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"Talks Machina #8: 'Raishan'" (TMx08) is the eighth episode of Talks Machina.
Laura Bailey, Taliesin Jaffe, Marisha Ray, and Travis Willingham discuss "Raishan" (1x80) with Brian Wayne Foster.
Q&A[]
Question 1: How exhausting was this episode for you?
- Marisha: I was tired. (Everyone laughs)
- They all agree that they thought the party was meeting it's end, noting that it may have been the closest they'd ever gotten. Marisha and Taliesin both express that it may not have been a total party wipe, but they had felt that only a few of them were going to survive.
- Travis: I just kept thinking, 'if all these squishy motherfuckers die, I'm just gonna walk out and start a new kingdom to myself.'
Question 2: From Nick Maguy on Facebook: Vox Machina tried to kill 2 ancient dragons in the same battle. I don't have a question, I just wanted to point that out. #askingforaTPK
Question 3: From bowl full of jelly (@JoshistheBatman): My butthole is still puckered. How realistically afraid of a TPK were you guys? I definitely didn't stress cry.
- The host reveals that according to CritRoleStats, it was accurately, statistically, the closest the party had come to a TPK, with 8 unconscious knock outs this episode alone; Vax has been unconscious 9 times, a third of those happening in this episode, Vex has been unconscious 10 times, 3 of which in this episode. Another fact given from CritRoleStats, is that the whole 15 round, 90 second encounter that started with Thordak and ended with Raishan lasted six hours, forty-two minutes, and twenty-one seconds in real life.
- The death totals, including pre-stream, come to: Grog with 2, Percy with 2, Vex with 2, Pike with 1, and Scanlan with 1. This leaves Keyleth and Vax as the only two party members with no deaths.
- Marisha: "Well, don't know what those Water Ashari are about, there's still time."
Question 4: Going back a few episodes, Michelle de Marée (@libertinian) asks: Would any of the other VM members have let Raishan finish whatever ritual she was preforming on/with Thordak?
- Travis: Hell to the yes, hell to the yes! I even asked Liam, like 'don't you want to hear what she-' and he was like 'no'. I wanted to hear it! Yeah, a hundred percent yes.
- Laura and Taliesin both agree that they would've too, Taliesin in the sense of searching for an open opportunity of advantage against her.
- Travis: See, I'm also of the opinion of when Matt writes this crazy stuff, cause he's such a fantastic storyteller, like yeah, I wanna see what he crafted, I wanna see the like terrible...
- Marisha counters that she didn't believe any good could come from letting Raishan complete the ritual, though Taliesin points out that perhaps they're worse for not knowing what's coming. This shifts into a quick back and forth to theorize what Raishan is attempting, whether it be to reincarnate Thordak or simply speak to his dead body. The only conclusion they come to is that Raishan is definitely waiting with more surprises.
Question 5: From Allen Devich (@AllenDevich): I mean. Their gonna loot it though right?
- A very quick and resounding 'yes' from the players, Laura very excitedly remembering the piles of gold just sitting in the lair. The party wants to aim for an obscene amount of money to support a very comfortable lifestyle, though Travis does point out that they've already reached a pretty comfortable level of wealth after finding the gold and platinum in previous episodes, suggesting that finding the means to transport the new findings to Whitestone may not be all that worth it, or feasible.
Question 6: From A Musing Kat (@KatMusing): Who did you guys think you were going to lose for good this fight?
- Laura admits that she thought Vex or Scanlan, especially when Scanlan got frozen as she had forgotten Pike's extra spell in her necklace. When Pike went down, Laura was sure Scanlan was gone.
- A special shout out is made to Sam's line: "I died as I lived: hard."
Question 7: From Aki (@MsWHITEnBYAKUYA): Question for Laura and/or Liam: what was jaegering for Pike during the rivivify spells like?
- Laura: It was stressful! It was stressful-well, the whole time it was stressful, because like, all we wanted to do was do what Ashley would've wanted us to do, you know, so thankfully, she was texting in after like ten minutes into the episode like, "DO THIS!!" So that was going on, but I was just, I mean, it was just like a giant clusterfuck. I had just papers everywhere, I didn't know which one was mine and which one was Pike's. {Taliesin: You never want to tell your friend you killed their character} No! I was freaking out that Pike was going to die. Like you can't; you can't.
Question 8: From Amelia Burke (@Lark420): We saw that Ashley was messaging Laura at the end. Did what Pike said during Scanlan's rivivify come from Ash, or Laura as Pike?
- Laura: So, so Scanlan--Ashley went, 'the letter!', or--he had said, they were texting, 'The letter!' And I had never seen the letter, cause Ashley's the only one who's read it, and so, Sam passed over his phone--I'm so pissed that I didn't hijack his twitter while that was happening--but he passed over his phone with the letter, and it all was happening so fast, I didn't get to read any of it! And then, like, I was about to just say something, cause I'm like, 'okay, the letter, sure,' and then Ashley texted "I can't raise Kaylie alone!" And it was like, 'okay, yeah, that's what I'm gonna say.'
Question 9: Travis, how frustrating was this fight for you? You're melee based, Raishan is flying around everywhere, you ended up administering a lot of potions.
- Travis: I did, yeah. I was like Nurse Grog from World War Two.
Question 10: Is Grog ever going to invest in other forms of weaponry, like throwing spears.
- Travis: No, I don't think so. I think it's important that Grog doesn't move around too much either, because he does-he deals so much damage. And I've had javelins, we had the lightning javelin, and it works every once in a while. I still have one javelin in the bag of holding that I haven't used. But I feel like it balances him out, not being able to go just like "woo" [while making a jumping motion with his hand] to the other side of the map like right away. It is frustrating, but it also forces you to be creative in your placement, because--You always hear Taliesin, who is smart about saying 'we're clumping up' or 'we're lining up' or whatever. So you have to look at the map, where is everybody, where's the empty space. And then my reach is just kind of crap, so you know, I think being limited to that is good. Plus, also force me to like keep an eye on other characters, which works for the story too, cause Pike was right there and she went down, I was the person.
Question 11, to Travis: What's something you really wanted to do this episode but couldn't?
- Travis: Make Laura reroll a character. (Laughter)
Question 12: From Dominique Waller (@denimknightmare): Marisha, how guilty does Keyleth feel that because of her want for revenge, she almost got all of her friends killed?
- Marisha: From a character perspective, it's clear. I mean, I know a lot of people, I think, in their own headcanons had a problem with the way that I chose that, but I mean, Keyleth did literally exactly what she said she was going to do in that war room a few weeks earlier. I've had several conversations and I've been thinking about the conversation with Grog too, and Grog told Keyleth that 'when the time is right and you want to unleash on her face, we'll be right there behind you.' And so, in that time, you know, and people have to remember that we're trying to keep in the mind frames of our characters, so in that time, Keyleth runs in, sees dead Thordak, goes 'which way did Raishan go', Vax went that way (points randomly), I went 'cool, thanks,' and went. So, of course in hindsight and retrospect, Keyleth is going to feel massively guilty, because--it's Keyleth, that's her thing. But um, Marisha doesn't feel that guilty, sorry guys!
- It's brought up that Marisha acknowledged the rash decisions by Keyleth in the episode, Marisha is conversely thinking of the rash decisions and personal challenges other characters had made, as well as what other characters were doing in that moment.
- Taliesin: I was gonna say, you're only the third of us to screw everyone over by running into personal endeavor.
Question 13: From aisle5 on Reddit: Taliesin, Percy has recently had an unfortunate string of weapons breaking in really bad moments, does this weigh on his conscious or does he think of it as acceptable risk?
- Taliesin: It's interesting, because he doesn't blame himself when they break, at all. It's not his fault, it's just bad luck, even though it's entirely his fault. (Laughs) Yeah, he hasn't taken any of that to heart, other than getting really, really frustrated at his tools and feeling like he needs to-he'll probably upgrade something while there's breathing room of any kind. But it's part of the fun of that kind of character, that everything can go horribly wrong so quickly.
- He mentions that every now and then, he'll get texts from gun experts who try to rationalize the weapons Percy uses, to no avail as the guns Percy uses are akin to very early technology that rarely actually killed its opponent.
- When asked about the upgrades, Taliesin admits he hasn't fully figured it out, but they're meant to 'streamline the character', as opposed to making him more powerful.
- Taliesin: He's got a much clearer idea of who he wants to be, and one of those things is he wants to stop relying so much--he wants, especially in combat, he feels like he's relying too much on things he can't control and is very much about the idea of creating bubbles of control. So a lot of it will be like, 'oh look at this weird little magical thing that does this for me, well we can't have that anymore, I don't understand how that works, get rid of that.' It's a lot of like, 'if you can't explain to me how it works, I want it gone.'
Question 14: Xenokaos on Reddit asks: How do you feel about Sam not using the flute sooner?
- Laura: Oh, you know, we all survived.
- Taliesin: I'm so pleased to have something to yell at him about.
- They all agree that it would have been great if Scanlan had used it just a little bit sooner, due to how long it took to take effect. When asked to clarify whether they meant sooner as in during the Thordak fight or sooner in the Raishan fight, Travis reflects that if they'd used it during the Thordak fight, J'mon probably wouldn't have made it in time before Thordak flew to his lair.
- When asked whether they thought Sam was waiting for a specific trigger, Laura feels Sam just wasn't going to use it, while Marisha feels he was saving it for a Hail Mary, which the fight clearly was.
- Taliesin: It's interesting sitting next to him, cause I always get this like interesting mix of understanding of like, seeing how deeply he understands the game versus how deeply he does not understand the game on any fundamental level...He's like 'no, no, I'm gonna save this for an emergency; what's an emergency look like?' It looks like that. 'Noo, that can't be right,' and just keeps playing.
Question 15: Would Laura ever play a bard?
- Laura: No, well, Sam is just so fast with how fast he makes up songs. I couldn't do that. [Host: He makes them up in the car, right?] I think he thinks about them while he's pooping. I think he like fully...plans out songs.
- She also reveals that she wrote another poem for him, one that she had thought up after the fight in the City of Brass: Have you heard tale of Scanlan the ass/His rhyming is endlessly crass/But he doesn't just sing/His blade can deal quite a sting/Just ask that old blowhard in Brass.
Question 16: Do you wish that J'mon Sa Ord had been able to do more?
- They all say yes, mentioning how hard they'd whiffed with the 3, 2 and 1 rolls and only 27 points of damage in the entire encounter. Taliesin expresses the hope that maybe J'mon will feel bad about it and owe them a favor down the line, even though it seems unlikely.
Question 17: From Nikhil D. (@Aeriqui): Laura, do you think coming back from death again is going to cause any lasting psychological damage for Vex?
- Laura: Ohhhh. I think she's gonna have an intelligence around Grog's now. Like just a few little wires crossed. (Laughs) Uh, I don't know, I haven't thought about it yet, but...oh man, shit I guess that would do something to you, dying a couple times, huh. Everything kind of just happened so fast that last episode, and by fast I mean three hours of me just laying on there unconscious, basically.
Question 18: From Catherine Grimes (@catsgrimes): Taliesin, how did Percy feel at watching Vex die (luckily briefly) for a second time?
- Taliesin: He was basically having a low-grade panic attack because he's one of those people who understood that there is nothing that he could do about the situation. He was watching a situation unfold that he had no control over and couldn't really be helpful on any level. That's why he was just screaming 'Somebody please fix this, this needs to be fixed right now.' And then immediately started doing what he shouldn't have done, immediately just started, instead of shooting the bloody eggs like he should've, freaked out and was just 'Maybe I can deal enough damage to knock her down before anything else awful happens.' He got very sloppy.
- Marisha chimes in that it wasn't that bad of a play, to which Taliesin counters that it wasn't the right plan.
- Taliesin: Even in the moment, I'm like 'Do I do the selfish thing or do I do--' The Percy thing would be like 'we take two losses and we kill those two eggs that going to be a problem in ten years.' And instead it was just [mimes turning a gun in a different direction]. It was just a very selfish pull.
- Laura takes the chance to say she did the same with Pike, that despite her party members being hurt, she knew Pike would want to get damage on the dragon. Taliesin concludes that two years ago, Percy would've shot the eggs, noting growth in his character. Or that he's turned into a weak, loving sap, as Travis jokes.
Question 19: From Chrim (@ChrimsonFox): Marisha, how did the magma taste? (Btw, you did awesome in the battle against Raishan!)
- Marisha: (Laughs) So ironic. It tasted of deep irony. Tasted of hubris.
- She goes on to say that they party has talked about how the worst way to die would be unceremonious deaths unrelated to whatever encounter they're in.
- With a decent Athletics score and it only being a six foot gap, the risk wasn't high, and she reveals that Matt had said she only would've need to roll a 1 to fail. She also explains that had she gone unconscious in the lava, two death saving throws would've immediately been lost, with the only chance of survival being another player pulling her out, and her body would've been incinerated with near impossible means of revival. This is the same reason Keyleth pulled Vax away from the lava earlier in the session.
Question 20: ThatGamerGirl on Reddit asks: Travis: as a player, you seem to prefer to act on pure instinct and impulse rather than trying to aim for the "ideal action." Is this merely a means of avoiding meta gaming and staying in the moment or a byproduct of Grog's personality?
- Travis: That is a great question. I mean, I think about meta gaming a little bit,
After Dark[]
Giveaway Winners[]
Gif of the Week[]
Winner: @TheHinduPenguin[]
Prize: A 'How Do You Want To Do This' hoodie[]
-A gif of Laura miming picking her nose and wiping it on Liam's shoulder and the exchange between the two after. It ends with the two laughing.
Liam: What?
Laura: Nothing.
Liam: Did you just wipe your stink on me?
Quotations[]
References[]
Art: