Critical Role is introducing a new Dungeon Master in its fourth campaign. And he has introduced his own exciting rules for leveling up. No more boring calculations!
Critical Role has dared to make a big change: for the first time, Matt Mercer is no longer sitting behind the game master’s screen in the fourth campaign of the world’s largest role-playing group. Instead, Brennan Lee Mulligan has taken on the role of DM. Of course, this automatically leads to some changes – after all, every game master has their own habits and house rules.
One of these has earned a lot of praise and attention from fans. Maybe it’s also an idea for your own group, regardless of whether you follow Critical Role or not. Mulligan turns the otherwise mechanical and boring leveling up into a narrative masterpiece. How does that work?
Level 3 to level 4 suddenly has meaning
Most DnD connoisseurs are familiar with leveling up: you select the newly unlocked abilities and spells by clicking on them in D&D Beyond (or mark them in the traditional way on a piece of paper, if you still use that). New hit points, new skills from a predetermined pool, and off you go.
DnD does not provide a narrative justification for why the wizard suddenly masters a new spell or why the rogue now causes more damage to mages.
This is exactly where Mulligan comes in with his own leveling method. The gaming group rolls the bonus hit points in advance and prepares several skill options for their characters – but then they don’t actually level up right away.
Instead, the players themselves can decide at which narratively appropriate point they reach their next level and which skills from their class pool they actually choose. Only then do they receive the health bonus. Heroic moments in the midst of utter despair are thus inevitable.
For example, a wizard could unlock a new magical power (i.e., the leveled-up magic skills) out of desperation in a hopeless moment. Or a barbarian could unleash new powers to save a friend in need. This makes more sense atmospherically than “I woke up after a long rest, can endure more, and can now cast spells better,” and is also much more exciting for the audience in a show like Critical Role.
The group does the preparations for leveling up in front of the audience in a separate video, which has attracted many enthusiastic comments.
Link to YouTube content
I love it when game mechanics are integrated into role-playing games
ikeekieeki
What a great idea to make leveling up a story moment. You really have to trust your players for that to work.
PianoMyHeart
Which brings us to the biggest risk: in order to make such moments appropriate and fair, the gaming group needs to have a great deal of trust in each other and should have a keen sense of the overarching narrative. With Critical Role, this is a given, of course, as it is a professional production with veteran actors and improvisers, some of whom have been working together for decades.
At your gaming table at home, it is advisable to discuss this method in detail and establish a few basic rules. For example, that there are time limits.
Or how many characters are allowed to level up in the same battle so they don’t steal each other’s glory. How much freedom of choice do you really allow—can a point be spontaneously chosen in another class, for example? Do you have to commit to certain spells in advance?
Each group has to figure out for themselves where there might be friction and how much clarification is needed. Then this approach could be a wonderful way to escape the dry grind of calculations.
