While I did not watch or follow it, I am familiar with Critical Role’s phenomenally successful live stream Vox Machina like most gamers. Amazon Prime’s animated adaptation promised to bring the familiar characters and adventures to a different screen while remaining faithful to its light-hearted but adult premise.
I find using the term “adaptation” strange. It acknowledges that what works for a Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) live stream may not work for an animated series. They are different media.
For example, D&D’s combat mechanics have always been abstract, focusing on die rolls and points systems to represent to tos and fros. Any narrative is emergent, like a lucky high dice roll or a string of unlucky low ones. D&D’s mechanics for hitting secret weak points or fighting internal struggles, both present in the show, are absent or poor.
The enjoyment of D&D comes from the interplay between friends sitting around a table. The players inject modern attitudes and sensibilities into a medieval-like fantasy world that lacks real repercussions for the players, if not their characters. D&D allowed players to be superheroes before superheroes were cool.
Unlike traditional media, D&D players save the world not because the story demands it but through agency and collaborative story-telling. While D&D’s designers biased the mechanics toward the players, failure is often only a single dice roll away. Real-life intrusions also mean players sometimes need to be absent, like Pike’s pilgrimage.
That said, Vox Machina‘s live stream was always partially scripted. Preparing songs or inter-player interactions is, otherwise, difficult.
These factors put the show The Legend of Vox Machina (or just Vox Machina) in an enviable and challenging position. Enviable because its huge audience will enjoy the new perspective on familiar characters and events. The group’s adventures already contain narrative highs, twists and lows.
However, its position is challenging because combat in most media is a narrative tool, not the central focus as in D&D. Narrative twists in D&D, like betrayal, need to be simple and telegraphed to see them amongst distracting banter. Players relish tropes at the game table that can be tired and overused in traditional media.
On the whole, Vox Machina delivers. The players, an extended “five-man band”, work through two story arcs, with the Briarwood arc being the longest. There are enough turns to keep the audience guessing and subtle nods to the live stream for long time watchers to feel nostalgic, like problems with opening doors.
Vox Machina has had to divest itself of anything potentially trademarked or copyrighted. Gone are the signature D&D spells and abilities and Scalan’s lewd songs. However, the show suffers little for their loss. Divorcing it from pop culture and D&D’s rules make the show more accessible and timeless. Compressing forty hours of D&D down to six also forces the show to focus.
The main problem with Vox Machina is its contemporary fantasy animations, like Arcane, offer far deeper thematic treatment. While humanizing the Briarwoods and Percy dealing with the overwhelming desire for revenge are notable, the show’s roots in D&D keep it superficial. It mainly falls back on the milquetoast “strength of friendship”.
Vox Machina’s D&D roots also constrain character development. Percy’s revenge arc and a short, shallow romantic plotline notwithstanding, the characters exist as escapist fantasy – the tabletop equivalent of sports stars – and not tools in a storyteller’s toolset. Other tabletop role playing games have better mechanics to capture and tell these stories.
However, Vox Machina heralds a new acceptance of tabletop role playing games like D&D. Gone are the 1980s when special interest groups ignorantly decried it as a bastion of satanism and witchcraft. Several unmemorable D&D movies came and went. With the increasing “nerdification” of popular culture, D&D has gone from lounge rooms to Twitch streams to standing shoulder-to-shoulder with more accepted media.
As someone that has enjoyed tabletop games for over thirty years, I would have loved to share many of my adventures. While many fantasy tabletop adventures resemble Monty Python more than Tolkein and science fiction tabletop adventures resemble Douglas Adams more than Asimov, they are still communal experiences in popular culture.
Vox Machina gets to the heart of what makes D&D great. It is not using signature spells or characters from published settings. It is channelling the camaraderie and humour of friends sitting around a table without degenerating into farce. Vox Machina teases fourth wall breaks without doing so, having fun without self-deprecation.
Vox Machina is a good show and a great adaptation. Its D&D roots both propel it with momentum and enthusiasm and constrain it from anything too deep. Existing fans will find it enthralling, non-fans possibly less so, but its fast pace and accessibility will enamour it to many.
The Single Player 