my prophet and me

I absolutely get the upsides of this experiment - having the characters and locations pregenerated reduces Brennan's cognitive load when he's juggling approximately 500 plates at once, for a start. But when the end came, he also seemed unwilling to kill some darlings, which is why we got the surprise clown that had nothing to do with anything and ended up eating several minutes of precious runtime.

Don't get me wrong - the clown was hilarious! I get why it was a darling in the first place! But the PCs never got to it during the season, so it had no business being in the finale, except maybe as an epilogue hint of future adventures. The same thing goes for Vesper's were-bat bio-dad. Frankly, even Gary Sinise Banksy didn't need to be there, but that one I can let go. But all of that stuff took oxygen away from the characters and storylines we'd actually been watching for the past 13 episodes, and there wasn't any to spare.

D20 has always been a game of "how do we make a TTRPG campaign fit into episodic strictures." The earliest seasons have an orderly pattern of one combat every two episodes, and even as those rules were loosened up, in any battle set season you had to get to those battle sets one way or another. You can see Brennan and crew messing with this more and more as time goes on, trying for more and more freedom, and I think the sandbox was another experiment in that line. But as anyone who plays sandbox-style video games can tell you, it's very easy to spend a hundred hours making sand castles instead of going to the boss battle at the end.

It's not that I think the Intrepid Heroes were wasting time throughout the season - the sand castles are part of the experience! And they were absolutely moving the plot forward at the same time. I just get a sense that the planning phases of this campaign didn't allot enough time for fucking around exploring the setting, so we ended up with 18 episodes of plot in a 14-episode bag.

but then toward the end of the season, more truth got revealed and it was just... more city people making fun of small town leftists for their own profit. sure, bigfoot (brennan) broke the fourth wall to encourage people to get into their own local politics. but the focus of the season so quickly became "murder the gentrifiers" when the people at the table are also the ones doing gentrification. we just happen to like them because they're the intrepid heroes.

To start: I was laughing so incredibly hard throughout this, I have a great time watching it

BUT

That was because I had completely given up on any actual resolution for this season after the last episode. Ally Beardsley is an incredible performer and player and I enjoy them immensely but from a plotting perspective? The moment they dove deep into the AI bit starting with an apology text I knew that the political aspect of this season wasn’t going any farther

How could it? It was the second to last episode and the relationship with the other political organizer imploded in front of us

Another reason I was having fun is because Brennan gave up on trying to keep the story on the rails. Immediate insanity. Everyone was having fun and the plot barely meant anything. Ally doing like. Four iterations of their turn STARTING with clown necrophilia? Sure whatever I’m laughing because we also have “as many dice as you can fit in your two hands” and “Vesper’s dad is an actual bat”

I had a lot of fun this season but it was disappointing to have a season that was so focused on community organizing have to leave that story extremely unresolved in favor of bits, and as much as ACOC is a bit too much for me, I do miss having the more serious storytelling rather than leaning so far into comedy and as much as it pains me to say this? HJ as a character was a huge part of that for me this season

Idk I love Ally in most seasons but this season it felt like the only thing I was enjoying from HJ was the yaoi and even then that relationship didn’t go full yaoi, though of course the epilogue of them is v queer coded and I’m glad we got that conclusion (especially after “I want a girlfriend”). I feel like outside of Lavonte, HJ had practically no serious moments or development that wasn’t played for bits

To start: I was laughing so incredibly hard throughout this, I have a great time watching it

BUT

That was because I had completely given up on any actual resolution for this season after the last episode. Ally Beardsley is an incredible performer and player and I enjoy them immensely but from a plotting perspective? The moment they dove deep into the AI bit starting with an apology text I knew that the political aspect of this season wasn’t going any farther

How could it? It was the second to last episode and the relationship with the other political organizer imploded in front of us

Another reason I was having fun is because Brennan gave up on trying to keep the story on the rails. Immediate insanity. Everyone was having fun and the plot barely meant anything. Ally doing like. Four iterations of their turn STARTING with clown necrophilia? Sure whatever I’m laughing because we also have “as many dice as you can fit in your two hands” and “Vesper’s dad is an actual bat”

I had a lot of fun this season but it was disappointing to have a season that was so focused on community organizing have to leave that story extremely unresolved in favor of bits, and as much as ACOC is a bit too much for me, I do miss having the more serious storytelling rather than leaning so far into comedy and as much as it pains me to say this? HJ as a character was a huge part of that for me this season

Idk I love Ally in most seasons but this season it felt like the only thing I was enjoying from HJ was the yaoi and even then that relationship didn’t go full yaoi, though of course the epilogue of them is v queer coded and I’m glad we got that conclusion (especially after “I want a girlfriend”). I feel like outside of Lavonte, HJ had practically no serious moments or development that wasn’t played for bits

Brennan: Leaping through the sky, the driver's seat under your chin fires with a spring--SPROING--you fly through the air. Your mangled body, attached by the cord of a paddle ball to the clown's corpse, the clown flying through the air behind you, you grab Bat Child right before your human body is about to be dashed against the rocks. And in the back of your mouth, now full of plant sap and saliva, the clown's corpse flies into your mouth, caressing your cheek on the way past and goes, 'Home...' [WOOSH] as the clown disappears into oblivion, the portal sealing, the balance restored between oblivion and the mortal world and the ghost war occurring in oblivion. You guys didn't know about it, but this is what fixed it.

[music stops]