the venting place

a place for me to freak out about the possibility of things that many adults have figured out already

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Brennan setting the difficulty for making a flier that actually attracts people to the event super high and then backing down when the evidence presented overwhelmingly proved him wrong is good game mastering. One thing about setting a game in a real world adjacent setting like this or even Unsleeping City is that it's so much easier to make assumptions that other people around you will correct.

Mostly it's funny because Dropout posted the clip of them debating it to all short form video platforms and all of the comments are a never ending stream of people telling stories about going to events because they got a flier. A much more universal experience than I'd have expected, honestly

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This week's Adventuring Party has one of my favorite recurring Murph bits, where he gets exasperated about people forgetting the format of the show they're on, like getting mad people are doing purely visual gags on a podcast, or, in this case, "you have to tell people that you can talk to animals in the episode and not in the post show you maniac"

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Zaeth is really funny so far but he does seem to be in that Puss in Boots spot that Zac sometimes finds his characters in where I dont really have a sense of what's going on with him as a character. I hope he gets some focus, soon

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I think the end of that Adventuring Party is maybe the first time I can remember Murph going absolutely in on Brennan for doing something weird and he was right to go after him for having a bowl of full nude Snickers

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I'm really sorry, but if you're older than like, 19, and you sincerely believe that there's a secret "good" Stranger Things finale that fixes every problem you personally have with the show, you have to get off the internet for the sake of your own mental health.

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I'm not judging all Stranger Things fans that are losing their minds and inventing fake episodes that have what they want to demand that Netflix shows them to them. Some of you are like, 20, and will probably be embarrassed about this in the comments of a video essay on Youtube in five or six years.

However, some of you are old enough to legally rent a car and you should not be acting like this.

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That's the kind of season finale to write when you're pretty sure you're getting a season two, huh

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If I had to guess what happened here, given the abrupt cut off of the episode and the lack of a cooldown, is that they kept playing this session because they hit the number of episodes they were planning to hit for the soldier's table but didn't want to drop a six hour episode, so next episode is like...finish up the soldiers, move on to the next table?

(With rotating tables, I'm guessing the split is partially "we play until we finish the arc" and partially "we have scheduled these folks for a set number of episodes, and then we've scheduled the next group for a set number of episodes." And they overshot how long either this combat took or how long the post fight breakdown went.

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lmao they're really not taking their time planting story seeds at all with the Mighty Nein, huh

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Laura yelling "oh, switch your heads," at those fairies is unironically how those kinds of sayings get started in history

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I think that Brennan should just make this whole campaign fey bullshit

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ASPIRE TO GREAT THINGS. DO IT NOW.

Hawkins the dog knight rules

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I think it's great that Campaign Four started out at a funeral with all of this intense worldbuilding and now they have two friends who are dogs. That's not sarcasm, to be clear. I love the dog knights.

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Finding out people are mad at Beau for being mean to Caleb in that episode is wild, if anything, she's way too nice to him at the end after all the shit she saw him pull this episode. She didn't even get to see the backstory where he was mutilating members of her order!

I do think it's interesting that Caleb's backstory in the show firmly establishes that there's no compulsion of any kind being put in place here. There aren't false memories planted. Caleb does all of these things because he thinks it's right. Yes, it is important to remember that he was manipulated into it, but he doesn't seem especially bothered by the carnage he's causing at the Cobalt Soul. It feels very much like it's meant to be an open question here: if Trent hadn't sent him after his parents, would Caleb had ever stopped?

I know that this is part of his story in the campaign, too, but seeing it makes it much more visceral, I think. I'm really interested in seeing what people who haven't watched the campaign do with this info.

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Sam rolling so well at being religious that he's in more trouble now than he would have been in had he rolled poorly

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The dog druid rules, what a great NPC

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I don't want to make any bold declarations after one episode, but the first episode of Mighty Nein is, at the very least, a LOT better than the first episode of the Legend of Vox Machina.

I suspect people are going to take some exception to how they're reorienting the story so there's more purpose to how they...do anything, but so far it honestly doesn't feel like they have to strain too much to make it so these characters getting involved with the main plot makes sense? Most of it is either just showing us stuff we wouldn't have seen because the characters weren't present or just fast forwarding through the parts of the early campaign where everyone was figuring out who their characters were. Like, they're not revealing all of their cards yet, but they've already given these characters more purpose than "they're at the circus because they've gotta do something."

(For clarification: that's a perfectly good start to a D&D campaign, but when you don't have 500+ hours to explore these characters, you've gotta get to the point a little faster. Also, now they know which narrative beats were dead ends)