I saw a great post the other day about how frustrating it is that so much media very narrowly defines self-sacrifice as one character dying for another, and it reminded me of how much I adore Critical Role for cheerfully subverting that idea again and again and again. Don’t get me wrong, character death is certainly possible with a bad dice roll, but whenever things are controlled by some form of narrative, there’s a clear appreciation for scenarios that don’t involve killing off characters for angst or drama.
I mean, the obvious example is the perfect setup for a tragiheroic character death: Vex gets caught in the detonation of a trap in the tomb of the Raven Queen’s champion and is killed instantly, and her brother, distraught, demands that the Raven Queen take his life in exchange for hers. Raven Queen agrees, Vex starts breathing again… but Vax is still alive. The DM getting creative with what it means for someone to sacrifice their life (surprise! you’re the new champion of the Raven Queen and she’s got a series of creepy and ominously ill-defined jobs for you!) meant that we got a series of fascinating character arcs unspooling all at once.
Keeping away from the self-sacrifice = character-death idea also helps you avoid fridging characters. Percy’s backstory features his sister Cassandra helping him escape the Briarwoods… and getting shot down in the process. But when the party returns to Whitestone, they discover that Cassandra is not only still alive, she’s been working with the Briarwoods to dismantle the townspeople’s attempts to revolt out of a complicated combination of supernatural persuasion and her lingering guilt and rage over Percy having left her to die. The result—Cassandra’s sacrifice taking a very, very different form than the “died to save her brother” narrative—is a million times more interesting than yet another angsty backstory death.
You can apply this stuff to make villains more memorable, too. Delilah wanted Sylas back, so she raised him as a vampire in exchange for a different form of self-sacrifice: the work they’d do together in order to bring Vecna back into the world. The sacrifice can go way, way, way beyond the personal, to the point where there are bodies literally covering the walls.
Or you can have a heroic character refuse an act of self-sacrifice. Vex refused Sondur’s offer to make her into something stronger in order to protect her friends because she wasn’t willing to give up what he requested in return. She knows it was the right thing to do, but the guilt of that decision lingers and has done a lot to shape her character.
You can have a self-sacrifice scenario where the person in question knows that there’s no positive result but is willing to do anything to avoid the negative. When Allura’s teleportation circle malfunctioned, Kima knew that following her was probably not going to bring Allura back and could’ve resulted in both of their deaths, but she wasn’t going to leave her. And again, that act of heroic death was averted when Keyleth and Vex managed to rescue them from the ocean.
There are so many vastly more interesting ways to approach the narrative notion of self-sacrifice that go way, way beyond “so the character dies and everyone else is sad about it, the end”. The challenge that goes into approaching self-sacrifice in a creative way really pays off, and the kicker is that you can explore loss and fear and devastation without losing that underlying beacon of hope. That’s pretty cool.
We were strangers starting out on a journey Never dreaming what we’d have to go through Now here we are and I’m suddenly standing At the beginning with you.
Anastasia x Perc’ahlia AU doodle fun from twitter!
AU where the RQ sends Vax to do some god shit into the mortal plane sometimes and he gets witnessed by some NPCs with high passive perception. His story gets told down the line, about a shadowy man-like figure with wings appearing and disappearing.. Vax becomes Exandria’s Mothman
Finally finished this! Critical role has been a huge part of my life for the past year and I finally got around to doing something from the first campaign. Thank you Marisha Ray for creating such a strong character in Keyleth!
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