Eh, then maybe there’s another reason why the animated version avoids all of that but that seemed to be the most obvious one. In any event, the point is that Vox Machina was far enough away from actual D&D properties that it was basically just generic fantasy. Doesn’t really matter what the reason was, it wasn’t very D&D-esque versus any other fantasy type cartoon show.
(I’m aware that there’s some CR-related stuff under the WotC banner but I have no idea if that legally extends to the animated show which would easily have different restrictions)
From watching it? I mean, I watched it the once back in March but I commented on it then in the thread about the show:
I remember it being enjoyable enough as a fantasy adventure show but not pinging as “D&D” except because I knew about the source material. That said, I don’t remember it now well enough to bother with examples and you don’t know 5e so I don’t see this being a real fruitful point of debate.
D&D is generic fantasy. That’s it’s strength. You can’t say, “It doesn’t have X, Y and Z in it, so it isn’t really D&D”, because there’s nothing a campaign or game world has to have in it in order for it to be “real” D&D. Take a generic fantasy story, throw in a random grab-bag of D&D races, classes and monsters into it, and voila! you have a perfectly legitimate D&D campaign - or movie.
I just looked at the wiki - 190 novels!!! Holy crap! I assume they must of sold enough to be profitable, so…wow. Gold mine, I assume. But yes, I assume it was hard to keep up standards across 190 freaking novels !
Meh. I can certainly say it doesn’t look/feel like D&D aside from the broadest of fantasy tropes. And you certainly could ADD elements that would tie it to the property (spell names, class/subclass abilities, specific monsters, etc). I don’t recall Vox Machina having any of that: they never called Mage Hand by name and it didn’t act remotely like the spell, the monsters were generic dragons, skeletons, vampires, etc, classes sorta acted like their class in a general way but nothing specific, etc. I dunno, maybe the big blue/grey guy Raged or somethin’.
In the sense that you can slap a D&D sticker on anything and say “prove me wrong” then sure. In the sense that watching it felt like a D&D property, I didn’t get much of that from it (versus the movie trailer in the OP which did say “This is D&D!”).
Hah, it was closer to 40-50 last I looked but even then it was mostly pretty bad.
That’s because he was casting Bigby’s Hand, just renaming it after itself (which is a totally PC thing to do).
You mean, the most popular monsters in the game? Plus, the dragon was blue and breathed lightning, which is very specific.
The big guy - a goliath, BTW, which is a race invented for D&D - did indeed rage, and the other characters did more than enough class-specific actions. Plus, you had different types of elves, and gnomes, which is a race rarely seen outside of gardens. What more do you want?
I thought about this a bit, and I realized there’s a reason for that.
Critical Role started out as a Pathfinder campaign. They moved to 5th edition when they started the show, so they could get WotC to help underwrite it. The cartoon is based on sessions of the campaign from before the show started, when they were still using Pathfinder rules. So stuff like never referring to Bigby’s Hand by name was for legal reasons, not because of a legal issue between WotC and CR, but because of a legal issue between WotC and Paizo. Same with the ranger not having access to cure wounds, which they don’t get until ~8th level in Pathfinder, and probably a bunch of other stuff that stuck out to you as “off” or otherwise generic. I play Pathfinder, so that stuff didn’t stick out to me. “Bigby” isn’t a name in Pathfinder, but spells that create a big telekinetic hand still exist, so Scanlan using various versions of Interposing Hand, Crushing Hand, etc. was a clear table top reference to me, not a deliberately generic reference. Even though, technically, that’s what it was back in 2009.
Likewise, stuff like a blue dragon that breathes lightning, or the way they animated the strength draining effect of being attacked by a shadow. Or, most perfectly, the way the party’s entire plan got wrecked by a locked door, because the thief couldn’t stop botching his skill checks.
Heh. I’m DMing an adventure now, and it turns out that none of my players gave their character the ability to use thieves tools or any other way to pick a lock. They keep begging me to stop putting locked doors and chests and other stuff in my dungeons, and I just laugh and laugh and add more locks.
I once played a Cyberpunk game where we put all our skill points into guns and hacking, and all our money into the sickest weapons and cybertech available. And nobody thought to buy a car, or learn how to drive one.
We had to take a bus to break into Arasaka headquarters.
That’s not on the 5e bard spell list so I wouldn’t have guessed (guess you could use a Magical Secret on it?)
That said, I don’t care enough to go through point by point. My impression was very generic and Johnny Bravo didn’t seem to think it felt like “D&D” as such (and I posted to agree). Can’t go back and change how it felt to watch it.
Yeah, they’re supposed to be around 7th in the show. Maybe they backfilled the hand because it became a signature thing later, and they really wanted to animate it.
On topic, I’m cautiously optimistic about the DND movie…
DND was intentionally written to be generic fantasy and even 5E hasn’t moved that far from those roots, with a few race exceptions. So, yes, anything that has generic fantasy elements could be called DND.
I also play Pathfinder and when I watched some of CR’s first campaign, was confused by the obvious gunslinger until I found out they converted the campaign from PF1 to 5E. btw, they didn’t do that to get corporate sponsorship but because they thought that the simpler ruleset of 5E would make for more interesting viewing.
I didn’t like the Vox Machina cartoon but because the plot was dumb. IIRC, they fought “level appropriate” monsters but the dragon seemed to outclass them in ep1 and the whole encounter came off as stupid to me. I think someone got hurt but none of the casters had Cure???
In the end, after watching (via YouTube, never did it as a podcast) of CR, I realized that watching a group play DND isn’t interesting to me as I would rather prep for my next game or play myself. That’s me, though. It has brought a lot of people to the game, which is a good thing.
I’m running Shadowrun and that is hysterical! Thanks for sharing!
I used to sometimes watch rinky-dink streams on Twitch that were basically “five people around a card table playing D&D” and it felt like having a game wrap up at the comic shop so you spend a few minutes watching another table play. All the ones I’d watch died out with Covid though so I fell out of the habit. I tried CR a couple times but never got into it – the slick production, voice actors and piles of toys felt too removed from my own D&D experiences to really make a connection or build interest. But I don’t hate CR or resent it; I watched Vox Machina because I thought “Well, maybe they had a good story and this is a way to see it without the barriers or watching/listening to the live game”. I found it entertaining enough to finish the season despite its flaws but I wouldn’t bother recommending it to anyone who wasn’t already a RPG player.
This movie feels like a weird place: They want to slap that D&D label on it to make it a commercial for the RPG product but, at the same time, I’d think anyone NOT interested in D&D is more likely to just say “This ain’t a movie I’d be interested in”. I guess that’s for the marketing people to figure out.
I was cautiously optimistic (I like Pine and Page, love Rodriguez, and loved all the classic monsters but the story did seem somewhat generic) and then … lute! I’m sold.
I keep seeing this thread title (“The New Dungeons and Dragons Movie Might Actually be Good?”), and I keep thinking: Yeah, but will it be lawful good, neutral good, or chaotic good?
!