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Written & storyboarded by Katie Aldworth & Ashley Tahilan
When a spat between the Elders of the Creek leaves an opening in their tabletop role-playing game, Kelsey joins the campaign.
Tropes:
- A Taste of Their Own Medicine: As DM, Kelsey nullifies all of Mark's attempts to win an encounter through force (the opposite of what Mark did to Barry) to show how frustrating his own railroading can be.
- Big "WHAT?!": Kelsey lets one out when Barry quits the campaign.
- Both Sides Have a Point: While Mark runs his campaign like a Control Freak, his railroading is also because Barry's bizarre tactics risk breaking the narrative Mark had spent hours planning.
- Convection, Schmonvection: Comically inverted when Mark puts Kelsey and David in a situation where they are surrounded by lava everywhere. They're not just killed by the ambient heat the lava gives up, but somehow the air had become lava.
- Deep-Immersion Gaming: Downplayed; the RPG's events are accompanied by sound effects and a changing background, but the characters and table in the foreground are unchanged.
- Feud Episode: Barry gets fed up with Mark's Railroading the campaign, so he decides to hang out with Craig and J.P. while Kelsey takes his place. None of the younger three kids can stand Mark as DM or Barry's rambling, so they resolve to get the group back together.
- Killer Game Master: Kelsey and David's campaign is ended when Mark puts them in an encounter where the monster doesn't even matter because the ceiling, walls, and air are made of lava. Although we don't see how they got in such a situation, so it may well be their own fault (for comparison, David's character died because he decided to drink acid).
- Our Werewolves Are Different: The RPG game features a three-headed werewolf.
- Painting the Medium: When Mark tells Kelsey that only the Game Master can narrate, her Inner Monologue switches to Mark's voices as she says it's like her own life has been taken over.
- Press X to Die: When faced with a giant centipede in the PRG, David asks if his character can drink its acid spit to gain its power. Mark flat-out tells him he'll just die. David figures anything else will still kill him, and so does it anyway.
- Railroading: After Barry befriends the three-headed werewolf in the game, Mark spitefully makes the werewolf a zombie immune to friendship spells. This is what makes Barry quit the campaign. Mark is a bit more permissive when Kelsey plays (even begrudgingly letting her skip a subquest through brute force), but still makes her use a character he made to replace Barry's.
- Replacement Goldfish: Mark blatantly treats Kelsey as a substitute for Barry, going so far as to make her play Barry's character and wear his (horribly oversized for her) armor.
- RPG Episode: It starts with the trio watching a live-stream of the Elders playing, then Kelsey takes over for Barry after he quits.
- Sequence Breaking: Kelsey skips a quest to get a treasure map when she assumes the quest-giver is a thief and more or less mugs him. Mark allows it, but complains that he'd spent hours on the parts they're missing entirely.
- Shout-Out: Barry bores Craig and J.P. by talking about older Cartoon Network and late Hanna-Barbera shows they're unfamiliar with, including relatively obscure ones like SWAT Kats and Sym-Bionic Titan. He specifically compares Craig and his friends to Ed, Edd n Eddy and Codename: Kids Next Door.
- Squee: Kelsey's reaction to Mark inviting her to join their RPG in Barry's place.
- Talking the Monster to Death: Mark gets mad at Barry for wanting to befriend enemies instead of fighting them. In the game Kelsey makes the Elders play, they face an ogre that is too strong for all attacks, and can only be defeated by befriending it.
- Third Wheel: Barry decides to hang around with Craig and J.P., but keeps derailing all of their activities and conversations to talk about cartoons they've never seen.
- Two Decades Behind: Zig-zagged; most of the cartoons Barry mentions shouldn't just be before Craig and J.P.'s time, but his as well (including The Pirates of Dark Water, which is almost thirty years old). However, he covers a pretty wide time range (the most recent was Sym-Bionic Titan), suggesting Barry watched them archived, even if his tone makes it sounds like he saw them when they were new. (It should be noted that the older Hanna-Barbera shows had Cartoon Network reruns contemporaneously to the premiere runs of the first Cartoon Cartoons.)
- When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Kelsey's solution to all her encounters in the game, even seemingly innocuous ones like a bard and a miner dwarf, is to attack with her sword (which Mark interprets as "intimidate into doing what I want").
