I EAT THE POISON

brian murphy as darkness man and emily axford as bat child were fantastic. very funny character concepts, murphy excels at being the butt of the joke, axford really nails bat child's bookish, childlike naivete. the funniest scenes in the series were all darkness man.

siobhan thompson as madelaine is her playing to her strengths, but madelaine is kind of dull because she doesn't hang out with the rest of the party that much. she mainly interacts with NPCs and because she's a toreador there's very little drama in that; she bowls them over with majesty and then sleeps with them. her tryst with a leprachaun is very funny.

zac oyama as zaeth is also zac playing to his strengths. zaeth suffers in the early episodes because of zac's completely unspoken desire to have zaeth meet a horse, something that hilariously only gets explained in the adventuring party. zac wants zaeth to meet a horse so fucking bad he refuses to do anything of substance until he gets a horse. once he has a horse, he's fine and he's a likable PC.

i'm just kind of weary of ally beardsley at this point. hj wingstreet is a fine character and ally and lou have fantastic chemistry as actors. unfortunately, ally didn't read anything about the game before playing and as usual prioritises making jokes over playing their character. when ally is focused, hj is fine, but we lose a lot of runtime to hj doing something bizarre because ally thought it would be funny. in ally's defence, it's pretty funny, but i couldn't help but be frustrated. a grip of hj's hard mechanical actions in the game are a product of ally suggesting something they want to do and then being surprised when they find out that their character can't actually do that.

CCOD is disdainful toward's vtm 5e's mechanics in a way i find truly impressive. the two big drivers for PC action in vampire are Humanity and Hunger. the former is just not ever used, ever. Hunger gets a lot of play at the start of the campaign but mulligan has this extremely odd implementation of downtime that leads to weeks and months of in-game action getting glossed over arbitrarily. in fact, most of the party's actions take place in a kind of hyperbolic time chamber where PCs get to have individual scenes with NPCs before being removed from play. this all comes to a head in the finale where the rules are fully dispensed with in favour of just doing whatever would be cool/funny.

and i mean, i guess that's fine? but i actually enjoy players engaging with the mechanics of the game.