#klck

i stand with my cancelled daughter

1) “It’s railroading.” Railroading is when the player has no real agency or choice. It is when their actions don’t actually affect the outcome of the game. Every player is given the ability to make choices that impact the world [created by Brennan] and do so frequently.

Having a planned story is called GM’ing. Letting your players know the general idea of what you have planned is a fairly normal thing to do. That’s called setting expectations/tone. Do you think someone hosting a campaign using popular and well-known adventuring modules like Tomb of Annihilation is railroading?

2) “[X character] is terrible this season. They made so many bad choices.” Almost every single choice made by the players is completely intentional (including the ones that make the character seem like an asshole). This is because they, like any writer worth their weight, understand that doing otherwise would be narratively boring.

3) “They said ‘chaos isn’t cute’ but Kristen is still being chaotic” (or something along those lines). Ally has significantly toned down Kristen’s chaotic shenanigans and made a real effort to show Kristen actually taking their clerical duties seriously after getting the wake up call. We have multiple scenes showing this. What are y’all talking about I had assumed that Kristen would spend the entire season blowing off their duties and only learning a lesson during the finale (but never learning the lesson). Instead I saw a great deal of character development that made sense for her.

4) “The story makes it seem like Kipperlilly deserved being manipulated.” /“Players act like Kipperlilly deserved what happened to her”.

They don’t. And this is the biggest one I saw and was what made me extremely pensive about watching this season. I had viewed every interaction with Kipperlilly under this lens. And then I watched episode 16 where they [SPOILERS] acknowledge that Kipperlilly wasn’t some inherently evil person but likely a very frustrated, childish teenager who was taken advantage of. They do not act like she deserved it.

They do, however, dislike her. Frankly they have no reason to like her at that point. Even if she’s a little sympathetic. Sometimes people don’t get to redeem themselves. Same with Kalina. Just because their situations were complicated doesn’t mean they didn’t directly played a major role in harming the Bad Kids. They are not owed forgiveness.

Overall: This season was so much better than I expected. I’m glad I stuck it through and decided to see for myself. I’m also happy I have basic literacy and critical thinking skills.

Disclaimer: This is not me saying D20 crew can do no wrong. I have my complaints. Brennan is way too lenient on them IMO. I dislike how they’ve handled Sandralynn’s whole thing. I think the players shouldn’t tunnel vision so much (the tragedy playing lots of D&D is sometimes you might be following a path of tropes in your head instead of the actual story). It has its issues but it’s also still a very solid piece of D&D media.