Writing Out An Absent Player's Character - Vox Machina, Ep. 37 | Critical Role Demystified 

Have you ever had to write out a player character after the player had already left the campaign? How did it go?

I always had my own reasoning of understanding for grog knowing the runes. They are shapes. And when lit up, they make Colors. Those are Grog's two area's of expertise.

"...and - now this is important - he's being respectful of the character." I think more important, he's being respectful of the player. Even after all the things they went through on and off screen, in front of and behind the scenes, Matt still respects Orion enough to do this for him.

I love how Matt handled Tiberius' departure with such grace. Definitely a model to follow.

Definitely a great scene saying goodbye to Tiberius. Especially combined with their final goodbye near the end of the campaign

Saying Goodbye. My Adventure League Dragonlance campaign hit the wall two months ago. They were in the final chapter and maybe had 3 big fights ahead of them. But work schedules destroyed the group. When figured it would be sometime in September, before we could get together again, the group was sad and wanted a conclusion. Some one said just write an epic ending for most of the group, so I communicated with them and killed off 3/4ths of group. The last gamer is still trying to write her epic conclusion. So that is one way to say goodbye. My group lost a player to Covid. He was 26. There is an empty chair. There are dusty dice. There is a toy unplay with. There is a friend gone. Good bye [Name with held.]

I swear at 1:45 I thought you were going to say "for instance, they aren't keeping good notes, and that's where today's sponsor comes in, World Anvil"

So fun fact, the comics revealed that crystal they gave to the Clasp is a Threshold Crest shard that the dragon Skysunder used to travel between Exandria and the Plane of Ice. They got it from her during their Winter's Crest game in Westruun.

I also partly think what the rest of the party said was being said to Orion as a player as well. They enjoyed their time together and will miss him.

And there it is. The first Sun Tree interaction. The next one will be in my Top 3 moments of all time

In retrospect, i took this fro granted, but... thees videos really ARE educational. You really ARE using theese episodes to teach us. Which is impressive

I’ve got to say that Mercer’s handling of writing Tiberius out was way more mature and healthy than the way the campaign that I’m in. In ours, the player got kicked and the team ended up robbing his mansion because he had an ancient artifact that he pocketed and never let the group have access to it because he wanted to be the most important guy on the team. He would also use his character to “punish” ours for disagreements outside of the campaign and when he was asked to stop he called the DM, who had been his friend for years, a slur. That’s pretty okay with us though. Sometimes being petty is cathartic.

I only just now got the lute playing joke. When I watched the episode on the weekend just gone, I thought it was a dig at Scanlan and how being a bard is no way to make a living. But the way you pieced your review together, and reminded us of the state of Desmond's hands, that now I understand the rest of the party's reaction. Vex! That was cold. I love even more now that Vax threw her under the bus with publicly announcing the matching of the money from Uriel.

I'm pretty sure that one of Tiberius's items appears much later in the story. In the final arc, the hammer they find chained to the forge.

I think the only other voice for Sun Tree, outside Matt, is Matthew McConaughey

Matt did a wonderful job sending off Tiberius here! Like you said, he did it respectfully and with a great deal of grace! Thanks for sharing your story as well. That certainly is a difficult situation. I wish you all the best in reaching closure.

Crazy that I found Vox Machina and this channel a few weeks ago and I've overtaken your recaps. I found your video on where to start and jumped in. I think when this series acts as a great companion guide. Good stuff!

this Tiberius scene was perfect, and knowing what we are going to get soon with him is almost bitter sweet. "I encourage peace" i also feel, that in a way, this was also the cast saying goodbye to not just the character....it was a deeply personal moment disguised behind a dnd screen imo

glad you highlighted that Percy/Grog joke, that was perfect :D

This is a good channel. This is a good series. I like Mike.

I wish I could support the patron. Honestly all the best with that you deserve everything that’s coming and more. Fantastic videos every single time. You’ve taught me so much about being a DM and I always look forward to future videos

New DM here. Finally convinced my closest friends to play with me, upcoming Saturday will be our.. 10th session? I came up with a system /because/ it's always so difficult to get everyone gathered. (We're virtual, I'm Euro, along with one more, the rest are scattered in the US) My system is (And it does have a story) they were all sacrificed during the first session. (Long story short, kidnapped by pirates to work on the ship. They wake up on the ship, hear a commotion, it's not pirates but cultists that killed everyone. Anyone who rolled high enough got glimpses of seeing the party being sacrificed, then themselves. Then, they wake up, and are back to waking up on the ship. A commotion, but this time it's the pirates and the 'normal' story continues.) They do notice an odd tattoo flashing, before it disappears. Everytime a player can't make it? This symbol 'takes' them. It's magical, giving them a sense of, oh, they'll be back. Mostly a 'Who? I didn't know they were here' Just in case. One player ended up showing up halfway through the session, flash, tattoo symbol and voila, there they are with everyone else. Convinced two more friends to join, flash, just showed up during camp time. It allows me to bring in anyone from anywhere, and have a reason as to why they're gone. The truth? They've been marked by Bane, the Strafe Emperor. When they're gone, they're taken to .. 'somewhere' in an attempt to break them and trying to twist them into something else. But Bane's playing the long game. (All the players are 'touched' by their gods in some way.) But it's proving to be an amazing system and allowing me a lot of freedom. Also, sorry, I ended up gushing. Enjoyed the video! I enjoy watching these, it helps me as a new DM!

Thank you for another great video!

Thank u for sharing with us what's behind the curtain. That takes a lot & I may not speak for all of us; but we appreciate u ❤

I know this isn't a PF2 episode. Just saying thank you again for covering it.

I recommended your vids to megaphoneman glad to hear you were very gracious and kind to his request to steam them

Love learning how to be better DM, this video helps. thank you also love the kingkiller shirt.

Uh oh. I think you might run out of LoVM thumbnails soon Also they were only at episode 37 of C1 in 2016? It’s a bit surreal when you think about the fact that roughly four years later they’re about to hit 100 episodes in the second campaign before shit hits the irl fan and this week we’re on episode 69 of C3. Fearne was right. Time really is a weird soup

Interesting scene. I always wonder how to approach leaving players in lore. Most of the time, games were not running long enough to really matter, but right now I'm running a very heavy plot game, and everything is interconnected. This is useful advice; thank you.

Thankfully, I have never had to write a character out (or if I did, it's beer so long it hasn't stuck with me). Matt definitely set the gold standard for how to handle a situation like that. Even though Tiberius' player departed under negative circumstances, his contributions to the story were honored.

I had to write out a PC before. He stopped showing up while when the party had a change of heart about aiding Orcs take over a Dwarven capitol. The party ended up getting split up, and his character never knew they had a change of heart. The PC ended up having a pretty epic duel with one of the players before the Siege happened.

16:32 Did... Did you just made a Blindspot joke? If you have... Well played, sir

I would really like to see a tiberius cameo in the animated series just as a fun nod for his fans

I wonder if Orion got to write or have some input on Tiberius good bye speech. I hope so!

I completely forgot about Riskel Raxio, tell you about how boring his fight was and how uninteresting his persona was (even she wasn't aroung much, Tofor made much more impact)

Maybe a coincidence but I've got a strong feeling that Mike used the term schadenfreude at 4:00 because Dimension 20's Mentopolis just came out lmao

we had a problematic send-off before the pandemic. we had a fantastic 5 year game that was very story heavy. and myself and one other player were the biggest story pushers. It was my favourite game I've ever played. and we found out very problematic things about that other player. He was no longer welcome at that table. We tried to keep playing. The character he played had JUST narrowly avoided death so we decided to recon that he didn't make it. The characters mourned the character and the players felt weird about the player. He had been one of my best friends and I couldn't reconcile it. We couldn't figure out how to give a send-off for the characters. That game died after two more sessions of trying. It never got any closure, and I don't have any about the person yet either. I wish we could give that story closure and so does the poor DM who worked so hard on the story. I don't know if we could have sent it off in a way that could have salvaged it. I don't know if we can go back and salvage it now. I wish I had watched CR before and seen how they dealt with it.

had one dm that just had us get locked in crystal. We never figured out why it was happening and tbh it was hard for our characters to not want to break them out. But idk something might be there I would be curious to see someone make something like that work.

Since the beginning of 2018, I've had a solid eight players at my table. A few ROSTER changes, but 8+me down in my basement every Wednesday (covid and IRL baring). Those roster changes were all...issues but I *think* I handled them OK. The first one was like if all Matt's plans were thought out for the Briarwood Arc but all of a sudden Taliesen had left the CR cult and joined the Moonies. I was IN THE MIDDLE of one "use your character's backstory and focus on them for a story beat" DMTube advice bits. He quit our table between sessions and it was completely focusing on this guy's character. Not only did I have to rewrite the session coming up, but ended up writing a completely different story arc as they were completely trapped in my version of the Underdark but the entire next area was based around that guy. I wrote that the NPC who was in the middle of running grabbed him and they vanished. (I have him setup in my head an NPC later.) The second left because she decided her personality didn't fit with the table any longer. She let us know that weeks in advance as were on a break in a Dragon Heist campaign with other PCs that she was leaving after that. When we switched back to mine, we also had a player who joined for awhile, then left for work reasons. Between those last two, the first one was a bard, so I RP'd her character being invited to go on tour with a musician she revered. The second just yeeted and I brought her back much later as an NPC min-BBEG. Both (former) players enjoyed what I'd done with their PCs.

I had a situation once, where two people left my group because of personal drama, I tried to create something like that. One PC just rediscovered her father ingame and redeemed him from evil when the private drama between her and me hit the fan. So she and her boyfriend left the group, but I was open to resolve this issue and have them return. So I created the ingame narrative, that her PC and her boyfriends PC leave the group to accompany the father to face justice. The problem was, that the two didn't take it as intended as a way to return after we solve our issues. They took it as me writing them out and deciding for them that their characters go into exile. It made our private drama worse and the players never returned and the drama strained the atmosphere in the group that much that it dissolved a few weeks after that.

I'm knee-deep in the suck of C2's Rumblecusp arc--It is a good suck, the PCs are having a bad time but the Actors are eatin' good--and the first lesson here is quite interesting as I'm currently watching the cast recover from an unplanned 4 month hiatus.

Trap reference: 19:46

Joke rolls can be fun but also I think it's fun to say "I the player noticed this, but another person's character made the observation" For example my bf and I are in a game where he is playing a wizard and I'm playing a sorcerer. As players, I'm the one taking notes, keeping the map, and calling out patterns, but I'm character it's always the wizard. We joke that I (the player) am really taking his (the characters) notes. And when I the player notice a thing because I have notes, even if I the player say it out loud, we all pretend it's insight from his wizard because my character is as dumb as grog.

I had a weird transition that was involved in players leaving a campaign. We started a new campaign with 4 players. After the 4th session, when they'd finished a small story arc, one player announced at the end of the session that he didn't plan on coming back, because the game was too chaotic due to what some of the other players do (he didn't blame them personally, but it just wasn't working out.) Another PC decided that her character wouldn't continue with the party without the first PC, so she decided to write out her character and roll a new one. Another player decided to do the same, since his character was basically a joke character to begin with. This meant that there was only one character that would be the sticking around. I decided to narrate a short epilogue about what happened to the 3 retiring PCs, and have the campaign pick up after a time skip in a major location that the remaining PC had already been headed to already. The first session back, that player couldn't make it, so I ran a shorter introductory session for the 3 new characters (we'd picked up a 4th player). After that session ended, the missing player told me via text that he wouldn't be able to continue playing because of his work schedule. Ultimately, I decided not to do another epilogue, since his character had only been around for 4 sessions, none of the other characters knew who he was, and the player wouldn't see it. Seeing as how I'd basically had to restart the campaign from scratch with 2 new players and 4 completely new PCs, I think it was the right decision. Not saying it's what's right for everyone, but it made sense in the moment.

God, I really love your explanation of how Matt handled Tiberius's departure, and thank you for sharing your experiences with departing players and how DMs should handle it. I was a player who left a game due to interpersonal conflict and it would have been nice to hear about my character getting a send off like this. Unfortunately that didn't happen, that was the last campaign I played in that I felt had good party dynamics, a good DM and was actually long running; haven't been able to find anything like it since and I so desperately want it. I'm not gonna act like I did nothing wrong and didn't contribute to the falling out, but there were a lot of things that might have turned out differently had communication about problems been a lot better, there were some outside game issues that got brought up in the falling out that I wasn't even aware were grudges because no one talked to me about it. But I found out later from one of the few people who I'm still friends with from that campaign that my character just basically up and disappeared. No farewell, no send off, just suddenly plucked from the campaign. Then he got dropped in later as an evil character that the party had to fight and I got killed by the player who had been holding a grudge against me because he didn't get to kill my (evil) character in a Lovecraftian one-shot we played, as if it was *my* decision to have his wisdom drop to 0 because of a bad roll. Needless to say, hearing that just kind of rekindled some of the resentment I had from being ousted from the game *and* my friend group.

I might be crazy, but I read the lock puzzle situation completely different. First off I do feel for Liam, the whole situation was terribly confusing. What I see is that Liam tells Matt that he wants to try to disarm the trapped two locks that say “no” next to them. Laura, Ashley, and Sam are begging him to just try to continue to unlock the three locks that say “enter” next to them, since he already unlocked the first lock and it was fine. Then when he does unlock those three locks, Laura and Ashley tell him to just try pushing the door open. Liam seems skeptical because the two “no” locks are still trapped. Ultimately he decided to listen to them and push open the door without disarming lock 2 and 4 which were revealed to be false locks. Laura, Ashley, and Sam were right about the solution as far as I can tell. Travis keeps telling him to disarm the trapped locks, I can’t tell if this is because he thinks that’s correct or if he’s trolling Liam. I think a bit of both. This really doesn’t matter haha I just feel like I’m missing something after watching the recap of that scene.

I always wondered if Matt was planning on having the Vesteges be the items Tiberius was looking for. ??? how could Tiberius have been alone for a week if Pike was at Greyskull as well? this is likely just me but, what if Matt put Alura & Kema as a cupple as a sutlb dig at Tiberius' crush on Alura.

I just wanna say that I thought Liam was doing a fantastic job with the lock trap/puzzle. The rest of the players were being TERRIBLE help. Pushing him to do the wrong thing multiple times and even confusing him unnecessarily. Really ticked me off the whole time watching because it was the one time where Liam was the one not being an idiot to the parties dismay yet they didn’t reward him for that at all

Yippee

I still miss Tibs :( (I do not miss Orion, just Tibs)

In an alternate universe the campaign mythic artifacts the vestages of divergence could have fit quite will with tibs goals He could have been (or the library he found them in) a way to guide the players to the location of said artifacts.

How did I go this whole time not recognizing Dr. Dransle is Dr. Dre? Or did I just forget? Idk. But damn lol. Also, while I'm commenting anyway... Travis definitely still does joke rolls and just nods at it or whatever, even in c3. I've noticed him do it a lot.

The cast's reactions to 'seeing' Tiberius again is what always proved to me that Orion left on at least somewhat amicable terms. Laura's always been one to wear her heart on her sleeve, and the way she reacts when she hears Tiberius's voice is... too genuine. I can almost always tell when someone is acting (high Insight I guess), and I'm almost positive her reaction, well, wasn't.

I think that writing out a character by simply killing them is the cheap and unfulfilling way. DMs have the ability to come up with whatever they want - why not be creative about it? Sure, not every character's departure needs to be Matt Mercer level, but at least some creativity should be expected, if for no other reason than it's more satisfying to the players.

I feel Laura/Vex's "probably not lute playing" comment is a good example of a joke that might've been offensive in another group or context but was handled well by the cast. The humor comes more from everyone else's cringe reactions that Vex would say that (along with Vex/possibly Laura instantly giving a "did I really just say that?") look, along with (not shown in your clip) Matt improving Seeker Assum holding back laughter under his breath while everyone else is stone-faced. It's like you describe Scanlan's sex jokes, the humor is at Vex's expense here and none of the cast seem uncomfortable. I'm not saying this is license to make potentially ableist jokes at your games, I just wanted to point out an example of these actors handling the situation well. Even when Grog's joke roll was rewarded, Travis makes sure to phrase the results in a Grog way: "This room doesn't like beein' looked at." Matt giving Laura guaranteed info through a whisper is something that'll come back in a BIG way in a couple of episodes. I love that moment, and love how the animated show handled it. Your "funnel where players can't do anything" comment is an issue I have with a MUCH later Vox Machina battle. Without spoiling too much, it takes place entirely underwater, which makes Percy almost useless since he obviously can't shoot his guns. Matt Mercer is an amazing DM but if you've got a gun-based party member, I wouldn't throw them into a fully underwater, long boss battle without giving them some kind of enchantment that lets them still do their thing.

So i just finished the fight, and i thought it was boring and more like a "scuffle" than a fight. I had the thought that i was thinking that because im exhausted from work, but i feel a little better now hearing that more people than me didnt like it either😂 it was a short fight with nothing happening the whole time. Just not very engaging to listen to lol

Is it wrong to say Orion Acaba.....? Not trolling, dead serious.

My God, if I was Orion I don't think I'd have the willpower to keep living. To know that I did something so dumb, and having it cost me the wild success of Critical Role, would literally kill me.