Critical Role does not usually deal with a a lot of permanent character deaths - though in campaign four, that might change!

When it was revealed that Brennan Lee Mulligan was going to be the game master for campaign 4 of Critical Role, I was ecstatic. I loved the games of Dungeons & Dragons run by Matthew Mercer and always wondered who would succeed him. Brennan is, in my opinion, the perfect choice, having run several of my favorite pieces of actual play media, like 'A Crown of Candy' on dropout.tv. His dramatic game mastering is very different, but equally refined and sometimes even more entertaining than Matthew Mercers.

"I've been looking into ways to make character death matter." - Brennan Lee Mulligan in an interview with The Character Sheet on ComicBook.com

In all these glorious announcements, there was a disclaimer that peaked my interest. This new campaign would most likely contain more character death then the audience was used to. Permanent character deaths have been very rare in Critical Role up until now, so I faced this statement with a good amount of skepticism. From other campaigns of Brennan, I am fully aware that he is willing to kill characters if it fits the narrative, but not in the cut-throat way many people seem to have taken this announcement. If you are looking at his quote from the interview above, this is the title they went for to release the interview:

"Brennan Lee Mulligan Talks DELETING Characters In Campaign 4 (...)" - Title of Brennan Lee Mulligans interview with The Character Sheet on ComicBook.com 

In episode 1 & 2 of the campaign, Brennan starts scenes with characters rolling death saving throws. Many fans took this as confirmation for a seeming brutality or deadliness of the campaign. I and some other game masters saw it as a clever sleight of hand, which I am absolutely going to steal for one of my games.

The official character art for Thimble - would Brennan actually have killed her in the first session?

Cheating death the clever way

At around the 2:26h mark in episode 1, Brennan lets Thimble, the character of Laura Bailey, make a death saving throw at the start of a scene. When you roll a death saving throw, you die after three failures and live after three successes (whichever comes first), though a natural 20 and a natural 1 count as two respective successes or failures. She succeeds two times and then rolls a natural one before Brennan lets the group roll for initiative. This means that she is just one bad roll away from death!

With her are Azune, a sorcerer paladin played by Luis Carazo, Teor Pridesire, a paladin played by Travis Willingham and Occtis Tachonis, a necromancer wizard. In the episode, Teor Pridesire wins initiative and heals Thimble after pushing a grate out of the way on a successful Athletics check with advantage. So Thimble barely escaped the claws of death!

Now in theory, this could have gone very differently. What if Thimble failed just one more time before rolling initiative? What if Teor Pridesire failed his roll to push the grate out of the way? What if Thimble was first in initiative and failed her last death saving throw? All these questions make this scene powerful and seem like there was a very tangible chance of Thimble dying. But let us go through these scenarios one by one and see if that is actually true.

1. What if Thimble failed just one more time before rolling initiative? I think that Brennan intended to let the group roll for initiative only if the stakes felt high enough. The first two death saving throws were successes, so there was no need to roll for initiative. He only made that call after the natural one upped the stakes by a lot. I do believe that he would have made that call to roll for initiative at any point where there was risk of character death, not strictly waiting for her third roll.
2. What if Teor Pridesire failed his roll to push the grate out of the way? I do not think that there were many ways for Teor to fail that roll, since Brennan did not announce a DC and Teor rolled with advantage on a +4. The lowest a DC can go in 2024 is 5 (and contrary to popular believe, there is no natural one for skill checks). Teors lowest possible result is also a 5, so it would have been well in Brennan's rights to just let him succeed in any scenario. But to his credit, Brennan is usually honoring the natural 1 & 20's even on skill checks (even if it is not a rule). This one is still up in the air - but a double natural 1 is only a 1 in 400 chance anyway.
3. What if Thimble was first in initiative and failed her last death saving throw? Now this is a more complicated endeavor. I was pretty sure that Brennan would just allow her to delay her initiative, but after researching it, delaying your turn has technically not been allowed since D&D 3.5. Since I played it this way before (and was sure it was a rule), I wondered if Brennan usually plays this by the books - and turns out he also (sometimes) uses this outdated rule, for example in "Escape from the Bloodkeep" and "Fantasy High (Freshman Year)". It is very much possible that he would allow Thimble to delay her turn, but not guaranteed. If he did, this would have given a lot more chances to safe her. The chance of Thimble actually winning initiative was also quite low (even with her high dexterity), with three other players rolling for initiative alongside her.

In his interview with 'The Character Sheet on ComicBook.com', he said "I had no desire to let Laura die in her introductory scene" as well as "The odds were very much still in her favor, that one of the three, one of the four adventurers in the room was going to figure out a way (...)". We have to remember that Brennan tried this scene in a room with 3 potential saviors (the two Paladins had healing capabilities, plus Kattigan Vale by Robbie Daymond as a Ranger, who showed up later). On the other hand, Brennan did instruct all of the players to make backup characters, so even with all of this, we do not know what went through his mind with certainty.

"I had no desire to let Laura die in her introductory scene (...) The odds were very much still in her favor (...)" - Brennan Lee Mulligan in an interview with The Character Sheet on ComicBook.com

Brennan Lee Mulligan is one of the busiest game masters of all time - what can we learn from him?

What can we learn?

If the stakes are high, any roll feels tense, even if the chances of losing are actually very slim. This is especially true if you create scenarios with invisible safeguards. In Brennan's case, he had many levers to make Thimbles death more unlikely, while still making the threat feel real. He would let Thimble roll death saving throws with no help in sight, until there was a failed roll, on which he declared initiative to get the others in the room. If we want to create a scene that feels more dangerous than it actually is, how can we learn from this little sleight of hand?

1. Build invisible safeguards. By revealing information in a certain order and obfuscating chances, you can make players feel in much more danger than they actually are. If you are unsure if a roll should result in a death or not, you can just not announce the DC to give yourself some wiggle room. If you are creating dangerous scenarios, you can build them in such a way that the player characters just "happen to have" the right tools to solve them.
2. Many rolls, but just one success needed. A thing Brennan does (not only do in this scenario) is to have multiple players attempt something with seemingly low odds, but only one of them needs to succeed. In this case, only one of the characters actually needed to go before Thimble to save her - with three players attempting this, the chances were actually much higher than it seemed. In that way, the players feel like they are going up against low odds, while in reality there is little chance of them loosing.
3. The players are the heroes. It is usually bad practice to let dying players get rescued by suddenly arriving forces, since it can feel like you are overextending you powers as a game master to save characters. But if player characters save other player characters, it can feel heroic and earned instead. Using your invisible safeguards in such a way that they come from the players will ensure that their feeling of control stays intact

In 'A Crown of Candy', Brennan had no issues killing off characters (Picture by u/Flightlesshorse)!

Letting go of safeguards

Does Brennan always cheat death in such a way? No, absolutely not! I have seen Brennan kill or attempt to kill characters in full force, like for example in 'A Crown of Candy'. Whenever he feels like a character death would fit the narrative, he starts to play with open cards, announcing DC's and letting go of the safeguards. What Brennan does in episode one of campaign four is a trick, a sleight of hand, that is very effective and clever - but one that only works that often before someone figures it out. You can only do this trick a few times over the course of a campaign before the players (or in this case, audience) start suspecting you, so you better make it count! Doing it early, like Brennan did, is actually a good idea, since you can establish some stakes and the idea of death without actually going through with it.

Even with all of that said, we do not know that Brennan was going to cheat death with 100% certainty - but I think even he would agree that he tried his best (which is very on brand for him). But I do think that, even though he pulled a similar trick in episode 2, we will not see a lot more of this particular trick going forward. Looking at his other campaigns, we will most likely see him lowering and eventually removing these invisible guardrails. If you are interested in reading more of these kinds of articles, check out the rest of my blog!