#like i know crown of candy is considered one of the best d20 seasons too! which is why i rlly wanna be able to enjoy it

[carelesscuriosity]

I am desperately trying to get through Crown of Candy so I can watch the Ravening War and atp, I think I’ve just gotta ask… If I haven’t been invested from the jump, is there a specific episode/turning point of Crown of Candy which makes the season really click? Because no matter how hard I try and focus/care, I just can’t feel myself getting immersed in the world/story like I did with Neverafter and Fantasy High.

Alternatively, how spoilery is A Ravening War so far? Like would someone be able to start with that and still enjoy Crown of Candy?

EDIT: Thanks for recommendations everyone! I’ll try to stick with it till at least episode 9! :D

[takaraphoenix]

My Ranking of D20 Campaigns

So I actually managed to watch all of them (or all that are out so far; not counting the still ongoing Junior Year yet) and since I like making lists, I drafted this post early on to keep track of which I love the most and how that love changed whenever I started watching a new campaign.

A Starstruck Odyssey

The Seven

A Court of Fey and Flowers

The Unsleeping City: Chapter II

The Unsleeping City

Mice and Murder

Burrow’s End

Fantasy High: Sophomore Year

A Crown of Candy

Pirates of Leviathan

Escape From the Bloodkeep

Coffin Run

Dungeons and Drag Queens

Mentopolis

Misfits and Magic

Fantasy High

Ravening War

Tiny Heist

Neverafter

Shriek Week

This was actually really, really hard, because the recency bias usually has me go “this is SO SO GOOD”.

I started watching D20 back in April last year, Misfits and Magic was the first campaign I watched - and The Seven was, I think, maybe the fifth or so? And it was my number one for the longest time. I love the girls, both the characters and the players, I love the plot, I love everything about that campaign. It is so heart-wrecking with the emotions it goes through for them all.

But then I watched A Starstruck Odyssey and it just hit all the right spots - the found family crew of a spaceship having wacky space-adventures is just something I deeply, deeply love and these characters were so much fun - and has the benefit of being longer and giving me more to fall in love with, I suppose. Still though, the difference between first and second is very narrow.

And I consider 4 and 5 a tie, to be honest. The Unsleeping City is one story, to me, I know the seasons are very distinct, but the flow of it and also my love for both is near equal. This campaign has the highest concentration of favorite PCs for me, like, when I made a list of my favorite Intrepid Heroes characters, their TUC characters all came in as either first or second place. Sophia Lee is the best Emily character ever, I will fight for her.

I am so madly, deeply in love with A Court of Fey and Flowers, which features my favorite PC romance so far, plus an impeccable cousin dynamic between Lou and Emily, also... there’s no fighting. While most fights are somewhat entertaining in DnD, I still remain Just Not An Action Gal and could skip on those in favor of more roleplaying scenes of character development and relationship exploration. And this campaign absolutely hit that spot just right. Plus, the fantasy fairy setting, and Aabria’s wonderful storytelling (how is this woman so talented? She was my first introduction to DnD as a DM, and then I got to see her as a player in the Seven and Pirates of Leviathan and she makes such great choices as a player too).

This list was ridiculously hard to make, because I look at it and I see Mice and Murder only on 6th place even though that definitely was the campaign where I had the hardest time to stop watching, I pulled an all nighter to watch half of it because it had the greatest grip on me, but then I look at the ones I placed higher than it and I can’t find it in me to move any of them lower either.

Recency bias definitely made placing Burrow’s End very hard. Not to repeat myself, but I am madly, deeply in love with Aabria’s storytelling. Combined with talking animals, the family focus, Brennan playing a mom as a PC (moms are my favorite Brennan characters), I have a lot of love for this campaign and I hope so badly that we’ll get a second part.

And here’s the reason why I couldn’t count TUC as one. Because Fantasy High: Sophomore Year ranks so much higher than the first FH for me. This was such a fun, ridiculous story, and it introduced my two favorite NPCs of all campaigns; Ayda and Garthy. It set the bar for FH3 really high and I am looking at Brennan to keep up the great work.

A Crown of Candy is well-placed in the middle. I am not the biggest fan of tragedies and definitely not into character death, but the characters and the world, are so very compelling still, even if I prefer the ones that died over the replacement characters - and that’s what puts it in the middle. Good, but could have been better.

Pirates of Leviathan was short but the characters, the players. Aabria is so so so good in this, it kills me. And she’s not alone. Bob is one of the greatest PCs of Dimension 20, to me, and that is vastly due to Krystina’s talent.

Escape From the Bloodkeep is one of the most surprising campaigns for me. This is a LotR parody that turned out to be way too heartfelt and much more found family than expected and it is great.

And Coffin Run is honestly one of the funniest D20 campaigns and I am wildly in love with about every single decision Izzy Roland made in this campaign. I am also entirely and absolutely gay for every decision Erika Ishii made.

Dungeons and Drag Queens was a very... standard adventure, but the players were so much fun to see. This would honestly be such a good campaign to start your D20 journey with, because the way Brennan eases them in and explains everything is so wonderful, and the excitement and joy of everything new they’re trying is contagious.

Mentopolis was cute, though I’m not big on noir and detective stories so that factors into why it ranks relatively low for me, even though the players and the characters were amazing. Dan Fucks is brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

And though the very first campaign I watched, Misfits and Magic didn’t make it too high. Some of it is the bytaste of HP, which I have come to just... not be able to stand anymore even though I am well aware that it’s a parody of it, and the other factor is the length. It’s hard to compete with 10 to 12 episode campaigns, that had so much more time to flesh out dynamics, worlds and characters and make me fall in love with them all, and that’s not really a reflection of the quality of this campaign.

I remain not much of a fan of the first Fantasy High. Maybe because I watched The Seven before this so when I watched FH, it gave me more of a feeling of “why is there a prequel spin-off about Zelda’s boyfriend who never had a proper appearance anyway? My girls should have bigger roles in this??”, but I largely feel that FH1 was more set-up, and the Bad Kids and their story really took off for me in the sequel, which I greatly enjoyed.

While I enjoyed the characters and the players’ dynamic in Ravening War, I am just... I guess I’m generally not much into “and it’s all futile anyway because I know how the story continues and these guys are not in it”? Matter of taste, I guess, but if that has to compete with others, it will lose.

Honestly, I enjoyed Tiny Heist when I watched it and I don’t dislike it, but it’s just so short and didn’t have anything that incredibly stood out to me in a manner that gripped me, so it had a hard time competing with other campaigns that gave me something I deeply fell in love with. 

I don’t like Neverafter, it had some good characters in it but on the overall this absolutely did not vibe with me. Which is a huge disappointment for me as a lover of fairy tale crossovers, but the dark horror approach does not work for me at all.

The only thing that was easy was the bottom of this list, honestly. Shriek Week was, hands down, the only campaign I absolutely did not enjoy. The storytelling was a mess, even before watching the Adventuring Party for it, it was clear that the whole ~villain plot~ was improvised and I still wish it had just... not... been in there.

[cloudmancy]

i know im fanning the flames but PLEASE go off about acoc i wanna hear your thoughts

crown of candy was an incredibly flawed season but I loved it SO much 😭 like. is the unsleeping city an objectively better season than crown of candy? maybe. do I like crown of candy better? also true. the thing about mediocre media for me is that there's more to ENGAGE with and think about than an objectively superior (artistically, narratively) piece of media, because there isn't a whole lot you can do with excellent media other than go 'I liked that :)' and maybe write one or two critical thinkpieces about it. crown of candy suffers from the limitations of dnd as the format of the show, the dimension 20 formula, and the length of time it was allowed to run for.

I was SO hyped about a crown of candy before it even began, and the excitement ramped up for about half the season before it abruptly plateaued and wore off. I mean... what's not to love? the trailer showed us jaw-dropping sets, promised BEAUTIFUL worldbuilding, and snippets of heartbreaking dialogue. I still consider that trailer dimension 20's best 😭 but the reality of it is that crown of candy simply... did not compare! it was a fantastic season and it takes up more space in my brain than the other 4 seasons combined but there is a reason I fell out of love with it and started playing around with my own ocs instead.

the first reason why I was excited about a crown of candy was the sense of scale. in the first 6 episodes there was a very real sense of wonder and excitement because we were promised NATIONS. LEAGUES of npcs and realms and political and personal alliances to explore. part of what made acoc so successful in my part of d20 twitter is also, maybe, part of its downfall. for a season that promised so much political intrigue, there was startlingly little of it. the only pc that had genuine political connections baked into their character and plotline was lapin; the rest were all the rocks family. the season stayed as low-fantasy political intrigue all the way up until episode 11, where it became some sort of... half-assed magic narrative? 

episode 11 and beyond was the rocks specialty show. I would’ve watched some british show if I wanted to see monarchy 💀 it was a mistake, I think, to make every starting npc, and half of the backup pcs closely associated to the rocks in some way. it is not emily's fault, but part of the reason that the season transitioned into the rocks family drama (and the rest of calorum is there too I guess) is because jet died and was replaced by saccharina, which was (rightfully) a very big deal for the pcs, who had all become related to the rocks at this point. it’s just not my cup of tea and I know that there’s people who enjoy acoc for the very reasons I didn’t - because it focused on the emotional journey of one family, instead of dealing with the repercussions of their actions across nations.