#bc if he wanted kristen to clock s/t in buddy he easily could have given her advantage

[jq37]

I'm like genuinely interested as someone who thinks a lot about the craft of critique and fandoms the ways in which the current Rat Grinders discourse shows why you can't really apply the same lens you use to critique a pre written story vs an improvised actual play show by a bunch of comedians who are first and foremost concerned with committing to the bit. Like Porter's a great example of this, he went from a nothingburher to secretly evil with a whole lore and backstory!

In the same vein the Rat Grinders probably could have turned out to be not as culpable in all of this had the Bad Kids really tried to bond with them, but instead they focused on other things with the way downtime was structured! And because they did that they could pass the Last Stand, and are safe from Porter's rage thing! Like legitimately I really liked the mechanics of downtime this season, it just also came at the cost of developing the Rat Grinders!

(Though to be entirely fair, the BKs did try to engage with Oisin, Ivy, and Ruben and then Oisin launched the house, Ivy was racist, and Ruben still attacked Wanda so)

I think it's really fascinating from a storytelling/game design perspective! The downside is the Discourse is so tiring

Yeah it's interesting. I covered some of this in other asks so I'm gonna hit on the stuff I haven't yet.

If you're telling a story that is based partially on user input, it's not entirely fair to be like, "This subplot was underdeveloped" if the reason for that was that the players didn't make choices to facilitate that development. When DM's push hard for the players to care about things they're not interested in, they get hit with railroading accusations.

And even outside of the player choices, there are also the rolls. A BIG part of D&D is the randomness of the dice. Even if the players care about something, it doesn't mean they'll get it. I'll mention again that Kristen tried to roll Insight on Buddy before the final fight and got a Nat 1. What is she supposed to do? Roll again until she gets a good read on him? That's not how that works. If the dice aren't cooperating, there's not much you can do. And you can make sure your big story beats don't rely on dice but at the end of the day they *will* shape your story in ways you can't control.

Another key thing about the medium, as you pointed out, is things can change on the fly. The confluence of high rolls and serious interest can change things that were behind the screen canon in an instant. In Burrow's End, Aabria planned for Bennet to have a family but as soon as Tula/Brennan expressed interest in romancing him, she Thanos snapped that family out of existence. I don't know how much Brennan wanted the Rat Grinders to be recruitable but even if he'd planned them all to just be foils and evil and nothing else, I can totally see him flipping one if they'd really wanted to and it would have made for a good story beat.

Anyway, yeah! Interesting stuff to think about. Even though D20 often feels like a TV show, it's important to remember that it's a different beast in many ways.