I love that, "The party's paladin, sometimes is just having a sandwich. He's not doing lawful good stuff every second of the day. He's just having lunch."

"No joke can survive session after session...."

Sam Rigel: "Hold my aerated wine."

That is so savage!
Laure: (in the fetal position on the floor)
Matt: (stands up to look down at her) "Vex, you're up next"

This video getting recommended to everyone else at the same time?

Marisha's right 100 percent about the character changing from what you planned to when you actually sit at the table. Much of my pc's are only half molded until you start playing with the party, then they start to take a life of their own.

Its like they always say, "If you want know who someone really is, give them a mask"

Bisected in half is my least favorite way to be bisected

"your chaotic evil character can just have a meal!"
you say that but then why is my chaotic evil dhampir character getting shit from the party for eating people
(love all the points made here)

It was very jarring when Marisha transformed into a mutton chop man 13mins into this video.

Really good to hear someone in Brennan's position talk about roleplay like this.  A lot of the fanbase for D&D streams seem to believe that roleplaying somehow involves downloading a new person into your head.

No.  It's mostly, "Me, if."

It will fascinate me forever that as animals, the same kingdom classification as a cat or bird or fish, we evolved the ability to craft entire realms of fiction from nothing but our minds. To create people and lands that if something happens to, we feel invested enough to be scared for them. It is truly the coolest part about people to me

Paladin opens his lunch: deviled ham sandwich. pulls out butter knife and casts Smite to cut it across the corners.

Oh my   g o d,   Brennan's metaphor of each character being like stained glass that you shine through is just... Fuck, that's on point.

Brennan’s metaphor here about stained glass is absolutely amazing, and has changed the way I think about characters and stories and worldbuilding

I have a rule for anyone who wants to play an evil character. "Be evil if you like, but you still need to operate as a party. However that works, whatever the reasoning is, as long as at the end of the day the party will be able to continue onwards? It's fine by me."

I remember the first time it really affected me to enter one of my characters.  I was playing a classic “last survivor of their village” character and he was discussing the events.  Now, this was during a time when I was not sleeping very much, and it was already late.  And between that and not having prepared the details for this part of my backstory, I was deep in a stream of consciousness, to the point of dissociating a little bit afterwards.  Like, I didn’t know I could conjure up those horrors on the fly, and it was unsettling to realize that I had that in me.

Anyway, now I’m running a horror game so being able to chill bones is a positive.

Marisha Ray is such a cool person. Beauregard is my favorite Critical Role character, because of the way Marisha played her. Such an honest portrayal of an “asshole” with a good heart. And the way Brennan (another incredible human being) sits listening, clearly rapt in attention, is delightful. I could listen to these two talk for hours (and have for many years, though sadly they’re rarely together).

One of my favorite evil characters was a Lawful Evil cleric that served the goddess of death. He was a super high Charisma character, and used deception and trickery to manipulate people. He went in to a village and they did something to anger him so he spread rumors that the local lord disliked the party and was planning something against them. He murdered a couple guards in their sleep, raised them as zombies to attack the party in the woods, and then convinced the party that the lord was evil and oppressing the people, so they went in, killed all the guards and the lord, and as they were leaving he just mass raised zombies to attack the town as they left and turned it into an undead ghost town.

Okay so Bill Seacaster is definitely at least inspired by that pirate character. I love that

Whenever someone wants to play an evil character or a loner at my table, I always ask them why. And yes, some people simply want to play a character that is just disruptive to the rest of the group.
Honestly, the motivation for playing my first evil character was to leave my comfort zone. I find it easy to play good and gentle characters, so I wanted to see if I could pull off something entirely different. But I didn't want to play a disruptive character, so I basically made a neutral evil support character. He was an opportunistic manipulator who saw the rest of the party as effective tools in his own quest for status and power. He was nice and charming most of the time, but there were moments when the facade didn't hold up.
I had a lot of fun with this character, but it was scary to me how easy it was to get into this state of mind.