The Mother of Invention
Whenever you’re making anything you almost always have some kind of constraints. The two largest that come to mind are time and money. We recently started Arc 5 and I’m really pleased with it. Leading into the launch I created some trailers for each group that would be playing in the campaign. I always have a vision of what I’d like to do in my head, but then reality creeps in. I had the idea of full animations for a couple of the trailers, but that was pretty darn unrealistic for a few reasons.
For starters, animation is a tricky thing to get right even if money is no object and you have all the time in the world. A quality animator like Xavier should cost you quite a bit to do something substantial. Since the entire point of this relaunch was to try and make a decent living again doing D&R, this was out. Still art was a bit more feasible, but could still take a bit too long. I finally just buckled down and only focused on what I could do. If I couldn’t do it, I watched Skillshare classes until I could fake my way through.
My point is, constraints don’t have to be a bad thing. Have you ever had a game that you were hosting and you waited till the last minute to plan it out? If you haven’t, I’m sure you’ve heard a story about someone who did. Do you know why so many people do that kind of thing? It’s because many of us work better under pressure or with limits. If you sit down and I tell you to write me a story and all you have is a blank piece of paper, how well do you think you would do? Now if I gave you a few rules like “it has to take place in the future” and “there can’t be any spaceships”, do you start to get a few ideas bubbling?
We’ve done D&R a certain way for so long that I often wonder what it would be like to suddenly be thrust into success. What if we caught on overnight and this Arc, for some reason, just clicked with a lot of people. Would that make the show better or worse? I don’t really know, but I don’t think I would like to work with a committee of people on a project. The more money gets thrown into something, the more people feel as though they have to have input and control. If Amazon bought D&R next week and hosted us on their site, to some extent, it wouldn’t be our story anymore. I love working with friends, but people who just see this as a job? No thank you.
In the last year, I have read a lot of Reddit threads and comment sections about gaming systems. Time and time again I see things like “If I had Critical Role money my game would be that good too”. I somehow doubt that. If you are good at what you do, you can make almost anything work. I have met some truly talented game masters and players that have no money for minis and books but still manage to create stories that will last a lifetime to the people who were part of that game.
If you are reading this and have always wanted to try hosting a game, but thought you needed a lot of props or books to do so, just stop waiting around. Money should never be a barrier to keep you from telling a story.