When you ruin the DM's CR17 monster encounter | Critical Role Highlight 

Marisha had a look of recognition. like "Oh THAT'S what that sound was for last week!!"

​@OriginalCreatorSama Just imagine that noise piercing the air out of nowhere when you're in the kitchen, making breakfast

id shit myself LOL @@toddalexander5015

Marisha "Dammit, he was trying out new monster noises in the bedroom again!"

my farts sounds better than him

Also, cherish the image of Yasha stood in the snow giving a turtle a belly rub while shouting "WHAT ARE WE DOING???"

he actually was making a blade runner reference I believe.

@@tannerarmstrong1496 true, the end of Tal's quote is "you don't help it. why?" asking why someone isn't helping the turtle on its back is part of the Voight-Kampff test

@@tannerarmstrong1496 I missed it completely! Good spot 😁

Speaking from experience

Oh and the woman with golden object glued on her hands there too

@@jbrone1241 She could be the one to gather them all together, leader of the anti-nein campaign

@@vampmir Anti-nein? So... Sieben? Because Sieben Acht Nein

Don't forget the ship they capsized.

And halas

But she still clutched so hard! Laura is a God

4:28 Ye

@@philmcbride3424Dude between this and the cupcake, Laura might be the greatest D&D player I’ve ever seen.

Man, you know he's amazing when even other voice actors have a reaction along the lines of "holy crap!".

I dare say he could even give Dee Bradley Baker a run for his money

@@operative2136 Everyone but Taliesin; he just looked over like "What's that, Cthulhu? Oh, it's just Matt."

I love to practice making random creepy noises, always have. Matt is my idol.

As the description for Beast Roar in Bloodborne says, "(...) The indescribable sound is broadcast with the caster's own vocal cords, which begs the question, what terrible things lurk deep within the frames of men?"

He stunned them all for a whole freaking minute, it was a well deserved retaliation 😂

I have taken your natural twenty and have turned its fury back on you, Travis!

I don't know a small part of me feels whatever Travis rolled the bunny was coming for him because Matt knew star razer was up and could get this fight back on track.

"Did it succeed? Now it's a regular fucking turtle." - Liam

All around me are familiar faaacess...

they already took it out on Fjord.

Nope just really boring tbh can't even get through the first episode, just 4 hours of meh.

@@afrosamurai3847 campaign 3 hasn’t even been announced what are you talking about

All monks with polymorph, somehow

@@gracehuang8571 Thought this exandria junk was campaign 3

Well don’t forget everybody but Jester got whammied the way they did. What choice did they have?

Everyone had fun tho.

@@Phiro00 Isn’t that the biggest point? I think if I were a DM, I’d be happy with my campaign going off the rails as long as my party enjoyed themselves

@@TieflingKumasi precisely.

@@TieflingKumasi You’d be at least a little disappointed about the hours you spent

Gotta respect the hustle Matt put in trying to salvage his encounter lmao. But sometimes you fail two consecutive Wisdom saves

🤣🤣 love it

Can I get a time stamp?

@@JD-wu5pf he couldn’t pass them anyway. -3 to wisdom saves is killer at high levels. It’s a bit of a gripe I have with the save system actually. Once you get to higher levels it’s basically impossible to make any of your saves unless it’s the type you’re proficient in. Another reason why monks are OP.

@@asherandai2633 Yeah, 5e is a pretty trash system.

We have a few spells around our table like that: fly, polymorph, and fucking color spray.

This is why you always give your big single target monsters legendary resistances

It's why I'll always pick up polymorph as a caster... it's so strong and is one of the few spells that can bail the party out of certain doom.

@@sirhamalot8651 or just give your big bad guy a legendary resistance. Or don’t use only one bad guy, like you should be doing anyways.

@@sirhamalot8651 Mat had one creature as his bad guy with no legendary resistances and, as you saw, it got ruined by a polymorph. This isn't a story that says ban polymorph, its a story that says to change your encounter design to account for save or suck abilities.

Idk, kinda looks like he's just checking his spells for this encounter...? And Matt grabs his attention with the trill for like 2 seconds and he goes back to prep xD

Because Tal has seen far worse in the Far Realm, where he was born 20,000 years ago.

Just another day for that eldrich being

@@beaug.2326 He only looked up because he was thinking it sounded similar to one of the eldritch beings he used to hang out with in the ancient times.

You ever try to intimidate a sentient pyramid?

Marisha in the other room just freaking the fuck out

That was exactly my thought when I heard it too 😂

The best part is he actually said he absolutely does bathroom voices time on a DM youtube video with Brennan and Aabria 😂

Lmao at the AC

@@mitchellsheridan5252 17 is a pretty good AC.

Matt: “Wait!… you have Star Razer up, don’t you?” Travis: “I do. OH!😱”

The day Fjord decided he's never going to the zoo again

For real! I mean... the Tarrasque is kinda like a turtle... 👀

Also: you have the most concerningly evocative name I've ever seen 😅

What about,,, the zaratan?

They did!

I mean, there is the Horizonback in the Explorers Guide... But they never had an opportunity to fight those

It sounded like they were rolling saves every round though, so not that rough unless you get really bad luck.

@@sha2143 they were. A 20+ DC con save is not a joke.

@@sha2143 This monster was in EGtW, and it's got some nasty stuff we didnt get to see. Sure, they get to repeat the DC20 save at the end of every turn and when they get hit. But it's multiattack versus stunned creatures is devious. +15 to hit, so nearly guaranteed for Caleb and Fjord, and for Beau at an AC of 21 it's a 80% chance to hit. 3d8+9 piercing, 3d6 cold isn't that much, but a DC 20 dex save or be swallowed. A kraken is grapple, THEN swallow, but this worm is a straight swallow. Stunned creatures insta-fail this save. It does this to two creatures a turn. Swallowed creatures take 6d6 at the start of their turns. We didn't see this, but when it gets reduced to 0 hp it explodes in a 60ft radius, DC 20 dex or take 8d6 cold damage. Swallowed creatures instafail. I genuinely thought it would TPK until she said "polymorph", then I wasnt worried at all.

@@choochoobob123 Dang that sounds like a TPK waiting to happen even WITHOUT the stun effect. Especially when the melee characters also getting hit with cold damage when they manage to hit it.

@@phillipsmith3423 I haven't played DnD before just watched tons of content for it, but I really think Stun effects are cheap and shouldn't exist, and I say this for both Players and enemies. Like, what if your whole team just gets fucked by an illithid mind blast or something else that you could potentially never recover from?, Also same for a DM you design something only for it to get stunned for ages by a monk. But what do I know about game balance tbh

To be fair it wasn't that long after this they started running into constructs that couldn't be polymorphed.

This is why I give certain boss monsters immutable form, so that they can't be polymorphed if I see it being abused constantly.

Or make creatures who get adversely affected by Polymorph

@@TieflingKumasi that is an interesting thought. What kinds of monsters? Any thoughts?

@@harrisonjones7420 thoughts on monsters or thoughts on creating a monster?

II just realized that you wrote this waaay before Travis's new character for campaign 3 was reviled.

@@Kadel___ lol. I'm still waiting for grog to pop up somewhere down the line as a crochety old Goliath with severe anger issues

@@Kadel___ also, that's chetney pockapee? Pockapy?. Not chutney chocolatecane.

@@arancourt5623 Pock O'pea

​@@arancourt5623 what do you want you dork

Also, remember when the banished an interdimensional monster winning the fight, then took like 9 rounds of environmental damage (boiling water), just to bring it back because it was covered in loot. That was hilarious.

@@jasonreed7522 Yeah the Vokodo fight was great, also with Caleb's final move.

We are trained with video games that we have to get a kill to get the reward. Thankfully DnD dosent have to follow that.

Honestly, it's not that creative. They'd been casting polymorph for around 60 sessions now. This enemy had no way to deal with high level casters, other than the aoe stun effect. So it was just an obvious choice for Laura

Always go for frog, lowest chance for getting out with only +1 acrobatics and 0 effective attacks to break concentration, can also breathe air and water so can be used in multiple scenarios. Hard to think of on the fly, kitten was a good one!

This is why we turn them into turtles

Nicely done, you Kifished the giant :D

Ummm I know dnd doesn’t use actual physics but technically terminal velocity for a cat can barely kill a cat that’s why you don’t hear of them falling to death

Still cool

@@coreyparker1544 Given that it was a dragon turned into a cat, it probably didn't know that a cat has to stretch it's body to not die due to the fall, so it was probably just flailing it's limbs into the air

@@lovelyyolk9066 Is a Fire Giant considered a Dragon? Actually curious cause I don't play D&D

It could have been serious though with everyone failing their saving throws except Jester. Definitely the best move in the circumstances 😂

@@CallistoTheWarriorQueen Definitely a good move on the players part; I'm not arguing that. But I've also been in Matt's shoes here with "well, my cool dangerous combat encounter just got reduced to bullying a turtle without hurting it. At least it's funny."

Polymorph has a few common uses: Transportation (fly as eagles) Stealth (cat, sparrow, ect) Escape (Dragon --> painted turtle, PC's -> birds to gtfo from either a crumbling dungeon or a hostile party) Of course you can do anything your DM allows with a spell its definitely most obvious that if the dragon wasn't a dragon this encounter would be less deadly. Also consider more weaker enemies, so that if the party has 3 concentration slots hit them with 4 juveniles instead so that way at least one must die before polymorph is viable. But sometimes you just want a big scary monster.

@@jasonreed7522 look at it this way, they could have used fly or another polymorph and had a party member fly high into the air then drop it from 600+ feet up. But they didn't.

Polymorph was much better for handling BBEGs back in the 2nd Edition days. It was always fun to polymorph your DMs boss monster only to have it fail its system shock roll and die instantly. Any spell that made you age, changed your body size or shape, and generally anything other than healing that physically altered you triggered a system shock roll.

Matt can do anything starting with killing the turtle at anytime due to it being a reptile in an arctice snowstorm and ending with making up any scenario he wants to.

You’re really happy as a DM, whenever this happens It’s amazing because it’s not just another fight, but a cool story you’ll remember I a DM of 1300h….

That’s a pegboard nerds reference right? Or something else?

@@brennangray8712 i think it should be a reference to the Sheb Wooley 1958 song Purple people eater. There have been countless covers and even movies about it.

Whoa

how did it go to the astral sea with two bags of holding?

When two extra dimensional openings meet they create a sort of small black whole that traps things in the astral plane

You can read it under the bag of holding in the DMG

@@odinholmes3713 im just imagining that one person is throwing the bag over it's head while the other is putting it over it's legs.

@@Ryan-qr3xg technically it would suck them in too since it's a 10 ft radius so they used mage hand I also realize that bags of holding are too heavy for that but it was more fun to just allow it

with a minute long stun, it probably would have been a party wipe as the worm would of just swallowed them all one by one while they were still stunned. In combat, a min is 10 rounds, which would have been more then enough.

It honestly would have been close to a tpk, I wouldn't be surprised if only Jester survived if the polymorph didn't land

Fortunately that worm had like a 10% chance to resist the spell.

@@ienzio7795 without help, Jester would have never made it back to civilization and probably would have died from exposure/wild animal attack while she was exhausted or if she had tried to teleport out possibly been killed by the wonkiness of magic in the area

@@Rembanspellsong But they got to repeat the save after each turn so as we saw 6/7 were fine by round 3. Each person swallowed would probably trigger the Con save vs regurgitation on their turn. It would have been a Deadly encounter and maybe one would die before they manage to force the regurgitation but they would have won.

technically yes and no reptiles are coldblooded which means itll fall asleep/hibernation before it actually freezes to the point itll be hurt they would still have enough time to just leave before it reverted back due to spell running out or actual dmg

Polymorph isn't instantly disrupted by any damage whatsoever, it's just that the first form was a snow bunny that had 1 HP

@@bopqw1055 not true. Reptiles don't go into a coma before feeling pain from the cold. It is just as agonising to them as it is to us. It was commonly used as a euthanasia method for cold blooded animals but not anymore as is turned out to be torture. That turtle should have taken cold damage.

@@steffanaarts-greven1352 i meant in terms of 5e not irl

@@bopqw1055 Where in the books does it talk about cold damage putting reptiles to sleep?! lmao

was looking for this

Probably the nicest way to deal with enemy creatures tbh

I swear Matt had flashbacks to this when that happened.

Yeah, Guidance is such a casual cantrip that you forget it's concentration. Happened to them quite often. Jester's duplicate is concentration and she dropped a couple of spells for that too (To be fair, it sucks that your Channel Divinity isn't that great and requires concentration).

You forget these things in the heat of the moment.

Wasn't there a blue dragon that got polymorphed in season 2 too?

Honestly, against a full party of 7, plus a potentially high-ish level fighter companion, Id give em this plus legendary or villain actions.

A fellow expert in insect language I see. Where did you learn your dialect? The zerg, or perhaps Tyranids? I learned mine from the Arachnids of the planet klendathu, They have a bit of a country "southern America" accent Unlike the boston accents of zerg, Or the posh british accent of the tyranids.

Oh wow, that hylarious.. Buuut i bet the DM wasnt happy

Honestly CR in 5e is a joke, some CR 1/4 or 1 creatures would be scarier to face than some CR 10 creatures

@@ienzio7795 looks angrily at intellect devoured

No lesson is: let the tutrle take cold dmg

@@heikesiegl2640 turtles, being reptiles, wouldnt be immediately sideswiped by cold temperatures.

@@heikesiegl2640 except it wouldn’t be cold damage, it would be continuous rapid onset exhaustion