Force Grey: Giant Hunters - Episode 3

You can watch this episode here.

Ok, strap yourself in. This is a good episode.

The Party

(Chris Hardwick) Whil Wee-Tawn - Sun Elf Wizard
(Ashley Johnson) Dagny Halvor - Half-Orc Cleric
(Shelby Fero) Brawlwin Chainminer - Dwarf Fighter
(Jonah Ray) Joppa - Human Monk
(Utkarsh Ambudkar) Hitch - Human Rogue

Last Time: The group is trying to meet with a sun dragon. There's a frost giant assembling an army of ogres, goblins, and who knows what else.

I still don't know what the heck the NPC's name is. The group decides to head through the swamp. We get some semi-animated willow wisps. I love these little animated things they do with the actual 5e art.

Brawlwin fires off a crossbow bolt at one. She rolls a natural 20. Matt multiplies her damage by two instead of having her roll double dice. Double damage is quintessentially 2e.

The wisps vanish. Huh, I think we edited through some stuff there.

The group continues on and sees what looks like a camp up ahead. The group decides to split up and circle the camp. Splitting the party, crazy.

Whil, Brawlwin and Joppa creep closer and see four camp fires. They hear angry voices chanting. Goblins are dancing around the flames. There's about 9 goblins. There's ogres, too. They're eating people!

There's also a frost giant with long greasy white hair. His torso is riddled with wounds and he has a deformed arm. Matt does an amazing.. AMAZING.. giant voice. Did they tweak the audio to make his voice deeper? Or did he do that on his own? Either way.. epic.

The frost giant is named Zagthos, I think. He busts out a soliloquy and we learn that the frost giant challenged and was defeated by another giant named Dovak. Zagthos is an outcast, so he has gathered other outcasts to his side so they can have revenge.

OK. That was the best roleplaying "performance" I have ever seen in a D&D game. I don't think I've witnessed someone in D&D give an in-character speech that comes even close to that.

It's funny, these shows get me thinking about the game in completely new ways. I've never really thought much about people's delivery at the table.

We bust out a battle map. Wow are we going to have this fight? That's a lot of bad guys.

Whil does it again. Fireball! 26 damage, most of the goblins are dead. We roll initative.

The frost giant chucks a boulder at Whil and does 21 damage. He's got 6 hit points left.

Whil casts lightning bolt and does 27 damage to the frost giant. Hitch ends up taking piles of damage and is barely still standing.

We're flying through combat. Lots of editing. We keep cutting to character sheets and the power that is being used is highlighted. Seems like a good way to get casual viewers to understand the game.

Poor Dagny goes down. There's natural 20's flying left and right. An ogre drops her.

Hitch climbs up the giant's body and attacks - and rolls a natural one. The giant throws him to the ground. Hitch tries to be buddies with the giant but he calls him by the name of the giant who beat him and yikes.. the giant hacks into him. Hitch is able to roll to safety, barely surviving the assault.

Joppa heals Dagny and she's awake. She grabs his cheek and gives it a squeeze. Now they are best friends. 

Whil casts sleep on the giant. It fails its save. The giant collapses on top of Hitch.

The NPC shoots an ogre and kills it. Brawlwin kills the other one.

Hitch stabs the giant from underneath and does piles of sneak attack damage. Hitch is covered in giant blood.

The heroes are victorious. That's where we stop.

Timestamps

(7:10) The giant's speech
(23:49) Hitch vs. the frost giant

Overall

I think this is the best episode of any D&D show I've seen. This was just tremendous. Really great pacing. They trimmed out all of the extraneous stuff and the combat flew by. I think you could show this episode to people who know nothing about D&D and they would enjoy it.

I really think that Matt is helping D&D and RPGs in general. He's giving DMs an example of how to run a game in a way not many try to do, and I'm certain he is getting people to try the game once they watch him.

Honestly, I am really excited to see other DMs use his work as a foundation to branch off and elevate their own styles. It's so nice that we can use each other as a resource to learn new tricks and to figure out what works and what doesn't. Collectively we can all improve now that D&D is something of a "spectator sport."