Photo credit to @VHoecake for the awesome cover photo!

Another week, another Thursday. Let’s take a look at the latest episode of Critical Role to see what lessons we can bring to our own D&D games.

– Spoilers for the latest episode of Critical Role ahead –

The more I DM, the more I realize that the most important skills to develop aren’t my prep style or how to develop NPCs and encounters. Those skills are certainly useful, but they aren’t the limiting factor to building a great campaign. Instead, improving my improvisation, story structure, and role playing skills seem increasingly important. Today, I want to look at Critical Role along these axes. But first, a bit of an intro on the framework I’m using for the analysis.

Beat analysis

I recently started reading Hamlet’s Hit Points by Robin Laws. The book breaks down individual moments in a D&D session into beats, which Robin then classifies by their function. For brevity, I’ll list the relevant beat types here:

• Procedural: Party members are trying to achieve a specific goal. This is the main way to move the plot forward.
• Dramatic: Party members are developing some aspect of their character, building relationships, or getting some emotional payoff. This is the primary way to make sure players care about what’s happening.
• Gratification: Party members have a chance to have low stakes fun with no real goal.
• Question: Something unexplained is encountered and the party members are drawn to understand more.
• Pipe: Information that will be relevant for a later reveal is introduced in a way that is hopefully unnoticed.
• Reveal: Questions that have been raised during previous scenes are resolved.

Robin further classifies each beat by whether it resolves upwards (in a positive way) or downwards (in a negative way).

Understanding  these classifications allows us to anticipate what effect a given beat will have on the momentum and direction of the story: procedural beats create forward momentum, dramatic beats make the players more engaged, and the other beats add nuance to the story at the cost of putting plot or character momentum on hold briefly.

Robins’ central thesis is that good D&D sessions are mostly forward moving, with occasional breaks to look around. They alternate between upward and downward beats. Knowing this ideal structure, and having classified the potential scenes our players could encounter, we can better choose what direction to nudge the players towards to improve the quality of the story and the session.

The beats of episode 33

Note: I imagine that Matt has his own process and doesn’t necessarily think in terms of beats explicitly. Any structures found while looking at the beats of Critical Role probably represent an innate understanding Matt has for how to pace a story and throw challenges in front of the players.

The Mighty Nein sees the ocean

Gratification beat. The scene resolves upwards – everything is light and fun.

Getting into the city

Procedural beat. The scene resolves downwards – Jester’s persuasion fails and she has to bribe the guard.

Walking through the city

Pipe beat. The scene resolves downwards – the Lighthouse and several other points of interest are revealed. With no context they raise more questions than answers.

Jester sees her mom

Dramatic beat. The scene resolves upwards – her mom is happy and welcoming and the singing performance goes off well.

Asking Jester’s mom about various adventure threads

Procedural beat. The scene resolves downwards – Jester’s mom isn’t able to provide many answers and only offers further leads and questions.

Revealing that the Gentleman may be Jester’s father

Reveal beat. The scene is mixed. It starts as a very upwards beat and you can see the energy shift in the room. But the scene ends downwards when the Gentleman provides an ambiguous answer to Jester’s message.

Fjord questions the Wharf Master

Procedural beat. The scene resolves upwards – Fjord and Beaux are able to gather a lot of information.

Questioning the Lighthouse matron

Procedural beat. There is a bit of a dramatic beat between Clay and the matron. The scene resolves downwards as the party is only able to uncover additional questions.

Investigating the Wizard’s tower

Question beat. Resolves downwards – everything about the tower is a mystery.

Sharing information and planning next steps

Procedural beat. The beat resolves upwards – this is mostly due to Nott creating a bit of fun with Nugget.

Skew towards down beats

The first thing to notice here is that downward resolutions don’t mean a scene was bad. The scenes I labeled as resolving downward were still engaging and full of laughs. Rather, downward resolutions build tension. They give the players something to look for or want. Because of this, down beats are more likely than up beats to occur next to each other.

We can see this at play in this week’s episode – a lot of plot threads were just resolved and Matt needs to start rebuilding tension. There’s a few down beats in a row, with up beats every once in a while to keep the players engaged and feeling like they’re accomplishing things. We generally want our payoffs to be big and exciting, which means a smaller number of up beats will balance out proportionally more down beats.

I’m interested to see if the skew towards down beats is a general phenomenon. It’s possible that we’re seeing more down beats simply because it’s the beginning of a new arc. But it’s also possible that there will always be more downbeats, since every session needs tension built.

Players identifying the beats

Beat analysis is obviously useful for DMs, who need a simple framework for deciding where to guide a story’s development on the fly. But I think there’s also value for players to understand beats as well.

A common challenge within a D&D session is keeping the pace moving without railroading the players. Like any good story, the heroes are operating on limited information as they figure out what to do next. This process can be slow and messy. The players spend forever interrogating an NPC who doesn’t actually know anything. A bit of uncertainty causes the party to talk in circles while they plan for an upcoming battle.

Good DMs recognize these situations and find a way to provide extra information or force the party to commit and move forward, without directly telling them what to do. But I think part of the reason why Critical Role feels so amazing is that Matt rarely has to do that. It feels like the players themselves have a natural sense of pace and are able to switch between silly interactions, careful planning, and forward action.

This is obviously a complicated skill that the players have developed over years of D&D sessions. But recognizing the different types of beats can help speed along our growth. If you realize that you’re in a procedural beat, you can focus on the goal at hand, cutting back a bit on side jokes and messing with NPCs. When it’s a dramatic beat, you can identify what kind of emotional reaction is the goal and focus your roleplaying towards that.

If all of the players and the DM have a shared vocabulary around story beats, it can help them coordinate in the moment. By realizing what kind of scene is being built, the players can make sure all of their moves are building forward momentum.

I think a great example of this was at the end of the show, when the Mighty Nein was getting back together and sharing what they had learned. Information sharing and planning sessions always tend to be a little slow. Realizing that the energy was down, Nott starts a gratification beat by playing with Nugget. You can see how everyone immediately recognizes what’s happening and even has a sense of how to contribute to the moment. In the span of a few seconds, the energy is turned around and moving forward.

Summary

Breaking your gaming sessions into discrete story beats is useful during prep and at the table. Beats give us a framework to quickly understand what impact a given scene will have on the story, and whether that impact is good or bad. Beats also give us a shared language for understanding the goals and tone of a scene, making sure that all of our moves pull in the same direction.

A few concrete takeaways:

DMs

• In your next session prep, when you outline the possible scenes that your players may encounter, think about what kind of beat each scene represents and whether it is likely to resolve upwards or downwards.
• At the table, when deciding between which direction to nudge the players, pick a beat that you think will add variety to the beats the players have already encountered.

Players

• During the game, whenever the energy of a scene changes, ask yourself what kind of beat you’re entering. Try to match your tone and actions to that beat.

Going forward I think I’ll try to break down the beats of each episode of Critical Role. I probably won’t spend the whole post analyzing it like I did this time, but it seems like a useful thing to continue revisiting!