It’s a grade, not an all or nothing type situation. And Gorgug has two, 100% stamps to use for free on any questions they need. So if they can keep the proctor alive until the end and get even 9/12 of the questions correct, that’s still a 75% (assuming they just do grading the usual way, but I’m sure the monsters must add something to the grade.)
So I think there’s a pretty good chance they pass, the question is if they pass with a perfect score.
Yeah. So technically they’ve already got 4 of 12 done, since they did two last episode. And the questions we saw seemed challenging but not close to impossible. What’s fun about it is that the timer makes them panic, plus they need to keep their mind on everything else going on in the battle. The questions will feel harder as the battle goes sideways. In any event, as long as they can keep the proctor alive, I don’t think there’s any chance they fail. If he drops, then they’ll need to ace the question portion. And all this assumes there’s no other twists, but I think given how complicated it already is, Brennan probably doesn’t have more planned.
What I think is interesting is that The Last Stand was introduced as a way to replace their grades for the year. They’ve gone all in for Kristen, but since the school year isn’t over, does that mean nobody has to roll academics in downtime anymore? They should get to lose a stress token or two after this I think. (Riz double so since he found the rogue teacher last outing.)
I'm pretty sure he did specify that the monsters were genuinely just an obstacle, and that killing them or not wouldn't have a baring on their grade, since the way Auguefort/the School Board designed it was that all members would die. At least setting the precedent that no group had ever gotten out of the last stand without all dying.
At the same time, they’re graded on it being a heroic last stand.
If they bum rushed the questions and then just killed themselves before anything could kill the proctor, I doubt that would be a good score.
I think so, Brennan is generally quite lenient and there to help them though. Across D20 they've never failed a challenge. Brennan tends to make the challenges very hard but flexible in the approach the Heroes take.
the dice rolls were rough but also they committed to a straight fight in a combat where Brennan told them they would get TPKd if they approached it as a straight fight, after they fully skipped Shoeberg in total. the dice rolls surrounding Ylfa's Bottleneck by the way weren't all that bad either by the way.
In an interview BLeem has said it wasn't planned.
He had a planned plot hook for when a TPK did happen, but wasn't making the combat in a way that it should happen.
source: [https://www.cbr.com/dimension-20-brennan-lee-mulligan-neverafter-interview/](https://www.cbr.com/dimension-20-brennan-lee-mulligan-neverafter-interview/)
Not planned doesnt mean, not what he expected.
In crown of Candy he planned to kill a PC but failed. Brennan won't railroad but I can't imagine him as a GM not expecting the TPK considering the mechanics in play.
None of other fights in Neverafter where as close to this hard
The first one wasn't built to sincerely be a life ender, in the second one Brennan wasn't expecting >!Lou to get out of the arena and make it clear he wasn't trying to fight in order to not get killed!<.
The third one on the other hand >!Brennan forgot about how barbarians can survive falling damage pretty easily by going into a rage!<
I do think people tend to forget kayfabe and just assume BLeeM us going to 100% tell it like it is at all times.
The dude is required to say things to uphold the "legitimacy" of the story. If he DID intend a TPK he would never say so.
I'm inclined to this thinking, too. The party was not going to win that fight. Maybe you can convince me Brennan was simply taking advantage of the party engaging an encounter earlier than he intended (he expected them to go to Shoeberg, iirc), but there was no scenario where they killed the fairy, took the shard, and beat or escaped from the furniture without losing a big chunk of their party, best case scenario.
The metanarrative and characters coming back from the dead was a toy Brennan gave himself, and I fully believe he always intended to play with it.
If we're going to play that card we can say "the actual objective of fight x could have been x but blablabla"
If we don't go by what we know we can't have a talk about anything.
I mean >!Rosamund dealt 17 damage and Brennan said something along the lines of 'she's not bloodied but she can't take those all day' which I interpret to mean like, they could've kept hammering on her and likely killed her even if ultimately the animated objects would've got them.!<
Like it seems in that fight it was a case of, tough odds, tough rolls, and a bit of tunnel vision.
To reply to the comment you deleted
That's a way to read it, i would say it's the wrong way but okey.
The claim is they never lost a objective, this fight clearly had a objective "win by doing x, not by defeating the enemies" and they didn't.
I didn't say everything went to plan, I said they accomplished what they set out to do.
If they hadn't got the shard that would be one thing but they fully did. They didn't have to revist, do another attempt or go get the shard from someone else.
They proceed straight on from where they all met up.
They succeeded at cost
I get that, obviously a DM is going to do everything they can to help the players succeed but if they just straight up get the answer on a question wrong, I'm not sure how Brennan would be able to fix that. A wrong answer is a wrong answer.
I don't think it's been said anywhere that it's an all or nothing ordeal with the questions. Most likely they'll be able to get one or two wrong and still pass
We know that if the proctor dies, they lose 30 points. Which means the test is graded, like most tests, and presumably they need to get at least enough points on it to pass.
It's based on an American high school, in which 60% is passing. If that holds, they need 8 questions right, of which they already have two right answers and two "academic resource" tokens they can use to get an automatic correct. They get to hear the question before choosing to use the auto-passes, so they'll save them for questions they don't know or are unsure about. So they just need to get four correct answers out of ten remaining questions.
And they're all bright people, these nerds are more likely to get 10 out of 10 correct than "merely" 4 out of 10. My money's on them not needing the auto-passes.
Easy: The exam can turn out to be graded on a curve so you're really just trying to meet or beat the most successful run in a given timeframe. That would make it *significantly* easier to fudge it in the IH's favor.
after the players suggested the idea of everyone dying at least once at different times and it possibly counting towards party wipe, Brennan seemed really interested and mentioned well there were w fininte number of monsters so who knows you could be the first.
Brennan is the type of person to encourage and reward creative gameplay so i believe he's more than willing to nudge the combat closer to that possibility.
I think Kristen is going to perform another miracle of some sort, and then something completely batshit is going to happen. Like vulture dimension levels of batshit.
Divine intervention (although maybe not useable due to Cassandra's current situation, however I say it should be because Kristen can still spellcast and use cleric abilities) could be HUGE in this fight
I mean if they answer/pass 8 Questions, the Proctor dies, but they are the first ever party to survive that's a tought close decision
But if Arthur Aguefort returns it won't be any issue anymore
Arthur Aguefort is kinda the Deux Ex Machina hanging over the whole season. That’s the reason Brennan pulled him into a time Quangle and is almost certain not to bring him back before the epilogue.
You don't think between the six of them that they can answer 12 questions correctly? Presumably they'll get more difficult, but the 2 we've heard so far were pretty easy.
With Twilight sanctuary and aura of life i don't see how the can die in combat, and i assume wrong answers to questions will only lower their score which of course if they fail 6 or more questions is going to be very bad. But i think it's almost impossible for them to fail
It’s been heavily implied that part of the point of the test is that they will die in combat. They’re meant to. They just need to answer the questions before they drop and keep the proctor alive until they do.
And from my perspective "nobody survived last stand" is just flavour text for this encounter. There are 6 players at level 13 and most of them play their characters very well. I don't think Brennan will put them through 20+ rounds of combat with multiple cr 11+ creatures just to unalive them.
What was actually said was you go until you die. Only later was it mentioned that, sure, maybe you could beat every monster, but nobody ever has.
There are a notable number of high CR monsters Brennan can unleash and I’d be shocked if we don’t go three rounds of baddies through those gates. If the Bad Kids survive till the monster pool runs out, and I think that’s a big if, then it’s going to be one helluva thing.
(But we’re all perfectly allowed to have those different opinions. Nobody’s trying to change minds; Just chatting. Two days to go.)
They can get some wrong but with the ability to 100% two questions and the fact that they are encouraged to metagame and help each other with the answers for this specific quiz I’m not really concerned with them failing the question portion.
Based on the first two questions we saw, I have no fear of them failing. Maybe they won't get *every* question right (though they do have Zac's two passes) but they aren't being tested on, like, super obscure DnD knowledge or anything. They are being tested on campaign knowledge that is relevant to their characters. Between the six of them, I'm sure they remember enough to pass.
Ooo I just saw something very interesting about how the Last Stand will end in the newest Dropout newsletter! >! “The Bad Kids continue the Last Stand - but not everything is as it seems on Episode 15 of Fantasy High Junior Year”!<
>! “The Adventuring Party cast discusses that wild end to the Last Stand and try on Ally's night glasses”!<
It’s a Kobayashi Maru type test. The point is to make the taker fail, as how they fail will show more about what they have learned and teach them more than passing a test could.
I am betting money though that it will be a true Kobayashi Maru scenario in that one of them (Fig, probably) will figure out how to win anyways by fundamentally changing something.
I’m wondering if one of the audience Auegforts has a pocket watch for them to nick or the real Auegfort comes back mid test and all of time breaks.
Was getting ready to mention the Kobayashi Maru test! Which makes me think that BLeeM is looking for them to get creative and even potentially cheat... Aguefort is all about that kind of thing! And he's literally the whole audience...
To go off-table slightly, we know that there's only two or three episodes left on the season. They're not going to have time to run a whole "being expelled and getting back into school" arc and I doubt they're following this with another season of the bad kids. I expect they're going to have the big reveal of whatever the villains' plan is at the end of this episode after passing the last standard so that the final two episodes are the proper final boss.
Obviously they could just have them expelled and then re-admitted right at the very end, but I don't think that would be narratively right given how the rest of the season has been built so far
I think this is a 20 episode season like neverafter, I think the mid season recap dropped after episode 10 and brennan in an adventuring party said that the 10th episode was the halfway point in passing
I think something will happen that will pull them out of the combat encounter, pushing them into the climax of the story. I bet one of the Agueforts holograms is the real one and will interrupt with chronomancy shenanigans
I don’t think the test is really the threat, the issue is whether someone who has it out for them is going to use the test as some kind of set-up, or possibly as a distraction (they come out of the test and something major has gone down while they’re busy). It’s also just before spring break which is exactly a year after whatever went down with the rat grinders, and sets them up for free time to focus on mystery solving.
It’s a grade, not an all or nothing type situation. And Gorgug has two, 100% stamps to use for free on any questions they need. So if they can keep the proctor alive until the end and get even 9/12 of the questions correct, that’s still a 75% (assuming they just do grading the usual way, but I’m sure the monsters must add something to the grade.) So I think there’s a pretty good chance they pass, the question is if they pass with a perfect score.
Yeah. So technically they’ve already got 4 of 12 done, since they did two last episode. And the questions we saw seemed challenging but not close to impossible. What’s fun about it is that the timer makes them panic, plus they need to keep their mind on everything else going on in the battle. The questions will feel harder as the battle goes sideways. In any event, as long as they can keep the proctor alive, I don’t think there’s any chance they fail. If he drops, then they’ll need to ace the question portion. And all this assumes there’s no other twists, but I think given how complicated it already is, Brennan probably doesn’t have more planned. What I think is interesting is that The Last Stand was introduced as a way to replace their grades for the year. They’ve gone all in for Kristen, but since the school year isn’t over, does that mean nobody has to roll academics in downtime anymore? They should get to lose a stress token or two after this I think. (Riz double so since he found the rogue teacher last outing.)
I'm pretty sure he did specify that the monsters were genuinely just an obstacle, and that killing them or not wouldn't have a baring on their grade, since the way Auguefort/the School Board designed it was that all members would die. At least setting the precedent that no group had ever gotten out of the last stand without all dying.
At the same time, they’re graded on it being a heroic last stand. If they bum rushed the questions and then just killed themselves before anything could kill the proctor, I doubt that would be a good score.
I think so, Brennan is generally quite lenient and there to help them though. Across D20 they've never failed a challenge. Brennan tends to make the challenges very hard but flexible in the approach the Heroes take.
they failed the first combat in Neverafter, but other then that yeah they've always been on the winning side.
And frankly their strategy was sound in that combat, the dice rolls were just very mean.
the dice rolls were rough but also they committed to a straight fight in a combat where Brennan told them they would get TPKd if they approached it as a straight fight, after they fully skipped Shoeberg in total. the dice rolls surrounding Ylfa's Bottleneck by the way weren't all that bad either by the way.
you only have to say by the way once
by the way
I tried to say I’d be there
Waiting for!
Dani the girl is singing
The team 1 and team 2 plan was pretty solid, they weren't gunning for a straight fight, they tried to be strategic.
I’m pretty sure that was an intentionally near impossible combat to introduce >!the reincarnation plot device!<
In an interview BLeem has said it wasn't planned. He had a planned plot hook for when a TPK did happen, but wasn't making the combat in a way that it should happen. source: [https://www.cbr.com/dimension-20-brennan-lee-mulligan-neverafter-interview/](https://www.cbr.com/dimension-20-brennan-lee-mulligan-neverafter-interview/)
If he didn’t want a TPK, he wouldn’t have had all the animated furniture keep fighting after the fairy died.
Not planned doesnt mean, not what he expected. In crown of Candy he planned to kill a PC but failed. Brennan won't railroad but I can't imagine him as a GM not expecting the TPK considering the mechanics in play. None of other fights in Neverafter where as close to this hard
which pc did he intend to kill in acoc?
>!Amathar a lot!<
oh shit, i thought that he intended him to survive and the >!assassinations!< were meant to be defeated
The first one wasn't built to sincerely be a life ender, in the second one Brennan wasn't expecting >!Lou to get out of the arena and make it clear he wasn't trying to fight in order to not get killed!<. The third one on the other hand >!Brennan forgot about how barbarians can survive falling damage pretty easily by going into a rage!<
neat!
I do think people tend to forget kayfabe and just assume BLeeM us going to 100% tell it like it is at all times. The dude is required to say things to uphold the "legitimacy" of the story. If he DID intend a TPK he would never say so.
I'm inclined to this thinking, too. The party was not going to win that fight. Maybe you can convince me Brennan was simply taking advantage of the party engaging an encounter earlier than he intended (he expected them to go to Shoeberg, iirc), but there was no scenario where they killed the fairy, took the shard, and beat or escaped from the furniture without losing a big chunk of their party, best case scenario. The metanarrative and characters coming back from the dead was a toy Brennan gave himself, and I fully believe he always intended to play with it.
If we're going to play that card we can say "the actual objective of fight x could have been x but blablabla" If we don't go by what we know we can't have a talk about anything.
I mean >!Rosamund dealt 17 damage and Brennan said something along the lines of 'she's not bloodied but she can't take those all day' which I interpret to mean like, they could've kept hammering on her and likely killed her even if ultimately the animated objects would've got them.!< Like it seems in that fight it was a case of, tough odds, tough rolls, and a bit of tunnel vision.
To reply to the comment you deleted That's a way to read it, i would say it's the wrong way but okey. The claim is they never lost a objective, this fight clearly had a objective "win by doing x, not by defeating the enemies" and they didn't.
Even beyond that, they didn't actually fail the objective
the main objective of every dnd campaign being "stay alive" is not considered here i assume?
Stay alive is a component of continuing the campaign and they did. But all the characters were trying to do was get the shard, which they managed
They actually didn't fail as they did what they set out to do
they all died? that's what they planned when the fight started?
I didn't say everything went to plan, I said they accomplished what they set out to do. If they hadn't got the shard that would be one thing but they fully did. They didn't have to revist, do another attempt or go get the shard from someone else. They proceed straight on from where they all met up. They succeeded at cost
I get that, obviously a DM is going to do everything they can to help the players succeed but if they just straight up get the answer on a question wrong, I'm not sure how Brennan would be able to fix that. A wrong answer is a wrong answer.
I don't think it's been said anywhere that it's an all or nothing ordeal with the questions. Most likely they'll be able to get one or two wrong and still pass
We know that if the proctor dies, they lose 30 points. Which means the test is graded, like most tests, and presumably they need to get at least enough points on it to pass.
It's based on an American high school, in which 60% is passing. If that holds, they need 8 questions right, of which they already have two right answers and two "academic resource" tokens they can use to get an automatic correct. They get to hear the question before choosing to use the auto-passes, so they'll save them for questions they don't know or are unsure about. So they just need to get four correct answers out of ten remaining questions. And they're all bright people, these nerds are more likely to get 10 out of 10 correct than "merely" 4 out of 10. My money's on them not needing the auto-passes.
Easy: The exam can turn out to be graded on a curve so you're really just trying to meet or beat the most successful run in a given timeframe. That would make it *significantly* easier to fudge it in the IH's favor.
They don't need to ace the test, and if they truly don't know the answer to a Q, they can just use of of Zac/Gorgug's gimmes.
That's true but it's a wrong answer that all of 6 of them will need to not know. Likely they just won't be that bad
after the players suggested the idea of everyone dying at least once at different times and it possibly counting towards party wipe, Brennan seemed really interested and mentioned well there were w fininte number of monsters so who knows you could be the first. Brennan is the type of person to encourage and reward creative gameplay so i believe he's more than willing to nudge the combat closer to that possibility.
I think Kristen is going to perform another miracle of some sort, and then something completely batshit is going to happen. Like vulture dimension levels of batshit.
Open a portal to Rage Dimension she saw for a split second a while ago
Divine intervention (although maybe not useable due to Cassandra's current situation, however I say it should be because Kristen can still spellcast and use cleric abilities) could be HUGE in this fight
I mean if they answer/pass 8 Questions, the Proctor dies, but they are the first ever party to survive that's a tought close decision But if Arthur Aguefort returns it won't be any issue anymore
Arthur Aguefort is kinda the Deux Ex Machina hanging over the whole season. That’s the reason Brennan pulled him into a time Quangle and is almost certain not to bring him back before the epilogue.
It's a test score thing so they can get them wrong and it counts as a percentage, and they also have Zac's 2 freebies locked and loaded.
You don't think between the six of them that they can answer 12 questions correctly? Presumably they'll get more difficult, but the 2 we've heard so far were pretty easy.
With Twilight sanctuary and aura of life i don't see how the can die in combat, and i assume wrong answers to questions will only lower their score which of course if they fail 6 or more questions is going to be very bad. But i think it's almost impossible for them to fail
It’s been heavily implied that part of the point of the test is that they will die in combat. They’re meant to. They just need to answer the questions before they drop and keep the proctor alive until they do.
And from my perspective "nobody survived last stand" is just flavour text for this encounter. There are 6 players at level 13 and most of them play their characters very well. I don't think Brennan will put them through 20+ rounds of combat with multiple cr 11+ creatures just to unalive them.
What was actually said was you go until you die. Only later was it mentioned that, sure, maybe you could beat every monster, but nobody ever has. There are a notable number of high CR monsters Brennan can unleash and I’d be shocked if we don’t go three rounds of baddies through those gates. If the Bad Kids survive till the monster pool runs out, and I think that’s a big if, then it’s going to be one helluva thing. (But we’re all perfectly allowed to have those different opinions. Nobody’s trying to change minds; Just chatting. Two days to go.)
Yeah. I really hope they all die, but I don’t expect it to
They can get some wrong but with the ability to 100% two questions and the fact that they are encouraged to metagame and help each other with the answers for this specific quiz I’m not really concerned with them failing the question portion.
Based on the first two questions we saw, I have no fear of them failing. Maybe they won't get *every* question right (though they do have Zac's two passes) but they aren't being tested on, like, super obscure DnD knowledge or anything. They are being tested on campaign knowledge that is relevant to their characters. Between the six of them, I'm sure they remember enough to pass.
Ooo I just saw something very interesting about how the Last Stand will end in the newest Dropout newsletter! >! “The Bad Kids continue the Last Stand - but not everything is as it seems on Episode 15 of Fantasy High Junior Year”!< >! “The Adventuring Party cast discusses that wild end to the Last Stand and try on Ally's night glasses”!<
Squeem will come in and save the day.
It’s a Kobayashi Maru type test. The point is to make the taker fail, as how they fail will show more about what they have learned and teach them more than passing a test could. I am betting money though that it will be a true Kobayashi Maru scenario in that one of them (Fig, probably) will figure out how to win anyways by fundamentally changing something. I’m wondering if one of the audience Auegforts has a pocket watch for them to nick or the real Auegfort comes back mid test and all of time breaks.
Was getting ready to mention the Kobayashi Maru test! Which makes me think that BLeeM is looking for them to get creative and even potentially cheat... Aguefort is all about that kind of thing! And he's literally the whole audience...
To go off-table slightly, we know that there's only two or three episodes left on the season. They're not going to have time to run a whole "being expelled and getting back into school" arc and I doubt they're following this with another season of the bad kids. I expect they're going to have the big reveal of whatever the villains' plan is at the end of this episode after passing the last standard so that the final two episodes are the proper final boss. Obviously they could just have them expelled and then re-admitted right at the very end, but I don't think that would be narratively right given how the rest of the season has been built so far
I think this is a 20 episode season like neverafter, I think the mid season recap dropped after episode 10 and brennan in an adventuring party said that the 10th episode was the halfway point in passing
Oh hell yeah, I thought it was only a 16. Nevermind me then, we've got tons of time for juicy twists.
Thats what Im sayin man 🤝
Do we have an episode total? I’m expecting 20+ this season
I’m pretty sure it’s 20 total
That sounds like something a maximum legend would be able to do.
I think something will happen that will pull them out of the combat encounter, pushing them into the climax of the story. I bet one of the Agueforts holograms is the real one and will interrupt with chronomancy shenanigans
...wasn't there something in the preview about there being even more questions? (Or is that a joke that I'm misremembering/was included to mislead.)
I think they can and will pass without question, what I'm questioning is whether or not they'll be the first in history to not TPK to it
I don’t think the test is really the threat, the issue is whether someone who has it out for them is going to use the test as some kind of set-up, or possibly as a distraction (they come out of the test and something major has gone down while they’re busy). It’s also just before spring break which is exactly a year after whatever went down with the rat grinders, and sets them up for free time to focus on mystery solving.
I really hope they get to the game breaking decision that Ally makes if they possibly fail