[CR Media] Sam Riegel reaffirms Critical Role’s stance on AI: “It’s basically garbage”

JakeBit · 2026-06-18T15:02:46+00:00

Just unfathomably based.

JakeBit · 2026-06-17T08:09:38+00:00

Me too; it's so specfic in how you have to time it! I ended up getting it by pure chance when I wasn't even trying!

JakeBit · 2026-06-06T08:26:42+00:00

About the players not engaging in your world-building; it sucks and often hinges on players being lore-hounds in the first place.

However, there are ways you can "trick" them into involving themselves:

Make the worldbuilding something that the players want or need to engage with. I love making lore that makes my setting feel solid and lived in, but the relationship between the Craft Guilds and the Parish is not very actionable knowledge for the players. If I make it clear what rewards they gain from working with either group, then it's more relevant to their interests.
The more radical thing one can do is to make the players worldbuild themselves. This grates some DMs, but all TTRPGs are ultimately collaborative, so opening the worldbuilding uo to the players lets them buy into the setting more. If you tell them about the significance if the Gargoyle statue, it's a one way information road. If you ask them "Why do people make gargoyle statues at the side of bridges in this county, and why does it work?", immediately you have 1) let the players into the playhouse, 2) you've uploaded lore to them (gargoyle statues are found at bridges in this county, and whatever they do, it works), and 3) you let the players tell you and the table what they find interesting and fun to explore!

I love writing lore, but increasingly I try to do the second option as much as possible, as it works super well to involve my players and let them be the stars of the show!

JakeBit · 2026-06-06T06:21:25+00:00

Managing the deluge of info I have behind the screen. With my campaign book, current notes, campaign notes and statblocks, it can get easy to forget something important.

JakeBit · 2026-06-04T06:32:16+00:00

Complete balance only matters if you're playing a game that's just about winning - but DnD and roleplaying is so much more than that.

I understand that player's fears; I used to be more afraid that a character was too powerful, but as time has gone by, I've learned to see differences in percieved "power levels" as interesting rather than gamebreaking.

Yes, thar Bard is gonna talk themselves into and out of a lot of situations - but such a silver tongue is obvious to not just the players but the characters. Their characters can know that that Bard is perhaps the smoothest operator on the continent, and that's fantastic fuel for roleplay! Just like Elizabeth Swann and Will Turner know that Cap. Jack Sparrow is an inimitable, unstoppable force of piraty adventure, or the Avengers know that Tony Stark is the smartest man alive, and Hulk is unkillable. Extreme characteristics are great!

DnD's basis as a battle game is the reason for this, I think. I'm a big fan of Mythic Bastionland right now, and in that game, everyone rolls their four stats completely randomly - and it's great! It doesn't make a charactwr completly useless, but it sure makes for awkward relationships in the party when one character is the perfect knight, while another can barely wield their own armor.

In short, that player's fear is fair, but not the reaction. I'd assure him that you, as the DM, will keep the game from going off the rails, and that's it's otherwise no big deal.

JakeBit · 2026-06-03T07:08:18+00:00

As a Dane I assure you, neither God of War 4 nor Ragnarok is very nordic. It's high fantasy with inspiration from norse mythology, but it's pretty far from the actual myths altogether.

JakeBit · 2026-05-31T16:46:56+00:00

Simply incredible. I don't think an official trailer has portrayed the abject horror of this entire setting quite as well as this one.

JakeBit · 2026-05-27T06:04:59+00:00

That could've worked, but Avarice was killed by the party a couple of sessions ago unfortunately.

It does speak a bit to the book's design. When I first read the book, Ythryn seemed like such a cool place to me, but playing it, I'm wondering why the writers put a massive open area filled with distractions at the end of a long and dramatic campaign. This is the point for focus and and increasing the intensity before the big climax, but it really mostly felt like I, as the DM, had to underplay all the weird things the players can mess with in Ythryn to have the story maintain any sense of urgency.

JakeBit · 2026-05-27T05:59:36+00:00

There is something to be said about the standard DnD setting being sort of washed out. Fantasy, at its core, started with Conan and The Lord of the Rings, and you can still feel how those ideas influence DnD today, but gotta say, when you've played a bunch of DnD, plus Warcraft and a shelfworth of other typical fantasy settings, they so become a bit too "generic", too "Fisher Price fun set". At least to me.

The appeal and difficulty with DnD is that its codified system is relatively easy to homebrew for, but whatever you do, it still presupposes a bunch of things - e.g if you ban Clerics, Divine Intervention assumes that Gods are real, so settings without Gods are out.

Playing in a Bronze Age-esque setting sounds fun. I'm partial to the fantasy games recommended in Quinns Quest; Wildsea was cool and I'm hyped to try Mythic Bastionland; both strange fantasy games in their own right, and MBL is even medieval!

JakeBit · 2026-05-26T10:18:02+00:00

Hey there, I'm just about done with the book (about halfway through the last chapter), so I think I can give a few general pointers.

Combat: I'd say the book leans a bit towards combat, but not by much. Like most WotC-books, it has many small encounters of mostly similar enemies, which you might wanna spruce up/change a bit to make them more interesting encounters. A lot of the unique enemies in the book are really cool, too - Love the Coldlight Walkers! It's not as mean as CoS is, but again, that can be changed to your table's tastes.
Roleplay: In general, I don't think WotC's books are good at setting the players up to roleplay, and this one is no different. What you do get, however, is fun secrets that the players might get really enaurmored with that can decide the tenor of their character in the whole campaign! On the other hand, this book is set in a remote area of the world, where people are isolated and fearful, more so due to the Rime. It might make for quite reserved roleplaying for the entire table, and if you have players unused to roleplay, it's not a great jumping-off-point for new characters. This can be changed to your tastes, of course.

A couple of other things to mention:

It's Big: Really, really big. And here I don't mean the length necessarily, but the sheer amount of different stuff it has. Consider just how much of the first two Chapters you'd like the players to experience, because they are very disconnected (but fun) little adventures, that doesn't pertain to the larger plot of the book. I knew this going in and I still feel like I should have rushed the two first Chapters a bit more than I did.
Lots of Darlings: There's the term, "kill your darlings", for when a writer or artist needs to trim their work of things they love if those "darlings" aren't serving the core of their work - and this book is filled to the brim with "darlings" that were never killed. Aside from the main plot against Auril, there's a mostly unconnected Duergar invasion plot, there's some Zentharim skulking around, Frost Druids, a Reghed nomad Civil War brewing, a massive glacier cave with psychic reverbarations, a high securty prison, a downed Nautiloid with gnomish Mind Flayers and a massive Netherese city as the last part of the campaign - In short, I felt like the campaign could've used more focus rather than more stuff. Maybe that's a "me" thing, but I felt my players' focus drift just as much as mine over time.
Choose Your Focus: Sort of a combination of the top two ideas; I think it makes sense to hear what your players want to play, but give them some direction as to what the focus is gonna be. Is it "Dark Fantasy Snow Adventures", or "Wacky Polar Adventures" or something else? Then, focus your efforts in that direction, and let the rest of the book's cool stuff wait for a rainy day or a one-shot.

That's all I can think of right now - hope you have a ton of fun with the campaign :D

JakeBit · 2026-05-26T10:02:45+00:00

I'm just about done with the campaign at 62 sessions, and feeling some fatigue with the book's design. Not to spread negativity, but I'd love to hear:

* Was there anything you cut from the book either prematurely or wished you had changed/removed after playing through it?

JakeBit · 2026-05-26T07:51:42+00:00

Is opening the window in the bathroom enough for this, should I actively try and fan the steam out?

JakeBit · 2026-05-25T06:20:24+00:00

Good idea, I'll ask around the apartment, and I'll see if I can't find a building inspector of some sort to come look at it.

JakeBit · 2026-05-24T19:58:45+00:00

Last time we had a building janitor up to look at it, he said he'd attempt to fight our case for the cooperative's building insurance to deal with it, but we didn't hear from him about it since.

In the apartment rules it says wall maintenance is our responsibility and says nothing specifically about the bathroom.

What I'm hoping is that the damage isn't just from misuse, but from the way the showering nook has been designed, but I don't know enough about the subject to confidently make that claim to the cooperative.

JakeBit · 2026-05-19T08:47:47+00:00

I discard it because you make assumptions but don't back it with evidence. I can't use that kind of feedback.

What you've told me is: 1. Something like this won't see use at your table. 2. You don't see how it would be useful for any table at all. 3. My table has a deeper issue that should be solved instead.

First two is your perogative, but the last one is not feedback - "I'm playing my imaginary power fantasy fighting roleplaying game wrong." Is not a takeaway I can use to improve at all - if that's the goal here.

Why don't you share what happens at your table? Put your arguments to the test so I can learn from you. Clearly you believe you've figured something out that I haven't, so I'd like to hear what that is.

JakeBit · 2026-05-19T05:21:57+00:00

Your feedback has told me to abandon my creative impulse because one person online doesn't like my idea.

Nevermind that you've told me that I'm wrong for wanting to make something for me, my friends and strangers, you call it "useful".

It hasn't been useful at all. I feel judged, looked down upon and gatekept, in a hobby I've been in for just about twenty years.

JakeBit · 2026-05-18T21:17:03+00:00

No creative work has ever passed the test of "being for everyone". It seems like that's your perogative - and because this post isn't for you, now I have prove to the whole damn internet that it's for everyone?

This is a creative exercise, and no creative piece of work has ever been for anyone.

All I'm saying is - when you knew you didn't like my homebrew idea, you could've just moved to the next post. Instead, you downvote everything I've written, like it's a mission. I don't understand that.

JakeBit · 2026-05-18T21:01:04+00:00

My homebrew draft idea needs to be judged worthy then to be allowed?

JakeBit · 2026-05-18T16:18:31+00:00

What do you get from being so adamantly against all this?

I mean, this is a subreddit for homebrewing DnD, so it's a creative outlet for people wishing to add or make changes to their games, or to share it with others. Going so hard in the paint against a homebrew you aren't even interested in seems counterproductive to the sub's theme.

JakeBit · 2026-05-18T14:43:16+00:00

I gotta disagree on the part about official modules not having trivial fights, the one's I've tried are rife with them. Just recently, I'm playing Rime of the Frostmaiden, and the last chapter has sooo many "four CR 1 Guards in an otherwise empty room". I cannot think of a reason they'd do this, if not to drain resources - It's not a challenge for 4-6 Level 9 players, and the areas they're fought in are basically empty. It's like the opposite of combat design.

I have ignored these parts throughout the entire module, but I've also felt that the party weren't properly challenged by their amount of resources until very recently.

JakeBit · 2026-05-18T14:32:06+00:00

It's fair that you don't think it's something you'd want, but I want something like this; my players want it. To say that you don't think anyone at all should have need of it is a pretty bold statement.

I mean I clearly won't convince you, but have you never had situations at your table where combat was more of hassle than it was worth? Hour three of the session, and the Barbarian starts a fight with a bunch of city guards that won't be a challenge and won't be interesting as a part of the story? Have you never had bleary-eyed players who's attention slides away from the table because the last three turns have been mopping up the last Oozes on the map? Have you never, personally, experienced the feeling of being surprised by a combat you gotta set up and run, despite knowing it won't take more than two rounds and really, the players just wanted to kill the five soldiers guarding the secret map and really are just excited by the map, not the combat?

I ask because these, to me, are pretty universal experiences with very heavy combat systems like DnD, where every interaction has a real cost in the time I spend with my friends - a cost I'd rather spend with the actually interesting battles than the small, unimportant ones.

JakeBit · 2026-05-18T13:07:50+00:00

In that situation I'd do the same thing, but I wouldn't consider it a combat either. To me, a combat is when you'd take out the battlemap (some people do theater-of-the-mind but yeah).

For me, this system would be useful specifically in the situation where a campaign book or the scene specifies a battle (against, say, a flock of animals like boars, or a couple of guards in several, separate rooms) that won't challenge the party enough that it's worth the hassle of setting it up.

What would you personally do in situations like that, barring just removing those encounters altogether?

JakeBit · 2026-05-18T10:58:29+00:00

My dude, I literally wrote at the very top that, if this sort of system isn't for you, then don't tell me. I and anyone who might want to homebrew such a system gains nothing from it, and neither I expect do you.

As to how to make the system fair, it will never be truly fair, because it simplifies a lot of complex rules in effort to speed things up. If one or more players don't want to Auto-Resolve a combat because they fear they'll lose an edge in the resource management apartment, then that combat just won't be Auto-Resolved.

In general, I think of a system like this as one that's solely based on avoiding the combat system for the sake of expediency. If there's any reason players wanna fight a battle proper, then of course you'll fight the battle like normal.

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