Now I Have a Title

I've been here since 2019, guys; I know exactly what show I'm watching. And when it's good, what D20 proves in spades is that comedy can go hand-in-hand with stakes and with story. You can have it all! And this time we just didn't.

The Whittakers were pretty much defeated already; getting mushed by a ghost bus was just icing on that cake. The Douglases going down in an orgy of violence was...well, as expected, though it would have been nice to know more about their powers and whatnot. But the political storylines ended on a complete whiff. There was no election, no real campaign arc, not even a hard commitment from Amelia to run for office.

Maybe if the Douglas blood orgy would have turned the election somehow that would have tied things together more. But even then we'd have the half-baked Camarilla story ending - it wasn't as thoroughly neglected as the Purpee politics, but ending with "oh actually we can defeat these ultra-powerful vampires after all" is a bit of a letdown.

Trapping Ermine in the void was a thrill because it felt like such a close call. But then she and Nixon went down like comparative chumps - the friggin' gumbaroo felt more dangerous. And again, I wouldn't mind that if it was just somehow tied to the story more. At least with Tarker, the party used his one established character trait against him to hilarious effect.

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.

It is incredibly precarious to be dependent on what comes down to the charity of some eccentric rich people, even when those rich people make the right noises about wanting to help. The resources HJ and LaVonte used to buy Amelia's childhood home, invest in Mike's, and get a giant Christmas tree and a whole fleet of buses were just playing-around money for them. But Purpee isn't a game to Maya; it's her home. And given the behavior she's seen from the coterie so far, she's absolutely justified in wanting to make sure they aren't just treating the town's rehabilitation as a whim.