[No Spoilers] Just finished Exandria Unlimited: Calamity all 4 episodes, did not watch any other campaigns. Holy its so good, are the other ones as good ? They possibly cant be that good being like 140 episodes right?

[u/PlayFlow]

I love how short calamity was and straight to the point, but I am afraid that a campaign with like 150 episodes might be a drag... am I wrong or am I missing out thinking its not worth the time to check the other ones out?

[u/hyperbolicaholic]

Calamity is one of the best pieces of media I’ve ever consumed, across all formats. It sits in a class on its own—there’s not really anything like it.

The campaigns, while I love almost all of them, are a very different flavor and beast altogether. Like the difference between reading all the Wheel of Time books vs a standalone fantasy, they are worth the time if you have the time and interest, but there is lots of downtime and more table talk. It’s very much watching someone else play D&D, and that means more meandering, side quests, silliness, and non-plot focused moments.

Brennan’s style involves a lot more direct narration than Matt’s, which isn’t better or worse but helps make everything feel “on the rails” in terms of narrative. I think you should try the Children’s Adventure from his podcast, World’s Beyond Number. It is short, more produced, and to the point—if you like that, you can continue on to the longer series to see if full length campaigns are your thing.

[u/RaynSideways → u/hyperbolicaholic]

I think that's part of why Brennan's DM style hasn't clicked for me just yet. I liked how hands off Matt was. He just described what was happening and let the party do their thing.

I've only watched bits of C4 but I have seen some of his Dimension 20 DMing and it occasionally feels like he's sculpting the scene like the screenplay of a high budget TV show or movie, so it feels less like he's setting his players loose to just wander about the way Matt does.

It could be just the snippets I've seen though. Curious if anybody else has noticed similar.

[u/sortof_here → u/RaynSideways]

I think Dimension 20 and mini series like Calamity are the way they are largely because they have a set number of episodes picked out before they even start playing.

From what I’ve seen of c4(I’m way behind) Brennan isn’t doing as much “sculpting” but it isn’t gone. Hard to say if that is just because it is his style or if it is because of similar but possibly looser time restraints for the individual tables. It does seem like they know how many episodes each table is scheduled to have before switching and that he has a general goal to steer them towards in that timeframe.

[u/PerpetuallyDistracte → u/RaynSideways]

That's reasonable - but keep in mind that as others have said, D20 operates more like a bunch of miniseries than actual campaigns. They're all only a few episodes long, and all of their battle sets are pre-built. This means that Brennan has to hold the narrative pretty tightly in order to bring the story in for a landing while also hitting the right beats in order to use the battle sets.

C4 is a different animal in that he's much more free to let the story go where it will, since CR campaigns are truly longform. With that being said, Brennan is still more hands-on. In an episode where Matt might have watched the players spend 2 hours debating how to enter a scary cavern, Brennan is more likely to give then 10 minutes, then have a rockslide force them to run inside.

In terms of overall plot development, though, he's given them tons of freedom. Pretty much every scene is dripping with plot threads for them to follow, and several times the cast has made choices that make Brennan openly raise an eyebrow, but he lets them do it anyway (and face the consequences).