Sins of RPG Actual Plays

So you want to do a TTRPG Actual Play / Stream / Whatever? Here are some things to avoid and tips on how to make your content enjoyable for your viewers.

I'll try providing examples of various do's and don'ts if I'm able. These are meant to be for educational purpose only, and are not meant as an attack on the linked materials. It takes a lot of effort to produce high-quality content, a lot of these are amateur recordings, and everyone makes mistakes. Sometimes a good-sounding idea can turn out to be poor in execution, etc.

This advice can also be very specific to recording / streaming and might not always be applicable to normal games. So while you might learn about a thing or two that could be useful regardless, take things with a grain of salt.

As for my qualifications, I've been a part of a weekly RPG Podcast for about four years now, and I've listened through a few actual plays with a critical ear.

With all of that out of the way...

Don't name yourself after specific games

I've seen this one a few times - the group would enthusiastically name themselves based on a specific RPG system, or their first campaign and later it would be hard to rebrand once they move onto a different system or campaign.

ExalTwitch for example still doesn't seem to have a parent "brand" after that campaign ended and they switched over to Changeling: The Streaming. Both names are also very system-specific. As I understand their RPGClinic used to be a separate show by the same host, meaning that's three different "products" without an umbrella way to refer to the group.

Swallows of the South similarly leaned heavily into their campaign name, and now they are running their second game, Arms of the Tide, still without some other name to call themselves.

On the flip side you have groups like RollPlay, which has done shows like Swan Song, Far Verona, Mirrorshades, etc., each falling under one parent entity, while being its own show.

Overall sound quality

Probably the most important part of any actual play - sound quality. It's the most important thing to get right. If you don't have a clear audio, people might not have the patience to stay for anything else.

There are a few key things to look out for:

1) Eliminate background noise. Nobody wants to listen to things like loud fridges, fish tank aerators, computer fans, etc. Some of it can even be nauseating to listen to for a longer time.

For example, check out this Colonial Marines Actual Play. Skip to anywhere during the episode, listen for a few seconds, then pause and notice that humming sound just go away. That's one example of background noise you want to avoid.

Luckily, programs like Audacity let you remove some of this noise. We start all of our episode recordings with "30 seconds of silence" used for this purpose and it helps a lot.

2) Use push-to-talk, but avoid "on/off" sounds. If you're connecting for an online game, you will have to choose whether to use push-to-talk, or other microphone activation methods. Push to talk is generally the best since it's more deliberate - you know when you're on, and you know when you're off.

However, sometimes when you use push-to-talk, you might be creating a crackling sound when you start and stop your microphone. For an example, check out this episode - about 4 minutes in onward whenever Gary / Mirage talks, you hear the snap on snap off sounds, and that's really annoying. It's probably due to an analog push-to-talk, but it's something worth looking out for regardless.

3) Audio clipping. This is especially important when you're talking into some headphones - if you talk too loud, especially with some extra software audio boosts, your audio will clip and sound just awful. If you don't know what I'm talking about, see this video:

#1 - your gain is too high

4) Set your microphone up correctly. You can be talking to your microphone from the wrong side, you could have a wrong type of microphone for your needs, or you could even be recording from a wrong microphone (especially relevant to laptops with built-in microphones!). In general, watch this video:

5) Don't put your microphone on the table. Find a way to set it up somewhere where you won't be rolling or putting your things, ideally on some boom stands / arms, maybe even in a shock mount. Otherwise your audience will get the experience of putting their ears to your table and hearing every tap, slide, roll, etc. like they'd have their ear to the table itself:

42:55, putting down a cup in front of the microphone...

6) Disable notification sounds. We all have some sort of notifications that bug us every now and then - Discord, Slack, Facebook, other websites, system sounds, what have you. You don't want to have those on your recording - they are not only distracting, but can also make your audience think someone is messaging them. Disable all of those when you record.

In our Congenial S01E04 the first 20 minutes are an example of what to avoid.

This should cover the basics, now for some more advanced examples...

Audio balancing - music

If you want to add music to your game, make sure it doesn't overpower your voice audio. People are here to listen to your stories, and the music should be secondary. This can be especially problematic if the song in question doesn't have a consistent volume but swells over time. For an example of this, check out Demon City Slickers Eyes of Stone, Fists of Jade: Episode 3, 10 minutes in.

Audio balancing - voice

People have different default speaking volumes - some talk quietly, while others project their voice, especially when they get excited. You should compensate for this so that more or less the sound level of everyone recorded would be on a similar level - you don't want to have one person be too loud while someone else is too quiet for comfortable listening.

This could be achieved in a few ways. First of all, if you are recording an online game, you can usually adjust individual volumes and balance things that way. If you are recording in person, you can achieve something similar if you have multiple microphones, each for a different person and balancing their levels.

However, if you want a cheap solution that we used for our one microphone setup, here it is. Use distance to the microphone as a way of adjusting volume. Put the microphone on one side of the table and sit the quiet people close to it, while the louder people should be seated further away from it. This will have a similar effect as the other options while costing you nothing.

Avoid sharp sounds

A personal pet peeve of mine. Sharp sounds pick up REALLY well on microphones, so if you're doing things like putting glass beads in a glass bowl, rolling dice on a glass table, eating food on plates with utensils or using a tambourine for a dice tray, your audience will hear that really well, to the detriment of everything else.

On a similar note, if you're using music in your games that are on the higher pitch spectrum, make sure to play those a bit more quietly and don't play it for a prolonged period of time.

Examples of what to avoid:

• Demon City Slickers Eyes of Stone, Fists of Jade: Episode 1 and the "tambourine-assisted rolls" - every time a roll is made it's painful to listen to.
• ExalTwitch Day Eight, 2:11:00 in - the GM plays a character that talks in whispers, their theme song however has a lot of very long, vibrating, high-pitched notes. Couple that with audio balancing that might be a bit off and have the character be in the scene for awhile and your listeners can get a headache (I have!)
• ExalTwitch Day Eleven, 1:06:00 in - the cast uses glass beads for essentially mana points and they keep them in glass containers. Usually everyone is very careful about moving them, but sometimes you move a larger amount and hear the glass-on-glass noise. This one is not a particularly bad example, but I couldn't find a better illustration. Imagine what a careless group might do in this setup with dropping more glass beads into glass.
• Our Amp Year One S01E05 - 21:30 in one of the players decides to microwave some food and then proceeds to eat it during the recording with utensils from a plate. The microphone picks it up quite well. The episode also features a player being sick or having allergies and just inhaling it in sharply, which is also rather audible.

Songs with lyrics

Humans are good at picking up human speech out of even loud environments. What is harder though is picking up one person talking over another. For this reason it's best to avoid playing songs with lyrics in them - you will be drowning your own self out with these. Generally save those for your intro / outro and use them very sparingly during the game.

After-effects

Sometimes you might want to spice up your recording with some after-effects. While these can be nice if pulled off well (see Swallows of the South Prelude: Episode Six, 27 minutes in for a good example), they can be a detriment if you sacrifice clarity for the effect (see Demon City Slickers Eyes of Stone, Fists of Jade: Episode 4, 23 minutes in for an example of an effect that makes a character illegible). Try erring on the side of restraint unless you know what you're doing.

Anachronisms

One part of enjoying an actual play is getting immersed in the game and its world. This is especially important for heavily stylised games like Exalted, Warhammer 40k, or Legend of the Five Rings. One surefire way of breaking that immersion is introducing things that don't belong in that world, or even clash with it - anachronisms.

Swallows of the South Prelude Episode Four gives a good example of this around the 19:53 mark, where in a sword and sandal setting of Exalted characters use the threat of a bad Yelp review on one another...

Bringing up the missing PCs

It's somewhat expected that some players will miss a session every now and then or have to leave the game entirely. Sometimes you know in advance and can plan accordingly, while at other times you won't know until after the fact, that's just life.

The problem arises on how to deal with the missing characters plot-wise. You could try to explain why they're away, write them out in-universe or the like, or just ignore the issue entirely. The latter is our default go-to choice as it keeps things simple and moving and avoids one issue that tends to drag some games down - character bringing up the missing PCs.

Demon City Slickers Eyes of Stone, Fists of Jade Episode 03 is the first episode after one of the characters, Kleefin, leaves the show. That marks the start of the trend of Kulak, another one of the PCs, reminiscing about his missing friend and bringing the fact that he's missing to the forefront of multiple episodes.

A similar situation happens in Swallows of the South, when after Prelude: Episode Three Rizzo gets written off. For seasons Godwin keeps bringing him up, how much he misses him and how much he doesn't like the new PCs that were introduced in comparison to his missing best friend Rizzo. This ends up alienating another of the PCs, Ariston, for no reason of their own. By the time Rizzo comes back, another one of the original characters gets written off - Ajax, which also doesn't help the situation.

In general, unless you have some some good story to tell about the absence of a character, it's best to not bring them up too much if at all. Asking "where's Poochie" is usually not an interesting question for the audience if there is no actual answer.

Name drop your characters a lot

This one is especially important when you're starting a new game, but is a good rule to follow most of the time. Name drop your characters, a lot. Use them when talking to a PC, use them when describing what your character does, etc. Eventually people will learn the names and learn to associate them with your voice, but it takes awhile, especially if someone is new to your podcast and doesn't know the entire cast yet.

The first episode of Congenials for example does a poor job of this - even though I know some of these people, it still took me an episode or two to be able to tell which character someone is playing and who is doing what.

Conclusions

There are a lot of things to get right when it comes to making actual plays. Listen to your material with a critical ear, listen to other actual plays to pick up their slip-ups.. Learn from the mistakes and aim to improve.