Today or tomorrow might see a double post day. Look on it as making up for no post yesterday. Which means I skipped day 8 of RPGaDAY2019.

In the meantime you have a post for Day 9 to suffer. And the theme/inspiration for today is…

This is a toughie. Critical can be interpreted a few ways. It can be used negatively, saying something is bad. It can mean something is of importance. Or finally it can be giving judgement or an opinion.

So I’m going to try and give an answer for each definition below.

Negative – I’m going to be unpopular for this one. My criticism is the likes of Critical Roll with the voice actors, or the one on Caffeine which hired actors that are good at improv. Whilst this may make good viewing, in my experience I don’t think this gives a realistic view of an RPG game. Not everyone does the voice, feels confident to do them, or are that “expressive” or hamming it up. And by that I mean the majority of players.

Important – this is probably the one everyone will go with for their entries for today. It’s the easiest of the three definitions. I’m going to choose a category of magic items for my important. I’m running a campaign that is at sea and island hopping. At some point the adventurers will end up having to go underwater. Maybe visit some merfolk, explore a wreck, or have to deal to rescue some-one from the sahuagin.

However they end up on the sea bed my adventurers will need some way to breathe underwater. This is where magic items that allow them to breathe underwater are pretty critical to their mission. These items could be manta ray cloaks or helms of underwater action. Possibly pressure capsules, or potions of water breathing.

Without these magical items the adventurers would drown, or worse not get to experience the underwater world. That makes them critical in my opinion.

Opinion/Judgement – this is probably the easiest one of these for me. So far after the sessions where I have been the DM, I have written posts that give my opinion/judgment on how I think the session went. In these posts I try and be honest and reflect on the session. These are notes for me to help me improve as a DM.

Ok not a great post. But hopefully though provoking.