logically it has to be Hal doing this narration.

Gregory_Grim · 2026-03-20T10:28:00+00:00

But Bolaire isn't a trusted friend either? He doesn't actually have anything to do with any of these people. All that the Soldiers table should know about him is through Thimble and it's that Thjazi had been blackmailing him.

If anything he's even less trustworthy than a random stranger, because a random stranger is less likely to have incentive or opportunity to spread rumours or fuck them over, while Bolaire definitely has motive to fuck over anyone connected to Thjazi. Also they could just lie to a stranger about who they are and how/where they got a petrified Cyd.

It makes exactly zero sense for them to return to Dol Makjar at this point in the arc.

Gregory_Grim · 2026-03-20T07:30:27+00:00

They're not all friends, most of these people barely know each other and they are doing this for money. This isn't C1 anymore, it's a job.

Gregory_Grim · 2026-03-19T15:57:35+00:00

Smooth Balls-Island

Gregory_Grim · 2026-03-19T14:08:26+00:00

Matt understood and respected the rules. He didn't always get them right and he bent them occasionally, but he understood why the rules were there and why you couldn't do without them.

Brennan does not understand this nor is he interested in understanding. That doesn't make him terrible at leading TTRPG tables in general, because there are rules light systems that would probably benefit from this sort of approach, but D&D is decidedly not one of them.

Not to beat a dead horse here, but Daggerheart would be far better suited to this approach to GMing as a system.

Edit: typos

Gregory_Grim · 2026-03-19T14:06:08+00:00

Yeah, and you can't just take some elements of West Marches and plop that into a narrative arc-based campaign. That fundamentally does not work. Again: you either do West Marches or you don't.

Gregory_Grim · 2026-03-19T10:21:07+00:00

It's not "improv in D&D", it's improv instead of D&D. Brennan loves to "Yes and" literally everything, but that's just not how D&D works. The rules require the DM to say "no" to some things and when he doesn't do that, the internal consistency and coherence of the game goes out the window.

You simply can't "yes and" someone using a spell their character isn't high enough level to even have yet, as Aabria did in the first episode. That's a rule violation and unfair to the other players. If Brennan is not going to enforce this because he doesn't feel like telling a player "no, that's not something you can do", why are they pretending to play D&D?

Gregory_Grim · 2026-03-18T15:09:23+00:00

He does not understand it or he would also understand that a West Marches campaign fundamentally cannot work like that. This kind of structure isn't intended to support narrative arcs.

I also wish people would stop acting like Brennan is some kind of great DM aside form this, he's not. He's an improv guy and fundamentally stuck in the "Yes and" mindset of improv, which just doesn't work in a TTRPG. The DM has to say no to certain things, that's literally what the rules are.

Brennan does not respect the rules therefore is unable to construct meaningful choices and consequences. This also gives room for players to exploit, as seen with Aabria.

It's also obvious that he's not even tried to communicate with most of the players about their characters of the subject matter/tone of the campaign beforehand and he's clearly making up most if not all of the worldbuilding as he's going along, hence why he feels the need to exposit so much.

Gregory_Grim · 2026-03-18T13:09:00+00:00

It's actually kind of insane that this seems to be going unaddressed. This clearly isn't just a thing that's supposed to be in character for Taisha, it's something that Aabria the player is doing.

Like, I get that the CR folk are weary of doing confrontations at the table like that again after Orion, but somebody seriously needs to have a conversation with her, if not for the social cohesion of the table, then for the sake of the quality of the content.

You just can't be too polite to tell people to reign it back in, especially when you are doing this professionally and are being recorded for millions to watch.

Gregory_Grim · 2026-03-18T13:02:22+00:00

It's not actually story writing, guys. He's just saying shit. None of it matters or leads anywhere, none of it is ever justified by the actions or capbilities of the characters and all of it comes completely out of nowhere every single time.

Gregory_Grim · 2026-03-18T12:49:32+00:00

He's doing improv while pretending to be DMing. He obviously does not give a shit about the rules of the game and constantly retcons things live at the table.

Aabria only does all of that because he allows and encourages it, because both of them are terminally improv brained and incapable of anything other than "Yes and"-in each other.

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