When you ruin the DM's plans | Critical Role Highlight | Campaign 2, Episode 47 

According to Wikipedia - Up to 500 yards for small early naval cannons. Larger cannons might reach as far as 2,500 yards

@@kirbs0001 How much is that in "Rest of the world"-units, 2.1235 kilometres???

@@Jalgorn 457.2 meters for the small ones and 2286 meters for the large one. Google is much faster than asking but I understand and have done this very thing many times.

@@Jalgorn 500 yards is 0.24686 nautical miles, which makes it 14 seconds of arc around the world, or 2.27 furlongs. or 0.4572 km.

@@kirbs0001 Except the early cannon weren't rifled but rather smoothbores. The EFFECTIVE range of most smoothbores were between 150m and 250m depending on the size and speed of the target.

When the players make and succeed at a good enough plan, that's all a part of the game

empirate100 exactly, when the DM knows he isn’t there to defeat the players but to guide them.

This part can’t be stated enough. Matt handled this exactly the way he should have and it was awesome to watch unfold.

Part of why it's so cool is that they can see that the ship combat isn't going to be easy.

empirate100 I love this attitude. I always see comments like “ugh i hate when players derail” but like... is this not the game? To play how you want and try to win the encounters?

100% that is what I would do

This is hilariousssssss and 100% what a good dm should do for the laughs

@@yourdadsotherfamily3530 no

@@yourdadsotherfamily3530 a good DM let their players win when they do something ingenious.

Ship: I am Hagred the worlds most most powerful wizard and i shall avenge my brother Hagren

Hell, imagine if they had Percy with them lol

Altyrell Percy’s guns have some serious range as well. He could literally destroy their sails from a range comparable to the actual cannons.

Not just that, but he could potentially simply shoot whomever is helming the other Ship

Only if he wants to take all the fun out of it. In all honesty, talking Vox Machina, Grog could take a couple of cannonballs with barely a split lip as he punched the enemy ship to death. Thinking about it, all of Vox Machina could probably stomp a ship single handed (except for Vex, she needs both hands to draw her bow).

Considering Taliesin had recently Control Water'd a pursuing ship into capsizing, I wouldn't put it past Taliesin to have Percy do that.

This wasn't even creative. This was using control water on the ocean.

Anytime my cleric will go near a body of water, he prepares control water. WHY NOT!

I remember one time my players were fighting a boss much stronger than they were and 2 of them got lucky nat20s on hit rolls (they were all rolling hit rolls at once due to the boss falling on his ass due to a bad athletics roll) and said players would have one shot the boss. So I cucked them and the boss shrugged off their blows and ran away with his pants around his feet. They then met him again later and had a fun super awesome boss fight.

DM Tip #3: Employ the sort of tricks players like to turn on you. Don't metagame and make the foes more intelligent than the foes would be, but make them fight people of similar abilities with different ideals/allegiances. It will make your players consider new and creative options and give some fun opportunities for players to easily connect with your villains.

@@AuthorReborn Very true, one of the best campaigns our main DM ever did was one that involved so many players he split us into two teams and we each met a different day of the week. He limited the world a bit more to prevent s just running off in opposite directions, but we were two parties of heroes pledged to different world factions. We constantly butted heads and ran into each other and he had copies of everyones character sheet so anytime the groups encountered each other we'd essentially get to pvp because the idea of playing "npc" heroes against us was that he could actually play each character how a player would and didn't have to force limit himself into keeping dumb creatures dumb and smart but weak ones smart but weak. I'll also add that the reason for this is throughout multiple campaigns over a couple years, our core group of 4 or 5 players time and time again concocted ways to completely ruin his meticulous plans, all because of either taking outside the box actions and getting good rolls or having and using skills that he didnt know because one guy or another was saving it up. In the mega campaign he figured out the ultimate way to negate that....by making us play against characters who could react in creative ways to our whacky antics.

...in retrospect, his nonchalance makes a lot more sense suddenly.

Samuel Harrison imagine you’re one of the crew and you know these weirdos that hired you are powerful but then the cook, the calm, cleric, cow man, just demolishes a ship in one fell swoop like that had to be a shock.

@@vespernight4236 why dose this comment make me think of the movie under siege

Sundavar Gaming because that was the exact movie plot of Under Seige, but let’s be honest Caduceus does it better and less creepy than Steven Segal

@@sundavar Always beware the cook: Under Siege, Hunt for Red October, Treasure Island...

thank you for putting this in my mind as the POV footage of the other ship during the control water moment xD

This is Taliesin Jaffe, you guys should have seen this coming hehe

please no one like this its on a nice 666 from Taliesin

@@KitsuneRokaku yeah everyone knows a dm's job is to make the players victories feel pointless, just so fun for everyone at the table.

It's basically megafluffernutter

WAAAAAAAAAAAAGH

WHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

Hitting on 4+ is a lot easier on a d20

@@ChaosSquad YELLING LIKE KERMIT FLAILING HIS ARMS

The enemy being the player haha

"Even the best laid plans go to waste on the battlefield." Sun Tsu, The Art of War. In the heat of battle, nobody is worried about the Plan, they're worried about survival.

Is VtM what the military calls Vietnam?

"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." - Von Moltke, the younger

Jane , Mike Tyson said it best. Everyone has a plan till you punch them in the mouth

this is true

Remember that time he did let Taliesin Roll and.....Molly died. This was perfect "gotcha back" from Taliesin.

So THATS why Molly died

every DM has had a taliesin at some point.

@@PsychicFX , that's simultaneously both the greatest and most terrifying thing I've heard of today.

I mean they still cheesed that encounter as well, so...

Cast animate object on bolder. Ask it to move itself :P

@@rinconusmc Mass animate object on group of boulders. Gain new spell of "Rocks fall, everyone dies"

@@obsidironpumicia4074 that is absolutely brilliant!

@@rinconusmc It's been done before. A cow reach unknown mach and decimated an entire city/mountain. Along with a dragon.

My own party recently managed to kill a boss we were meant to lose against by rolling 3 20's in a row and him failing his various saves. It was kinda epic.

SAM GOT TO FIRE

@@bitter-bit At an unmoving target that had already been defeated....but sure.

@@gamester512 hey sometimes that enough taste of what could of happened to have the players ask to have another chance at what ever it is combat wise they missed out on. I've experienced this. We were playing Starfinder, and I had an Envoy that was basically a gunslinger in all but name. Due to the ridiculous Carisma stacks the Envoy can have I bluffed our party's way out of a unique Combat of a game of Poker. Which after the session the dm explained the rough concept, we all liked it and asked for that to be revised elsewhere in the campaign. It ended up becoming the encounter for the end of "Act 1; Now what the fuck did we do?" It was pretty intense actually. Managed to bluffed my last hand and forced the Boss to fold, reviling I actually had a losing hand, won my partys ownership back, they where captured and turned into slaves, cleared all my characters debts,( he was a ganster) and established Rightful claim on my planet essential I owned my own home world. It was fucking awesome.

At least they got to do naval battle in mighty nein reunited

*Marisha

you frickin fricks

As a dm, I agree with this statement wholeheartedly

Yup, just dropped ~300 angry treants (CR9 each one) on my party for casting a Fireball in the woods and starting a wildfire, even though they had a very recent encounter where these non-forgiving plants who warned them about chopping firewood and starting fires. Sad thing is, I have prepared 3 sessions worth of material for the grandmother hag lair with a coven of green hags amplified by a rare mineral Arcanium which turns them into perma-morphing nightmares. Now all of that goes down the drain because they have no chance of surviving in the wood and the only option is to run out of it.

@@DarthBoberEXMinMaxMunchking Fleeing the woods is amateur hour. They should lead the Treants towards the Hags, and try to pin the fire on them! It won't work but it will be hilarious.

@@Lurklen Impossible, treants know for sure it's the PCs who startes the fire.

That reminds me of LITERALLY MY SECOND SESSION EVER. A simple dungeon crawl resulted in us accidentally releasing an arch-lich into the world and forcing the DM to rewrite her entire campaign. Fun times.

D&D at it's finest

I have only played D&D once, about a two years ago. It was a one shot to see if we liked it (We all really did, but then graduating and getting jobs kinda got in the way sadly). The story and set up was simple; An old necromancers dungeon had recently been discovered and opened. The local guild had set up so that any adventurers who wanted to got to enter the dungeon only being paid if they could bring back proof that they had actually killed things down there. The proof being things such as heads and different body parts from undead. Our party met at the local guild and decided that we should work together. We had a wood elf bard, a high elf druid, a kenku rogue, a dwarf cleric and me, the human unarmed fighter monk. We after our first couple of fights had a long rest in one of the "bedrooms" in the dungeon. During said long rest we heard a scraping sound outside the door, the kenku rogue peeked out the door. Outside our door was another party of three people. They were dragging a giant shield of some sort. (The story we got to learn later was that inside the dungeon was a giant broken statue of a god, for every piece that was found and put back on the statue everyone inside the dungeon would get a sort of blessing by the god, +1 to AC) We decided that we should try to convince them to work with us, we left the room and after a failed persuasion check the other party belived that we were trying to trick them and kill them. So they attacked, our rogue used their crossbow to try to shoot one of them, missed and hit the giant shield. At that point the enemy party realized that they could use the shield to their advantage as a giant cover. They all hid behind the shield. A good thing to note is that this was one of the DMs planned battles, so wether the persuasion check had succeded or not they would have turned on us. This was supposed to be a sort of "mini boss fight" as the enemy party would use the shield to have almost full cover. That being said, we realized that we could use the shield to OUR advantage by pushing it. So we did... after a failed strength saving throw on the enemies part, a natural 1, the result was that the shield tipped over on top of the enemies and instantly crushed all of them, ending the boss fight instantly. After a long laugh from everyone at the table we looked at the clock and realized that it was time to end the session. The DM was cool with the outcome and said "That is the most you thing to do to a bossfight!". And sadly never got the time to play again.

that's got to be nearly a 1.75 on the henderson scale

@@Meta-Drew How did I screw it up?

Horde of the dragon queen? I had the exact same experience with my group, but mine decided to yell out to the watch towers and literally tell them who they are. then one of my guys cheesed cyanwrath by calling him out to a unnarmed duel, which he cheesed by another party member using protection from good and evil on him right before the 1v1

@@chasefarber3796 In our group the camp rolled terrible perception to the point that they didn't spot a naked Tielfing flying in the sky above them. When we later fought Cyanwrath in the cave he was knocked out most of the fight with a DC 13 Tasha's Hideous laughter and only got one attack when he finally rolled high enough to break it before we killed him.

you can always have the players come back to the camp later, maybe it's been invaded by orcs or goblins this time and you need to find a cultist cowering in a chest or something.

This isn't even remotely what happened in the video. In the video, the DM presented the players with a challenge and they conquered it succinctly.

kind of beeing there, i spend a hole day making a cultist hideout, planing how will they find them and creating my very first homebrew monster with cool mecanics, a cool background, lore building... they kill all of the cultist they saw but terrible dice rolls didnt allow them to find the passage to the boss 😢 obviously they left thinking there was nothing else and the rest of the cultists + the boss escaped 😭😢

scofield117 Tal just cast the OP spell: Fuck the DM's plans. Only requires somatic components, being a middle at your DM.

Lmao

Well thats what you earn with 2000 years worth of experience

Well I mean, the enemies had magic, and probably should have expected the sly adventurers to have magic too.....So they probably shouldn't have tailed the parties ship so close to a shore and some rocks....That was their own dumb captains fault. Lol Also, If you wanna be a challenging DM in a sea battle. FIREBALL THE SAILS...that'll stop the party in their tracks, then you can board and raid like a REAL pirate all you want. LOL

@@k-aw-teksleepysageuni8181 Matt doesn't a play "Let's destroy the party" He plays a world that has their own things and reactions. The Pirate ship did not go "Oh I think there will be high level magic casters in the middle of deserted islands so let's assume they can make a tidal wave that would fuck us" In most worlds, and especially Matt's, "Fireball" is not a common spell that every group has access to.

I'm starting to think that any ship worth it's salt should have their own aquamage on board.

With what spell??

@@micahinnerarity9563 The spell's name is Control Water.

Weiss I mean how much is salt really?

@@micahinnerarity9563 or counter spell. Everyone knows how badass that can be

He had already said it's a 30% chance, and he rolled a 15 on the percentile

@@Deathnotefan97 Yeah, but he could have said it was a high 30%. Like they would have to roll a 70 or more

It wasn't stated before hand and they seemed to be all on the same page. If he changed it after the fact it woulda been kinda obvious.

Abject Mathew Mercer is definitely really good but I believe he didn’t had the possibility to come back on what he said... And in the end it’s not that much of a big deal :) If you feel like you missed something that means you should try it in your campaign or do a one shot

Forgive me for this as I don’t play d&d but if it’s a 30% chance to work how does a rolling a 15 mean he succeeded?

Why is this so true?!

It IS taliesin

Welcome, to Critical Roll!

lesson learnt I think, next time Matt will sure to have a magic user standing by with dispell or maybe a counter control water.

it's stunts like this too that debunk the whole "this is scripted" bull that people claim CR does. How many times has Matt been blue balled from what he had planned (like Lorenzo getting away) vs what actually happens. Matt made a long twitter rant saying play the way you want to. Critical Role is more story driven, to provide entertainment for the group playing and for those of us that watch them versus many people who play a campaign and literally just play the game "I do this: Roll, pass/fail. I attack that boss monster: It's dead, done. CR tells a story with even the smallest rolls. Fails could result in hilarious misgivings, like Nott failing trap rolls and then subsequently getting impaled on the very traps she misses (thankfully instead of the other party) or success on attacks giving us some of the goriest HDYWTDTs.

Welcome to DnD, you must be new xD I saw that happen so often, nobody is save.

Technically the Plank King did...

SPOILER . . . . . . NARRATOR: But Avantika’s death at the hand of the Plank King would NOT eliminate the instance of her attacking the Mighty Nein on the water …

That's a fair point!

As it should be.

Well yeah, it gives them avatar powers where everything is water.

But normal cannons outrange them... Normal range of 600ft. And in a fantasy setting you would KNOW of this spell and have tons of counters to that... Still, gg to the players though.

An upset Cadeucus is a most daunting thing. His “March of Angry Beetles” when Fjord was ambushed in his sleep was just phenomenal.

Again, the case of "fear the wrath of a calm man".

It's just good business

Shadows_Assassin Matt’s laughing but you can see he just died a little inside.

This music is from Skyrim

Yeah, once he dies he will become one of the minor deitys, granted the status by the Wildmother

It took you that long to realize? He's an Eldritch Entity/Deity

Everything marisha does is adorable.

I am guessing that has changed after rumblecusp.

@@TheSpencermacdougall nope. Marisha reigns supreme.

You love to hate them?

@@Tempestan sometimes it's more than you hate that you love them for their cleverness

I had a party of nine players go to the hells to rescue a friend. They met Mephistopheles. Was supposed to be an epic level boss, 500 hp, the first person used a ridiculously op magic weapon and action surged to attack like 8 times...killed him in one turn. No one else even got a turn. I’m not gonna lie I was so disappointed. I was pissed. I was prepared to run like a 2 hour encounter...over in five minutes.

I feel both despair, and utter pride when my player's destroy my plans. "So proud, yet so betrayed.... well done."

And they still cheesed that encounter, lol.

@@Stingra87 and then they lost their ship

@@thetntraider They got a much better one.

Matt's the best. He dms under the premise that its about letting them be hero's and having fun.

If you really really don't want them to skip that encounter you can always say that they didn't capzise but some men and canons fell overboard, or that the ship got pushed and damaged against the coast line. You are the DM, you are literally the god of your own world, you make the rules.

@@pairot01 and this is the reason i stopped playing random groups. the god complex is fun, but it is about the players making the story and you revealing it to them. if you abuse the gm powers youwill slowly find yourself having a forced storytime thinking the players enjoy it but that is just them saving face. I've left groups when i started seeing the gm go down this dark path and a very good percentage of the time it leads to player stories becoming "i think we rolled three times collectively' to 'the gm forced a character into our party dedicated to forcing his storyline' stop seeing your god powers as a cheat. if there is no reason the players actions really mess something up then nothing is more fun than adlibbing.

@@evilgibson I've never DM'd so don't say throw that criticism at me, you don't know me or what I do. Have you ever tried talking to a DM about that? Because leaving a group should be the last resort. You seem like a very polarized person, everything is either perfect or it's the worst.

i am a very polarizing person, yep! i like having good times for all than bad times for some, so thank you! reply was directed at you but mostly to your comment (shocking!!). just the absurdity of using the god power to save the GM's precious story even if the players did something awesome is just downputting

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-GUx2C7Pn7ZE.html

squattingheads I see what you did there!!!

It will come handy in another occasion :D

Luckily, there are several.

It's a good thing that he is invulnerable.

I'll bet your DM was really *heated.*

Nah he was surprised but went along with it... the rest of the party was horrified. Especially the Cleric

How did you phrase your wish to where it "accidentally" kills off an entire race of frost Giants?

@@johnlong8952 "I wish for all the frost giants to be dropped into a volcano" as I gestured at the ones attacking....I realized too late how I worded it and by the time I tried to fix it millions of frost giants were falling into the volcano.... First time dealing with a genie and my second wish from it....

@@galbert117 You have clearly never seen Aladdin 2! XD "I Wish I had the great Sunken Treasure of blub blub blub blub?! Blub!!!" Genie Jafar: "You probably Wish to breathe now don't you?" "BLUB!!!!" Jafar had teleported him to the Sunken Treasure, at the bottom of the ocean. Yeah, be careful what you wish for.

Assflap dangling

Cool Dude yup

Oh god, the last one is hilarious!

I remember when some powerful witch was trying to escape the group for whatever reason. She went into rat form and quickly scampered into a wall through a small crack\hole in the wall. The mage decided to cast enlarge (or was it dispel?) on the witch just before the tail was out of sight. Yeah, didn't end well for the witch.

@UCH4RodxUQEQ-SSGiB7gl5Fg Indeed it was... the DM just stared at me, like i broke him.

That sounds awesome!

John Witherspoon “So there are a bunch of skeletons climbing up out of the well. The Wizard goes first.” “I cast grease on the well.” “Goddamnit.”

@@SolarFlarehorse hahahaa... That sounds hilarious.....as a player.

Ikr, its so funny how it compliments his blue hair so perfectly

I understood the reference.

@@aglazeddoughnut5250 i was waiting for someone to see the name "Ball Eater" and come to the conclusion that this was a floating brothel.

@@Grey_Shard there's still time

Ahh a fellow door monster friend

Jeff Heun Then they could have gotten into Boat Heaven.

When was his rant? I am currently watching the episode on youtube around the exact moment of the highlight here, but either I missed it or it doesn't happen until around the end of the episode.

Lucien Schlut it’s pretty much like a pathfinder vorpal sword(don’t know if it’s exists in 5e). If you get a 20 on dice and confirm the crit( basically doing another roll and beating the enemy’s AC) you behead him and kill him if he needs his head to survive. For example, an ooze is immune to vorpal

Then the Naheulbeuk game is a path of found vorpals.... In this message lie the worst pun ever, please kill me.

Lucien Schlut vorpal Sword is in 5e, but you have to double crit to cut off the head of a creature.

@@deathcompanybattlebrother Vorpal swords exist in 5e I just think they have DM fiat where if the creature is too big to 1 shot it takes 6d8 instead

Just re looked it up, its immune to the 1 shot if it has legendary actions, is immune to slashing, doesn't have or need a head, or if its too big to have its head cut off in 1 blow from the given weapon. If it fits in those categories it takes 6d8 extra damage instead

Oh my friend welcome to the best thing on the computer, I've been watching since the first show of the first season. It never gets old.

They've got 5 different casters at the table, the amount of magical fire power at that table is staggering!

@@jekubfimbulwing5370 Thought there was 4 magic users at the table?

@@KeiyarlaDraga Caleb, Nott, Cad, Fjord and Jester are all magic users

@@KeiyarlaDraga Caleb = Wizard, Ford = Warlock, Jester = Cleric, Caduceus = Cleric and Nott = Trickster Rogue. Rogue with a half caster subclass. Plus they're only level 7 at this point. It's only going to get worse!

@@jekubfimbulwing5370 Ahhh, I thought that Nott was just a rogue. That shows how much I pay attention to anything.

Minutes yes, however in-game time, by the time they caught up it was over in like 6 seconds

Im so happy that this little video helped you discover CR :) .This actually made my day

@@SpeckoVids I thought you might like to hear that! Happy to brighten your day :3

@discoandherpes if nothing else, i'm glad they brought this to my attention - i was using airships in my fantasy rpg-ing since the start. written rules help.

With the way control water works he could have tried it a hundred times