Hi, my name is Matthew Mercer. I'm a voice actor and the Dungeon Master for Geek & Sundry's
Critical Role, and welcome to this fun video series about tips and tricks for game masters and
dungeon masters alike. Today, I'm doing an FAQ, because I get a lot of questions often over and
over again, and while I'd like to answer as often as possible, it might be easier to put this up as
a video and answer some of them for the foreseeable future.
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Number one, is your Critical Role story a homebrew? Yes! I created it from the ground up,
for better for worse, and I'm still developing it as we continue playing the game. I did borrow the
Dawn War pantheon for it as it was a memorable and relatable pantheon, but there are some
carried-over gods from Pathfinder because it's where we began the campaign in Pathfinder, then
converted over to 5th Edition partway through. It's all homebrew and if time allows me in the
future, maybe I'll put something out for you guys if you want to play around in Exandria, so fingers crossed.
Number two, I see you looking in your app a lot for reference during the game. What app do you
use? I use Fight Club 5 on iOS. It's a free software. It requires a little bit of jiggering to
get it to work. You have to download some files from certain websites and then upload it through
Dropbox onto the actual app, so it's a little involved with the get-go and you have to do some
research on Google to find out how to actually do it, but it's an extremely helpful resource for
quick reference to spells. You can bookmark spells, creatures, abilities, see classes and
racial feats. It's great. So that's been very helpful to me.
How do you make your maps? I start with one-inch-grid easel paper. You can get these giant
pads of one-inch-grid easel paper on amazon.com. Those are great, because you can just go ahead and
tear them off. They're semi-transparent, and then I go ahead and get some Crayola markers and some
colored pencils and I build from there. I usually sketch out on a small scale first just to get the
feel for how the battlefield will look and flow, and then I draw the larger version and fill it out
and use that for the actual game. But there's a lot of great software online that you can create
maps with. You can do things like Photoshop, Campaign Cartographer, and if you play online for
Roll20, there are a lot of great software in those communities that you can ask about that that help
you build your own maps to look really awesome and professional too, so look into that.
Where do you find, or how do you make your playlists for your game? I make them on iTunes and
I pull from many tracks. Mine currently are made up from tracks from Platemail Games, which has a
lot of cool atmospheric and thematic tracks for locations and terrain. I use Midnight Syndicate,
has a lot of great tracks. Incompetech from Kevin MacLeod has a lot of great tracks, and all those
are royalty-free, meaning these are kind of the only ones we were able to use when we started the
stream. Since then, I've gotten permission to use the soundtrack from the PC game Pillars of
Eternity. I've gotten permission to use the Elder Scrolls series soundtrack from Bethesda and those
have all been really cool. You guys won't have to worry about that if you're doing home games. You
can use
You can pull soundtracks from Conan the Barbarian. You can pull in Final Fantasy tracks if you want
to. Anything you want to, but what I do is I break them down into playlists and each playlist is a
certain mood or location, so I have a playlist for small battles, one for big battles, one for boss
battles. I have a playlist for creepy. I have a playlist for
playlist for a mysterious scenario, I have playlists when it's peaceful. I have playlists for
when you are in a town, playlists when you are in a tavern. That way, it's just really easy for me
to just click any one of these playlists for a specific moment. It takes a little bit of setup
and it's a lot of time put into it to make sure you have that layout, but once you have it, as a
Dungeon Master or as a Game Master, it's really easy to go ahead and switch pretty quickly based
on how the scenario's mood and dynamic has changed.
Can I use or incorporate your characters or parts of your world in my campaign? Sure! Yes, please go
for it. I find it flattering. I think it's awesome that you would want to have tie-ins or elements of
your game crossed over to ours. Just be aware that players' actions in our game can sometimes change
the world, so if you want to be playing alongside our campaign, there's always a chance that things
can get weird down the road, so be prepared. If you want to keep it consistent at least, make
things weird on your end as well. I don't know-- depends what the players do. But if time ever
allows, I would love to make a sourcebook, so we'll see if that's ever a possibility if time
lets me. How can I improve my skills as a GM or a Dungeon Master? First and foremost-- it's not
necessary but it's so helpful-- improv classes. You don't have to want to be a performer or an
actor to take improv. It's helpful in so many facets of your life. Just the idea of quick
thinking, of being able to "Yes, and" and work with other people to make fast decisions and listen
very well and to be able to adjust on the fly. It's helpful in everything from business to social
dynamics to so many things, but it tremendously helps for dungeon-mastering or game-mastering your
role playing game. Also, you can look online for great blogs from other Dungeon Masters. If you can
find it, I'd recommend looking up Chris Perkins' DM experience blog for episodes-- you can find
them still, I think. There's some good stuff on there. You can also look at a lot of the really
great real-play shows that are online, like Rock'n'Roleplay, and probably some Acquisitions
Inc. stuff that Chris Perkins himself did at PAX, or you could watch Critical Role! But you can find
a lot of cool little tricks and interesting techniques that different Dungeon Masters use to
make their games immersive, and everyone's different, everyone has their own method, everyone
has their really cool thing they do. So watching them all, you can pick and choose and build your own
cool method.
Final question for this FAQ: How does this random rule or feature work in D&D? Google. Google is
your friend. I know a lot of the rules in the game, but there are also some that I'm even fuzzy
on. If you have any questions or any concerns or anything you're not sure about in the game and how
the rules work, before you tweet it at me, look it up. Put it into Google. You'll find a lot of great
people that have probably asked the same question many times over and a lot of people that are
probably much more alert in the rule system than I am who have answered it. So go ahead and just give a
search out there, find the communities that work out there. Rpg.net is great about that and
Reddit's really great, and get those answers there. And if you're still stumped, then go ahead
and throw it at me. Otherwise, I end up not having time to answer all those tweets and I feel bad.
So, go to Google. It'll help you out.
That's all I've got for this FAQ. I might have another one down the road in the future, depending
on how these questions continue and you guys have really cool things you want to ask, so once again,
thank you for coming by. You can see more of these videos on geekandsundry.com and I'll see you
around soon.