critical role doors illustrate everything wrong with rpgs in the entire world
(Original article from dapgloopy blogspot posted on November 4 2021)
hello all creatures. this blog is new.
i like OSR games and adventure games and not 5e very much.
ok, so,
critical role doors illustrate everything wrong with rpgs in the entire world. ok not really though.
but there’s a recurrent theme with the critical role crew having a tough time against furniture. It’s, like, really freaking funny.
But like, why does it keep happening?
The iteration of this problem that inspired this text was in Episode 3 of Season 3 of critical role. I only caught the episode halfway through, so im not entirely sure what was going on, but from what I remember of episode 2, they’re skulking around looking for someone bad who is doing some sort of smuggling. To this end, they’ve used detect thoughts to identify about 10 people in the next room, behind a locked door.
After some planning and plotting, their halfling fighter decides he’s going to kick in the door, to the astonishment of the rest of the group. This is cool. Oh shit! He’s going to knock in the door and alert the guards! Damn!
Except, he doesn’t. He has to roll a strength check, which he does decently on. Matt describes the door get splintered and kicked in but not open. What follows is a bunch of people attacking the door with their swords, and it tanks their damage.
At one point, matt says “It’s always the doors!”
Well, duh, if you give your doors AC and Hit points! Why do doors need hit points in the first place?
I don’t even know if matt is tracking damage behind his screen. Doesn’t matter, door’s not open. What could have been a cool bust down the door moment is now an awkward, lets just keep attacking this thing, prolonged affair. I find that that ends up happening a lot in 5e.
Matt is ostensibly better at DMing than I am. Just yesterday night i ran a fucking terrible sessions of D&D, real failure. But I cant help wondering if the incredibly funny war on furniture in matts game is a product of the system hes using, rather than a quirk of his play group. If he wasn’t playing 5e, would he have made the door as tenacious a foe? I suppose it does make sense for the halfling fighter to have trouble kicking down a door, but, cmon, you really think Critical Role is the type of game to be that pedantic about the realism of the fantasy world?
Maybe matt had something cool behind the door that he wanted to keep secret, so he made it hard to get through by instinct. Maybe his NPCs needed time to get situated. I often find that in adjudicating the realism of the fantasy world, you can misplace the drama of the moment and fixate on the wrong thing.
Oh well. As i finish this article his players just yelled in fear and surprise at having to roll initiative. That must get exhausting.
(Note: If i were a better creature i would go find the other examples of furniture being a nuisance. I vaguely remember one from campaign 1 but i don’t have enough effort to go find it)