RPG Blender - an Exalted Podcast review (up to Episode 56)

I’ve spent the last few years listening through a few of the Exalted RPG Podcasts / Actual Plays and I figured I’d share my thoughts on them with you. There is a good deal one can learn from them, whether you’re making your own actual plays or just gaming in general.

In today's episode, I will cover RPG Blender’s unnamed Exalted 3E campaign (one shot, plus Season 1 Episodes 1-56).

1) Disclaimers

There are a few important disclaimers to get out of the way before we start.

First of all, I understand this was a fan project and should be judged accordingly. I am thankful for the effort the cast has put into entertaining us with their stories, but there will be some criticism of the podcast present.

Secondly, any criticism made against the characters portrayed or how the game played out should not be held as criticism or insults of the game master or the players. Not everyone is perfect and sometimes something doesn’t work out or falls flat in execution. It’s important to keep the art separate from the artist and focus on the former without being disrespectful to the latter.

Thirdly, since I’m also a part of an RPG Actual Play Podcast that features Exalted games, I might be biased towards one interpretation and way of handling things in Exalted that might not agree with how others view and play the game, that’s to be expected. That and some might see criticising other podcasts a conflict of interest or something, so here is your disclaimer.

Finally, there will be some spoilers for the show, it would be rather hard to discuss some things without that...

2) Overview and minor things

This Exalted campaign is hosted by George (Twitter) and is part of the RPGBlender podcast. This game started as a one-shot session as a part of their Grab Bag Gaming “let’s try a system and see how it shakes out” type of game, but has since grown into a full-blown campaign. It's a game recorded over a voice call that’s later been cut down into 1 hour sessions and uploaded to YouTube.

The game follows a handful of mortal heroes that Exalt, explore their cool new powers and get roped into political machinations a bit beyond their grasp.

Episode synopsis

3) Player Characters

The campaign features a mostly fixed cast of player characters that go from mortal to Exalted:

Smiling Mountain, aka Mnemon Rakin (m) - a Dawn Caste giant strong punchman that believes in the rule of the strong.

Dirum Borath, aka Cathak Lau (m) - a Twilight Caste archaeologist and artifice enthusiast.

Strings Like Fingers (m) - an Eclipse Caste flamboyant crazy horse girl man that loves his amazing horse, Invincible 2.

Adramalihk, aka Cynis Niddala (m) - a Day Caste Abyssal, a down-on-his-luck dynast that wants to return his family to the glory they deserve. Has a monkey named Uba and a cult of devoted followers.

4) General Plot

So far, there are basically four stories in this campaign so far.

Firstly, there is the one-shot campaign where Mountain and Dirum as mortals go out to Darthask to investigate an Anathema sighting as a part of a Wyld Hunt.

The second story is the Daughter of Nexus module where the group tries saving a daughter of the god of Nexus from being used for nefarious purposes.

The third story is the players investigating a mysterious treasure island that has called out to them in a dream, from the Tomb of Dreams module.

The forth and ongoing story is the group’s adventures on the way back from that island where they decided to have a quick stop in the city of Nechara and got roped into a large conflict between the city and the Broken Horn Tribe hoping to conquer it.

5) Highlights

5.1) Group’s First Exalted Experience

From everything that’s been stated, this is the group’s first Exalted experience. They try the system for the first time during their one-shot, and then continue the campaign afterwards. It is interesting to watch those players get over their D&D brain and slowly embrace the higher-power game while being wide-eyed newcomers to the world.

Sure, this might not be what some Exalted fans might be looking for in their actual play, but viewed through the lens of what the group is trying to accomplish, it’s a solid exploration of the system.

5.2) Biased introduction to the world

One thing you can’t really do with players that have read a lot of Exalted is to introduce them to a world in a biased way, which the GM did pretty solidly at the start. George told them the tale of holy tyrants that oppressed the world that had to be struck down by heroes rising up, and how that brought about the freedom of the world. Except this wasn’t the story of the Primordial War, but of the Usurpation. The players, as a Wyld Hunt retinue, are primed to hate the Solars… until they become them. It is an interesting take on the dynamic of the world you don’t often get in games like this that is made possible by the players not knowing the world too much before jumping in.

5.3) Some good characters and drama

A large part of a successful Actual Play comes from the characters involved and their dynamics with one another, and RPG Blender does deliver on that a bit. You don’t have any Godwins or Mocking White Winds (characters that winge or are too paranoid), and any inter-character drama is first discussed OOG from what I’ve been told, so that’s the baseline.

Strings Like Fingers was a nice, colourful character. He had the most wuxia design of the whole group (long robes, long fingernails, a meter-long pipe, etc.) and seemed to be the character most comfortable with how the Exalted setting operates (once he gets over his D&Disms from the first episode). Him being really infatuated with his horse, Invincible 2, was also very amusing. It was unfortunate that the party would often find themselves in places where that horse couldn’t go. The party dynamic felt a bit off ever since this character left the show.

Adramalihk seems to be stealing the show though in his own way. His weasely mannerisms come off quite well, and they are well suited for a Day Caste. His player can also deliver on his complex backstory - being a member of house Cynis that is uncomfortable with what his family and he has done in the past, having to live with the indignity of being impoverished, being driven to reclaim his just deserved place in society, and being a leader of a cult-commune that has built itself around him. Every now and then you get into his emotional core and the player can deliver.

Dirum and Mountain are not bad characters, but they seem to fall under “mostly okay”. I’ll talk about them later.

5.4) Flashback combat tutorial!

Since the one-shot the group ran was the players’ first introduction to Exalted, the GM decided to teach them how the system’s combat works by the means of a flashback tutorial bout with their teacher. It was an amusing scene, being about as self-aware as a video game tutorial, but got the job done. It was a neat trick on the GM’s part.

5.5) Playing pre-written modules

While watching the earlier episodes of the campaign, some things were a bit weird. Some of the plot points were a bit weird - multiple factions wanted to use the daughter of the city god of Nexus to turn the city into a shadowland or a wyld pocket somehow. Then things clicked more when it was pointed out the group’s first adventure after the one-shot was a pre-written module - the Daughter of Nexus. The next adventure was also a module - the Tomb of Dreams.

On one hand it’s interesting to see some of Exalted’s pre-written scenarios be played, but on the other hand, it doesn’t seem those scenarios were that great to begin with. It would be interesting to see if some other modules make their way into the series, it would certainly be unique among the Exalted Actual Plays I’ve seen so far.

5.6) Social combat

In Episodes 35 and 36 the group had an unusual conflict - a full blown social combat. The circle decided to appeal to the council of Nechara to get a peaceful resolution of their conflict with the Broken Horn Tribe. The GM ran it as a quasi-combat where the circle had to figure out and convince enough of the councilmembers to get the vote to go in their favour. In the second episode they were also pitted against some Dragonblooded to up the stakes.

The players said the conflict was more stressful than the actual combats they were in and it did feel a bit tense and high stakes listening to it, especially given that the circle couldn’t let their anima flare during this conversation. It was definitely a fun situation to listen to.

5.7) Abyssal Resonance

I’m always a sucker for seeing how people play into Exalted’s Limit system, and it seems we might be getting something brewing here. While between the three Solars we had about one Limit roll, our resident Abyssal Adramalihk has done quite a few transgressions against Oblivion (mostly because I’m guessing they weren’t laid out to him from the start, instead he’s learning them as the episodes go on). It will definitely be interesting to see how far that will get pushed and what will be the implications of it. Now if we could get the Solars to do a temper tantrum spiral…

5.8) Animal antics

The series’ running joke is the players realising they can make their GM do animal noises by taking an animal Familiar and having fun with it. You get your regular dose of monkey noises out of it.

5.9) Interesting enough cult

Character cults in demigod games can be a hit or miss affair. Usually the NPCs in them tend to be really flat, existing only as a hivemind that just sings their patron’s praises. While we do get that to an extent, there is a little bit of extra depth on display here.

Adramalihk is a person with a personal grudge compensating for his family’s impoverished status. His cult is his second family, one that he takes care of and nurtures, and they in turn work themselves to the bone out of devotion to him. The relationship has a little bit of give and take from both sides. It’s not much, but it feels a little bit less bad than some other cults I’ve seen.

Unfortunately, we also have a bit of moralising from Dirum about how cults are bad that takes up a good deal of screen time repeatedly. It also doesn’t seem to be going anywhere beyond people giving Adramalihk flak for taking that Merit, which is a bit unfortunate. But on the plus side, apparently the players did check in with one another before they started arguing in-character, so that’s good to know! Would be nice if the arguments actually went anywhere other than just lingering pretty much unresolved for the characters though…

5.10) Consent before arguing

Exalted and similar demigod games tend to make people argue with one another a lot about morality and other things, and those moments in an Actual Play can be uncomfortable if you think the players are actually yelling at one another. It was a big thing in Swallows of the South, Princes of the Universe, and in A Pair of Dice Lost’s Exalted campaign (the one they did a recap of).

I was a bit anxious when I heard Dirum’s player start raising his voice while arguing with Adramalihk about his cult, but as mentioned above - from what I heard the players did check in with one another before that argument happened, so good on them! It would be nice for that to be a part of the recorded episode, but it’s at least good to know it’s not an afterthought for the crew.

6) Criticism

No show is without its flaws, and so we should turn to what RPG Blender has committed. Not as an attack on the show or its creators, but as a learning experience on how everyone could improve...

6.1) Straddling the line between D&D and Exalted

One downside of the group being new to Exalted but not new to RPGs is that they do bring some baggage, assumptions and incorrect style of play into the game. The series teeters on the edge between being Exalted and “D&D but in a different system”. Sometimes you are dealing with demons being trapped in a dream and used as a safe to store ancient artefacts, while other times you are watching a rogue sneak into a building and look for loot to steal.

The worst example of this is understandably pretty early, in Season 1 Episode 1 where characters get a rescue quest to go into a sewer, haggle for an advancement, fret about buying the correct supplies and so on. This being the first episode this is understandable, although this kind of “adventurer” attitude appears every now and then. A large chunk of S1E26 is spent fretting about having to change clothes to remain incognito, snubbing some proposed clothes since they were woven by a cult, exploring a clothes store in bumpkinville and so on.

If you expect epic heroic fantasy all the time, you will be disappointed.

6.2) Only the GM reads the lore

While it’s all well and good for the players to go into a system blind, that novelty can only last so long. Eventually, it gets a little grating that the players don’t seem to know some basic stuff about the world, especially when they are supposed to be educated dynasts from the Realm. Meanwhile you have someone 50 sessions in talking about “The Empire” (The Realm), “The Holy Order” (The Immaculate Order), “the Ascended” (The Exalted) and “Elementalists” (The Dragonblooded) and it’s getting a bit old.

Similarly, one of the players decided a running gag with them is that they can guess peoples’ names on a random chance. But rather than using some list of eastern-inspired names, or getting poetic with wuxia names, the player tends to guess some modern western names more often than not which doesn’t add to the immersive feeling of the game. A Stephanie and a Samantha don’t belong in Exalted…

The GM seems to be well enough read in the setting, so that stops it from being a complete write-off. But if you want to compensate for your players not reading the book, you really need someone steeped in the setting. Swallows of the South had a similar issue to an extent, but Quinn painted such a vivid world you got nicely immersed in it, and the players did pick up what he was putting down.

A big appeal of Exalted is its world and lore. It’s the reason why you make characters tied to The Realm and its Great Houses, why you go to Nexus and deal with the Emissary to avoid a Wyld Hunt. All of those things have a narrative meaning behind them you can draw on, rather than making up your own empire, city, people, etc. in the vast swathes of uncharted Creation.

6.3) The world is empty

In comparison to a few other Exalted Actual Plays, the world presented by RPG Blender feels rather empty. It is a bit telling when some of the most developed NPCs of the game are a pet monkey and a horse.

The series didn’t introduce too many deep NPCs, and a few that were introduced are mostly tied to their respective areas. Of ones that appeared in more than one episode, you had Useless Sparrow and Pluton of the Endless Stream in the one-show, two guild hierarchs, the Emissary and Avia in Nexus, three spirits during their dream adventure, and in Nechara you had Captain Njalan, Lore Of Autumn, Cynis Lanawle, Nanik, a bartender, and an angry undead. On top of that you have about two or three recurring members of Adramalihk’s cult, Uba the monkey and Invincible 2 and that’s about every NPC that’s worth remarking about that has appeared in the series. This isn’t much, especially given how some of those NPCs are “silo’d” in their part of the world and understandably you can’t interact with them if you are elsewhere. So having like half a dozen NPCs for a whole city where you spend 20+ hours is a bit sparse…

Funny enough though, the one-shot episodes were filled with a neat cast of colourful characters, but they mostly appeared in flashbacks to set things up for the players.

We seem to be slowly getting more interesting characters in the latter part of the series when the group is not going back and forth between their boat, the forest, investigating some empty buildings or talking with a literal masked and undistinguishable council of seven people. Captain Njalan is growing a personality, we have an interesting villain show up, Lore of Autumn is not a one note antagonist Lunar, etc. Cynis Lanawle especially had an interesting potential - she is a member of a Sworn Brotherhood that’s bringing a Wyld Hunt into Nechara to investigate some Anathema sightings and so on. Her first interaction with the Circle was through a heated debate in front of the ruling council, which was an interesting conflict that let the players learn a good deal about her. So things are looking up, but might be a while before we get Swallow’s Aria or Seven Symphonious Cords.

6.4) Time passing day by day

This campaign makes keeping track of time an important part of the game (for training times as well as with some ticking clocks), but also likes to drag some of that time day-by-day, character-by-character. This was especially painful in S01E13 where you spent an hour on something that could’ve been montaged to 10-15 minutes - one character was doing research, one was helping them with said research, another character was tailing an NPC for no payoff, and the last person was stealing some supplies. But since one of them was involved in a difficult Extended Roll he could only do once a day, we got to hear a week’s worth of what everyone was up to, two time slots a day. Makes me wish for Fellowship’s A Little Downtime…

6.5) Playing overcautiously and the Solar problem

While cautiously might be the way a lot of people play RPGs, it can get a little old in an Actual Play. Part of it is a setting problem, part of it is a player problem.

As with most Exalted Solar Actual Plays, our protagonists go out of their way to keep their powers on the down low in the fear of party popper Wyld Hunt showing up on your doorstep. We’ve seen it in ExalTwitch and in Swallows of the South, and it’s a bit same-y by now. But can’t blame RPG Blender for playing the game the way it kind of wants you to play it, even if we’ve seen it before elsewhere. However, this isn’t the only way the game is overly cautious.

The group came to Nechara in Episode 22. They wanted to have “a quick beach episode” here. But players being players messed with some things and ended up getting roped in as the local Anathema specialists and diplomats trying to solve an old feud between the city and a local tribe that has been trying to raid it for some information. Rather than picking a side they have been very cautious in committing to anything, instead going back and forth between the two sides and negotiating a peaceful solution. This isn’t helped by the fact that a Wyld Hunt has showed up in the city AND the fact that the tribe is being helped by a few Lunars working for a Lunar kingdom of Mahalanka that wants to conquer the city, forcefully relocate the inhabitants and use it as a staging ground for fighting against the Realm. But you know, let’s try appeasing both sides here and see how that works out! ;)

The whole peaceful resolution option seems to be only pushed by the players really wanting to avoid bloodshed while not having much in the ways of negotiating skills or goodwill from the Lunars to avoid the war. It’s mostly wishful thinking bordering on delusion to make it work, and it’s a bit frustrating to watch the players just keep chugging along in that direction rather than resolve the issue faster or more directly by playing it too safe.

6.6) Wobbly character dynamics

A big appeal in a lot of Actual Plays are the characters and how they interact with one another. Unfortunately, it doesn’t feel the group dynamics are entirely there in this adventure, at least not since Strings left.

Mountain and Dirum form your foundation. They are war buddies that will be together through thick and thin. Sometimes that dynamic does feel like it’s veering towards Godwin and Ajax territory (characters that were introduced first are buddy buddy with one another and when a new character joins they are “the outsider” and not treated) with Mountain having Dirum’s back on more than one occasion, but it’s not egregious.

Mountain is a character that believes the strong should rule, and that tends to come up every now and then when he flexes on other characters in situations you sometimes don’t expect, like when he withheld possibly dangerous artefacts from the group by putting it under something only he could lift to assert his strength-based dominance.

Dirum fills the leader role in the group, at least as far as directing Mountain and trying to negotiate with various NPC parties. Unfortunately, sometimes he has problems being the party’s face, which was more comfortably filled by Strings when he was still there. His base character concept (an Indiana Jones style character that’s really into Artefacts) also doesn’t come up very often since the player doesn’t seem to pursue many of his goals actively all that much (sure, he does a lot of leg work with book research to advance the plot twice, but that feels more reactionary).

Adramalihk feels like the odd character out in the group, which is a shame. He’s a Day Caste, so you expect some degree of sneaking out on his own and doing things independently, and he does shine there. The problem is that he’s kind of in a similar space as Dirum otherwise - he kind of plays a face but without a strong preference for it, and he could be a leader if Mountain and Dirum would follow, but those two prefer their own dynamics.

So overall, it feels the group is lacking some key dynamics you’d want in a group. You want someone that at least knows a bit about the setting to quickly pick up what the GM is putting down and maybe push the plot forward with some decisive actions. Give this group a Killer Queen or a Royal and they could sing.

6.7) Is this an ambush? Fishing for dice

Exalted is a Storyteller system, so it comes with the usual mechanics you’d expect from the system, including skill specialties. While most of them are okay enough, one of the players picked a specialty that for me has become a bit grating over time - an Awareness specialty of "Ambushes".

So whenever something unexpected happens and the players are told to roll for Awareness, the inevitable question comes up - “is this an ambush?”. This gets especially repetitive since Awareness is also used for Join Battle roll, meaning every combat also opens up with this question.

This wouldn’t be too bad if it wasn’t for the fact that that player likes to haggle with the GM for dice. Sure, it’s done in a playful way, but it gets old sooner than later.

You similarly get more and more haggling for stunts, assists, using one roll instead of another and so on as the players learn the system. Part of it is understandably due to how the Exalted system works - you describe your action for a Stunt, GM judges how many dice you get for that, and then you roll all of those dice. So it’s primed for players to fish for those bonus dice. But it gets a bit old when a player jokes that a small description should be some really big dice bonus, especially if they are not doing it for themselves but for someone else.

I get that the player just wants to be funny, but the system is a bit slow as is and haggling for dice on top of stunts on top of rolling 10+ dice and picking which charms to use starts to add to the tedium rather than excitement.

6.8) Audio quality

While most of the time the audio quality from the group is pretty good, things do dip down every now and then. A player or two have the tendency to go loud and over-saturate the recording, sometimes a lower quality headset microphone is used, etc. The show also seems to be using an automated piece of software to cut out all the dead air in recordings, but at times it gets a bit too eager and starts clipping into the start of sentences which also makes it a little bit less comfortable to listen to. But generally, it’s pretty serviceable.

7) Conclusions

Overall, RPG Blender’s Exalted campaign is fine enough. I wish I could praise it more, but there isn’t that much I could say about it even after watching through it twice. It’s not the most captivating game, but it’s got competent production value. The characters have some potential, but too often they are spinning their wheels. It’s fine enough as a first foray into Exalted, but after 50 episodes I would expect a little bit more to come out of it.

The game is teetering between being an Exalted-level heroic fantasy, and dipping down to the characters being D&D-level adventurers. It isn’t a good place for it to sit though, since people that come in expecting an Exalted game would be put off. It does take a bit of a perspective shift to get into the correct head space for the players though, so it can be challenging.

The show would probably benefit from having a fourth member to improve the group dynamics. Ideally we’d have Strings back, but understandably that might not be possible. Beyond that, we need the world to be a bit more fleshed out - have a few more strong, well-defined NPCs for players to interact with. Finally, we need the players to start taking some more decisive actions. Commit to one side of the conflict and go with it rather than trying to appease everyone.

With all that being said, I think the show is starting to improve in the more recent episode. After a while the group has met a number of important NPCs in Nechara, they have had their run-in with a colourful Wyld Hunt gang and we might be heading towards some climax of the current conflict. It seems the crew also had a talk about embracing the more heroic nature of Exalted and jumping into action more readily, as apparent by Episode 56. So I’m cautiously hopeful that the show will get better sooner than later.

I plan on revisiting this review once the campaign is officially over, which might not be for a while it seems - the GM has hinted on a possibly lengthy meta-plot the characters might be facing.

Play with a purpose - filler content in streams and actual plays, looking at RPG Blender

Recently I've been watching some RPG Blender actual play of Exalted 3E and I've noticed something about a few episodes or scenes - there was basically little of note happening in them! You could summarise entire scenes or hour long episodes down in a sentence or two and not lose much. As someone that is also a part of an actual play group I think there is something to be learned here.

It's time to talk about optimising air time!

Disclaimers

There are a few important disclaimers to get out of the way before we start.

First of all, I understand this was a fan project and should be judged accordingly. I am thankful for the effort the cast has put into entertaining us with their stories, but there will be some criticism of the podcast present.

Secondly, any criticism made against the characters portrayed or how the game played out should not be held as criticism or insults of the game master or the players. Not everyone is perfect and sometimes something doesn’t work out or falls flat in execution. It’s important to keep the art separate from the artist and focus on the former without being disrespectful to the latter.

Thirdly, since I’m also a part of an RPG Actual Play Podcast that features Exalted games, I might be biased towards one interpretation and way of handling things in Exalted that might not agree with how others view and play the game, that’s to be expected. That and some might see criticising other podcasts a conflict of interest or something, so here is your disclaimer.

With that out of the way...

The offenders - idle chat, planning, combat and downtime

So here is an overview of the kind of situations I noticed are just "filler" in the episode, in a sense that you could cut them down or out without losing much of the story.

In Season 1 Episode 1 Welcome To Nexus the second half of the episode boils down to "buy supplies, go down a sewer pipe, dodge molten metal that barely does harm to you, find some tracks and follow them". This takes a good half an hour to get through. Sure, part of it is due to the group being new to the system (they only ever played a one-shot of the system, and Exalted 3E is a bit of a dense game), but the other part is everyone in the party interacting with the same tracks (looking at them, smelling them, tasting them) while mostly chatting idly and repeating what the GM told them.

In Season 1 Episode 11 Freedom For Arvia the second half of the episode consists almost entirely of the group planning what to do next, going over their options for where to turn in their quest basically.

Season 1 Episode 8, 9 and 10 are almost entirely made out of one extended fight.

In Season 1 Episode 13 Perchance to Dream the players describe how they spend a week of downtime, day after day, which boils down to "get paid, do a research in a library, talk about the dream they are having, steal some things, tail someone and do some training".

So let's go over the concepts one by one.

The idle chatter is a bit of a difficult one to avoid. You want your players to be talking to one another and engage with what is being presented, since that is a step up from players being rather passive and not filling the airtime. But on the other hand, if they are already good about creating enough content, you don't want everyone commenting on everything that's going on. If someone is focused on finding a trail, the spotlight is on them to lead the group to follow them. It's their time to shine and have the spotlight! Heck, Exalted 3E even incentivises you with a Role Bonus - you get XP for letting others have a spotlight and being cool according to their character concept:

Over-planning is one of those problems a number of more modern RPGs try to solve. It's a hard habit to break - players want to make optimal decisions and they want to anticipate problems that might arise, but that not only leads to overly-cautious play, but also a lot of air time devoted to chatting about the things you're going to do rather than doing them. Heck, in our Princes of the Universe game those things would even end in a deadlock because players couldn't agree on what to do, or didn't like what others wanted to do. It fostered an attitude of "just do what you want, since the group is more likely to forgive you after the fact since they won't care anymore than agree to let you do it in the first place"...

But at any rate, this kind of planning and deliberation not only takes a good deal of time in the game, it's also not that terribly engaging in comparison to the players actually doing something. It would be much more productive to develop some trust between the players and the GM and speed things along. Players shouldn't deliberate too much on what to do next, and the GM shouldn't punish them for acting without considering everything. Heck, it's more entertaining when not everything goes the way the players wanted and there is some obstacle to overcome, but those shouldn't be seen as a punishment but as a cool action scene you get to do.

Combat being slow is unfortunately the staple of Exalted 3E and many other systems, so it's kind of unavoidable. Heck, in one of our own episodes we spend like, 3 hours doing a fight that amounted to like one or two cool situations. There is a good deal of back and forth in Exalted combat, which is not helped by players being able to "stunt" their defence (cinematically describing how they counter an attack to get a boost to their defense). In a pre-recorded game, ideally you'd edit out a lot of the pauses, rolls, rules lookups and all that, but it can be a bit of a problem for streamed games.

Unfortunately, there isn't a great time saver to be had here unless you'd switch out what game you're using, which might not be the option for every group. Save that, maybe you could try optimising your game to speed things up a little. Maybe limiting the amount of combatants in a fight, maybe cutting down on some stunting (like, assume everyone gets a stunt so people don't have to describe how they parry a sword with their sword for the 20th time), etc.

Downtime, on the other hand, is something that can use a good deal of streamlining. Players should come into it with a purpose - what they want to accomplish. Based on that, everyone could get a scene where they do just that and focus on that being a cool moment, rather than switch between one player and the next every minute as they incrementally do what they set out to do. Give them some time slots. Heck, give the players a heads up that they will be doing a downtime and ask them to come up with interesting things they'd like to do ahead of the session so you'd come into this freeform time knowing what cool stuff will be going down!

Part of the downtime in RPG Blender that make it a little longer was also down to calling for some rolls that didn't need them. The big goal of that session was figuring out a vision the characters were having - where in the world is it located. That was accomplished by paying for a library access and two characters bunkering down to study it over the course of multiple rolls. The thing is, this was basically a start of a new quest for them, so from the narrative perspective, the players couldn't fail to find the location otherwise the entire quest couldn't begin. This makes it so strange why they were rolling to do the research, other than it taking up some time...

How other games streamline this

It's one thing to talk about some lofty theory on what to do and another to point out some systems that are already solving these issues. So let's talk about Fellowship!

Lesson one - supplies. In Fellowship you don't generally buy gear, your character comes with a gear list you pick from during character creation. The game knows you're an adventurer, so you have the basic supplies that don't matter for the story (something to sleep on, clothes, all that jazz). If you need a piece of gear to solve a problem (like a climbing rope, a ladder, some consumable tool, etc.) that's covered under Useful Gear:

So bam - no shopping is needed, if you want to come prepared make sure you have Useful items, no need to plan anything specific. Easy peasy, squeezed lemons.

Lesson two - working together. In Exalted, if multiple people are working together, first person rolls a check and the number of successes are added as dice to the next person's roll. Also, since this is Exalted, both of them will be stunting to describe how they are helping and so on and so on. That's like twice the amount of descriptions and rolls than you need. In Fellowship that's Bond That Bind Us:

People declare they are doing the same thing together, only one of them rolls, but adds an extra die to the roll and everything's easy. You don't have multiple people doing the same roll, but cooperation is still useful. Easy!

Lesson three - failing forward and investigation. Fellowship very much wants your game to progress, even if it is through failure. So when you are examining some clues or doing some research, you will always learn something, even if it backfires in some way. This ensures there is no gridlock in the game because the players roll badly and fail to get the clue they need to unlock the next step of the quest. This is done through Look Closely:

And of course, if you have other people helping you with the research, you use The Bonds That Bind Us so only one person rolls even if multiple people are contributing and so on. It's more efficient!

Lesson four - combat. In Fellowship, the combat isn't turn by turn, but more flowing. The spotlight is on you, you continue rolling until you fail and get into trouble, then the spotlight goes to someone else. If you're not saved from your consequences by the time the spotlight comes back to you, you have to deal with it yourself, usually by taking the hit. This basically means there will be less moving the combat beat by beat from player to player, but having more action scenes going down one after the other.

Lesson five - downtime. In Fellowship, this is a structured activity called A Little Downtime:

This covers doing research, training, having some other cool moments over the course of time passing and so on. It usually takes only minutes though, after which the group accomplishes what they need so they can get to their next objective. Sometimes to deal with a situation you have to "spend" enough scenes of the Downtime addressing the issue. It's still simple and efficient (and ties very neatly into a long rest, healing up, changing gear and how the BBEG progresses their evil plans, but that's a story for another time when we discuss Fellowship in more detail).

Conclusions

When you're creating an RPG stream or an actual play, you want to come into the game and every scene with a direction and a purpose. You want to entertain your audience and respect their time. Chatter for the sense of chatter shouldn't exist - you want to have scenes that further the plot, explore the characters, entertain, world build, etc.

And if you can pick games that streamline the game, or at least steal some good ideas from them to help you with your game, all the better ;).

Boundaries, genre conventions and breaking kayfabe in RPGs

Recently I ran into a post on reddit asking for advice on how to deal with a player having an emotional response and getting depressed over a death of an NPC they couldn't save. OP did want to remove them from the group not to ruin everyone else's fun, which a number of people chastised (and is one of the reasons I won't link it here). The whole situation did remind me of an idea we had in our podcasting group though about how to handle similar situations.

Draw boundaries

If you want to have a game where everyone is comfortable in playing, you ought to communicate both what you expect out of the game, as well as discussing boundaries. The latter is often overlooked since a lot of people just go off of what's been acceptable in their circle of friends and so on. A good deal of the time that's fine, but sometimes you do have to be more explicit since RPGs are prone to a lot more bleed than other games.

If you want to establish boundaries more explicitly, it might be handy to use #iHunt's Levels Worksheet:

Part of #iHunt's Level Worksheet, expanded edition from
Kissing Monsters in the Gig Economy

It will help you make sure everyone is comfortable with various topics, scenes and so on, and know what things to avoid not to make someone uncomfortable. If the game you wanted to play would feature those elements (say, the problematic "romance" present in Curse of Stradth or Bluebeard's Bride), it would be a good time to discuss them and consider altering those elements, or picking something else to play entirely.

Establish genre conventions

Talking about the boundaries is not only about what a person is comfortable with, but it's also a good time to discuss genre conventions. There is a world of difference between MCU, The Tick, Watchmen and Invincible, even though they all fall under the "superhero" genre.

So establish your genre conventions! Talk about what kind of things you do and don't want to happen. Maybe you want to be a hero and make sure no innocent bystander would die. That is a valid way to play, and as long as everyone is on the same page, it can be fun.

Not every game has to have character or NPC death be the price of failure. Sure, if people want that, it's a valid way of playing, but sometimes you do want to get invested in various characters and stay with them. You can also get a bit more creative with things...

Breaking kayfabe

Kayfabe is a term from professional wrestling that focuses on portrayals of wrestling events as if they were real. Basically, wrestlers always have to stay in character in front of the general public even if they are not in the ring not to break the illusion of wrestling.

In the World Wide Wrestling RPG that part of the genre is emulated - the outcomes of matches are fixed and you're supposed to play into it most of the time. However, you can explicitly Break Kayfabe to change the script and get what you want, but that can risk bad things happening to you since you're going against the genre convention.

If you want to have fun with your game (and everyone at the table similarly are into this), you can play around with that idea of breaking kayfabe. Basically, as long as the players follow their role in the story, the GM similarly is bound by the rules of the genre convention and can't hurt them too much. But then the players can start bending and breaking the rules slowly shifting the overton window to get what they want, at the cost of losing the protection of the genre because they are breaking kayfabe. This could set up an interesting "fall from grace" story akin to:

"A Street Thug Beat A God"

Or on the other hand you could make it into a genre deconstruction where the characters realise that being a superhero that doesn't kill doesn't make you the good guy. There is a good amount of stuff that can be done with this kind of premise.

Conclusions

So in conclusion, make sure you establish boundaries of what everyone at the table is comfortable with, have a chat about what kind of things you want to see within those boundaries, and if you're feeling like toying with those assumptions, see what comes when you tear them down methodically.

RPG betrayals and the meta game of friendship - the finale of the Crown of Candy

Recently, I've been watching some Dimension 20's Crown of Candy series, which was a somewhat ruthless game reminiscent of Game of Thrones wrapped in a sentient food aesthetic. Spoiler warning for the series - at the end of the series when the players won their decisive victory, they were faced with a dilemma - do they keep their fragile alliance, or do they backstab one another to have it all. This was an interesting example of the meta game of friendship you build around the table I'd like to discuss today.

The Crown of Candy trailer

Trust, friendships and bleed at the table

As discussed before, different tables will have a different level of trust built up over time of playing together for a while. If you're playing with randos online, chances are someone might turn out to be an asshole and backstab everyone at a drop of a hat. If you have a stable game going, usually you learn not to do that and respect one another's characters (unless everyone is into playing a backstab game of course, then all bets are off).

Along with that, you build friendships with the people you play, bonding over the many adventures you had together.

Every now and then, you also can experience bleed - mixing in-game and out-of-game feelings, grudges, etc. If someone hurt your character, you can feel personally hurt. It comes with the territory of being really invested in a game and a character.

Those three factors contribute to the meta game of friendship - when you play an RPG, you're not only playing the game, but also engaging with your fellow players at the table at the same time. Because of this, you tend to avoid doing something that might upset the other players, even if it would fit the narrative to do so (at least not without checking in with them first). If you don't, you might "win" something in the game, but lose someone's trust or friendship that would carry over to your future games.

This is kind of reminiscent of GeekNights' "Practical Game Theory" panel where they discuss threats and trust - if you play a game repeatedly, you can make credible threats that will affect the games you're playing. If you always punish anyone that messes with you to ensure they don't win even if you lose, eventually they will learn not to mess with you:

So the trust and betrayal in RPG would work similarly to game theory - by cooperating everyone gains something, but if you betray someone you break their trust and everyone is worse off in the long-term.

The Crown of Candy situation

The dilemma at the end of the Crown of Candy was like this - On one side you had Queen Saccharina, played by Emily Axford, daughter of King Amethar from his first marriage, abandoned by her mother at a church orphanage due to her magical prowess (non-cleric magic in the setting was heretical). She later became a queen of outlaws living at the edge of Candian society. After joining the game, she was crowned the Queen of Candia (after her father lost his claim to the throne), obtained a hatchling dragon and let it feed on the hearts of the priests to let it grow to an adult size by the time of the final battle. On the other side you had Princess Ruby, played by Siobhan Thompson, was a rogue princess, twin to Emily's previous character, Princess Jet, and half-sister to Saccharina. She didn't approve of Saccharina's ways and knew what kind of future her reign might bring.

Those two players were given an option to backstab one another at the end of the game. Ruby knew Saccharina would upend the status quo and go on a crusade to eradicate much of the church, and would probably be unfit to rule Candia. Saccharina was advised that the nobles look down on her due to her upbringing and would gladly kill her now that they don't need her to retake Candia.

So did either of them do it?

Watching the video, I had no doubt of the outcome. Siobhan and Emily have played through 5 series together, everyone at the table has been nice to each other, they have faced many hardships together in this series, playing inseparable twins that schemed together. They wouldn't backstab each other's characters, especially given that this was the end of the series - there was nothing for them to gain beyond a different epilogue. And yeah, shocking nobody, they decided to trust one another and have a happy ending together.

Last minute betrayal would certainly make for a shocking moment in the show, but would probably cause some strife between the caste members and some longer-term distrust. Sure, they are professionals, but if you watch the behind the scenes of the series they are jokingly dissing on the GM for backstabbing and killing their characters a few times in the series.

Backstabs in other actual plays

Thinking about it, I haven't really seen that many other actual plays that have the characters backstabbing one another. I've watched a number of other Dimension 20 shows, as well as various games by Arms of the Tide, A Pair of Dice Lost, RPG Clinic, etc. and played a lot of games on our very own podcast - Sponsored by Nobody. Sure, we had a number of "a character does whatever they want disregarding what others think" moments in Evicting Epistle, Princes of the Universe, Conspiracy at Krezk, etc. However, only one series had a genuine betrayal.

In Princes of the Universe (spoilers), there was one situation that was almost that, and one that was a full-on "I'm the bad guy". The first one was when the party managed to find the Eye of Autochthon, an ancient relict of nigh-infinite power. They wanted to use it to wake up a titan, but not before everyone had a mexican standoff to make sure nobody else would steal it and use it for their own goals. My character was a Night Caste (a hero-thief essentially) and was the only one that could actually steal it without anyone having a counter to his powers, so the GM asked me if I do it. In the end I decided not to, since it would turn the game into PVP, and being 1v4 had really poor odds. Plus it would be an asshole thing to do.

The other situation came at the end of the whole game, where after fighting the Scarlet Empress, the ruler of the world, the party was faced with a secret foe that was pulling the strings all along. During that fight, one of the PCs, Longhorn Desertwolf, turned on the rest of the party and was revealed to have been working for that foe all along. The reason why that twist worked though was because of how that character entered the story.

See, while getting the Eye of Autochthon, the party went to a weird proto-dimension that was all weird and wonky. They met alternative versions of themselves from another part of the multiverse. One of the PCs, Longhorn Seawolf, was already on a hit list for two other PCs due to letting a number of their children die in a fight, so it was only a matter of time before he'd be killed. So instead, we decided to trade our Seawolf for their Desertwolf to solve the issue of a character needing to be gotten rid of and also to give the player a similar character they could wrap the series with. None of the NPCs believed what happened, but they learned not to question our crazy antics a long time ago. But at the end of the series it turned out they were right - we did inadvertently trade an ally for a wolf in sheep's clothing that turned out to be orchestrated by the big bad evil guy. So that betrayal and backstab felt alright, especially since in the end we managed to kick both of their asses and win. If Desertwolf would've turned out to be victorious, I know of one or two players that would've flipped the table and not forgiven it - it would've felt that the last two or so years the game was running was a complete waste.

So lesson learned - if you want to have someone betray and backstab the party, they should probably lose to make the game less unsatisfying...

Conclusions

While one character betraying another might be an interesting twist in a TV show, it's usually unsatisfying in an RPG if you're talking about two PCs. Unless the game is set up from the get-go to support it, or the player explicitly allow for such an ending to their character, it can be more damaging to the long-term relationships between the players than it is worth.

Failures and fatalities - why Dungeons & Dragons is awful for Actual Plays, looking at Dimension 20

Recently, I've watched Dimension 20's Fantasy High Season 1, and the show's first two episodes really encapsulate why Dungeons & Dragons is awful for Actual Plays.

Some disclaimers and qualifiers before I get further. I'm not hating on Dimension 20 (I've seen a few of their shows and I do enjoy them for what they are), the people involved (I've enjoyed their performance through that show), or saying that you shouldn't play D&D (although there are so many better options...). I'm focusing precisely on Dungeons & Dragons as a framework for a gaming performance in the format of a video or audio Actual Play. I'm also speaking as someone that has 5 years of doing their own Actual Plays and as someone that has watched a few APs in their time.

So without further ado, let's talk about Fantasy High (spoiler warning for various episodes of the series, as well as some Escape from the Bloodkeep).

Fantasy High

Fantasy High is a show about a group of adventurers going to an adventuring academy, a fantasy high school where you learn how to be an adventurer, filled with all of the D&D races and classes. A pretty okay setup that gets elevated by the amount of colourful characters that populate the school and the nearby town. From an ice-cream djinn, through a chill werewolf guidance councillor, down to anarcho-socialist halfling family. The player characters are also a colourful cast - you have spoiled rich son of a pirate, a gentle half orc barbarian that doesn't want to hurt anyone, a rebellious tiefling bard going through some issues after her horns recently came in and her dad learned he has been cucked, etc. All in all, the characters are really interesting, the performance through the entire show has been great, I could listen to these things all day with glee. That is, if it wasn't for the second half.

Dimension 20 has a formula for their shows. You usually have two kinds of episode formats that keep alternating - a free form roleplaying with some light checks and conflicts, and then the big set piece fights. They are gorgeous to look at, featuring large customised areas, a lot of unique minis and so on:

The craft on display is phenomenal, there is no denying that. Dimension 20 has taken the D&D formula of "minis fighting" and made the best version of that I have seen. However, it still doesn't solve the issue of this being D&D that we're talking about. So let's set the scene:

It's episode 2 of Fantasy High. All the PCs got into detention for one reason or another. You could run it as your stereotypical "detention bad, the teacher running it is a warden, everything sucks", but no, Dimension 20 is better than that (heck, they even work with sensitivity consultants, kudos to them!), and the guidance councillor starts encouraging the PCs to talk about their feelings, whether they have trouble at home, etc. It's a tiny one minute of a show, but it showed potential, especially when one of the characters started opening up about their issue at home (it was the tiefling, now living alone with her mother who she's on a war path with since she won't tell her anything about her real father). But just as that's about to happen, we hear screams from the cafeteria and it's off to fight we go!

In the cafeteria we find a large cream corn monster, a possessed lunch lady, and a bunch of animated corn cobs, and we have ourselves a level 1 adventurer fight. What follows is a series of mishaps, bad rolls and just a lot of what could go wrong does go wrong. The tiefling gets knocked out cold at the start of the fight, and through the rest of the encounter, that player sits there and stews, unable to contribute anything but quips about how people should throw her body around (I don't hold anything against the player there, it did look frustrating!). A few others, including a swashbuckling jock son of a pirate repeatedly have problems climbing the tables and lose a good deal of health and turns because of that. Enemies start multiplying to the point they murder two player characters (and they do fail their death saving throws and actually die). A prissy elven wizard is reduced to bludgeoning the lunchlady to death with a magical spatula and her scepter (the lunchlady has been the tiefling's freshly adopted role model, since she was going through a rebellious spell and respected a blue collar worker for being the only honest person in the school), with her dying words telling the elf to remember that she killer her with her own hands.

I'm going to leave out the number of times people have been going in and out of many of the cream monster's buttholes, and just skip to the end where the heroes manage to defeat it. Since this is a show that's built on the characters that were just introduced and two of them have died, the GM has to pull out a deus ex resurrection to put the show back on the road. Not to make it consequence-free however, they have the quirky principal of the school (if Dumbledore was a bit more peppy but also a D&D character) murder the soft-spoken guidance councillor with a gun before committing a suicide and using a phoenix egg to resurrect the two PCs - a life for a life. At this moment the tiefling player still upset about having to sit in the time-out through the encounter wants to also commit suicide to bring back the lunchlady, but since they are unconscious they don't get their wish.

So all of that fight was a big clusterfuck, pretty much all due to D&D's rules. So let's start breaking things down.

Failures of D&D

Character death vs character-driven show

Dimension 20 is a pretty character-driven show. One of its core appears is that you can count on there being a cast of colourful characters at the table, portrayed by some very talented people, and through the show you get to have some of their problems, arcs and so on come to the forefront. For example, initially I disliked one of the PCs being your stereotypical born-again-bible-thumping-christian-coded girl that worshipped the Corn God. It felt too much like the proselytising type trope at the outset. However, through the serie she started reflecting on her life after having a brief death experience and realising the Corn God is a bit of a douche-bro and can't answer the problem of evil. Later she realises she has been raised in a fundamental family, been part of a religious extremist cult and discovers herself anew. It's really great.

D&D, however, is not a game that promotes that. Rules as written, the characters can die pretty much during any fight and you're not really meant to get too attached to them. Heck, one of the reason why "grognard" is associated with the game is because it's kind of like going to a ruthless war - what's the point of getting attached to the new level 1 guy if he's going to bite the dust during the first fight. Nobody cares about your backstory until you're level 3 and can survive an encounter with a rat.

Sure, that can be okay to play if you're into that, and the more recent editions of the game have softened the danger a little bit, but trying to do a character-centric game in D&D is still a liability if you don't fudge things or have some convenient way of bringing the characters back.

And for those that think that a story without the stake of character death is meaningless or the like - watch any popular movie. You know going into like, any Marvel movie that no character there will randomly die without a proper payoff and definitely not before their arc is over. You know Thor won't be Ragnarok'ed and will be there for the next movie. You still get invested.

Incompetence, coolness and stunting

D&D is awful when it comes to character competency due to its linear rolls. Chances are whatever you try doing at level 1 you will fail. It's not a game that wants you to be a cool badass, it's a game that wants to watch you faceplant into the floor whenever you try something.

Part of it is its approach to how it handles cool actions. When you declare that you will do something cool, like swinging down a chandelier and leaping from one table to the next before backflipping over the enemy to stab them in the back, the game expects your GM to make you roll to see if you pull it off and tell you "no" if you fail a roll. If you do the most boring action though ("I move forward and attack"), you don't have to roll anything special.

The thing is, you do want the characters to show off how cool they are. It makes the game more interesting, and definitely more fun to listen to! So don't penalise them, don't make them roll and fail, heck, give them bonuses for being cool! That's one of the things I enjoyed about Exalted - stunting. Basically, the cooler you described your action the bigger bonus you got. A lot of the players in Fantasy High could easily do really cool stunts and the game would've been even more cool for it (as it stands, it's only so cool with a pirate jock riding a hellbeast motocycle onto a stone golem to do a cool stunt on its back's half-pipe to throw it into a pit of acid...).

Rolls are boring, damage is mostly meaningless

When playing D&D, you spend a lot of time rolling dice, especially in combat. Add situations where those rolls get more complicated, such as with the use of inspiration (and if you take a shot each time someone on the show gets an inspiration you will get pretty drunk...), and you spend a lot of time rolling your math rocks.

Sure, this is fun when you're actually doing it yourself, but for a viewer, the rolls are only interesting if they are high-stakes, or someone ends up rolling a botch or a crit. Sooner than later individual rolls stop mattering, since a character suffering 5 points of damage out of their 80HP pool is just noise.

Once again, Dimension 20 does the best with what they have. They put visuals up to illustrate people's health as it changes and make the process as engaging as possible, which is commendable, but such edits are someone's job there. It would be quite a bit of extra work for anyone that is not doing this as a full-time job.

Similarly, when you're hoping to get a good story out of dice rolls like these, you also tend to have a low "signal-to-noise ratio" so to say. It takes a lot of time rolling, tallying numbers and so on to move the action one step. We had some bad games like that in the past (a 4 hour session with a 3 hour fight that was mostly rolling and not much interesting stuff going on until the end), and these days for our podcast we tend to go for lighter systems to avoid precisely such problems.

In general, it's much more interesting to play a game like D&D than to actually watch the game being played - passive vs active engagement and all that. You will have to put in a lot more work to get some interesting content.

Fights and rolls create funny moments, not interesting stories

A good RPG system helps you create interesting stories and character moments. Unfortunately, D&D combat isn't that great for it. Sure, it can create funny moments, and sometimes cool moments, but they are rarely interesting stories, despite how much time you're devoting to it.

For perhaps the best illustration of it, I'll have to turn to Dimension 20's other show, Escape from the Bloodkeep. It's a show where the PCs are knockoff evil characters from knockoff Lord of the Rings fighting the heroes. Many times in that show the Witch-king of Angmar would face off against Samwise Gamgee, who was armed only with a frying pan and a whole heap of enthusiasm. The thing is, the hobbit had such high stats that he would routinely stand his ground against the Witch-king and batter him pretty handily with that frying pan, turning their fights into some slapstick Bugs Bunny skit, all because the Witch-King couldn't kill this one halfing. Was it funny? Yes. Was it an interesting story? Not really. It was slapstick. Unfortunately, that's about as much as D&D gives you.

Sure, everyone has an awesome story about how one roll change the course of their game's history, or how they rolled an impossible roll and just dominated some situation. However, those are often stories about a single cool moment, not big interesting stories. Sure, it can be a fun entertainment to see your enemy roll nat 20 and then you matching it with your own nat 20 and the table exploding with emotions, but it's kind of like action for action's sake in a movie - entertainment without a deeper meaning.

Sitting in the death roll penalty box

Many times during the Fantasy High run the characters ended up at death's door, having to roll their death saving throws and not getting to do much. Again, the worst offender was Episode 2 where the tiefling player pretty much had to sit out the entire fight in the penalty box just because they got KOd early and nobody could heal her. You could see and hear the player's frustration with the system and being an unconscious deadweight in the corner of the room. Again, I don't fault the player for any of that - it's the system that creates these scenarios.

When you play a game, you don't want to have to sit and do nothing. Being forced to skip your turns is one of the least fun things because you don't even get to have to focus on coming up with strategies on how to not lose. And if you are doing a show professionally and have some actual actors on your show, you don't want them to sit by the table and not act out their character. It's not fun for them, and you're paying them some good money to sit and do nothing.

Ideally, you'd have a system where characters don't go down that easily and can always contribute something. Fellowship does that pretty well for example - it takes a lot of beating to put someone down (most of the game focuses instead on a death by a thousand cuts, so you know it's coming), and even if you are badly hurt you still have pretty good odds at doing something to contribute to the game.

Regularly scheduled murderhobos

D&D is a game that's focused on combat and murdering enemies. Countless people have pointed out the problematic colonial issues with that, and how Gygax essentially says Paladins would be okay with the Sand Creek Massacre. So how do you square that with a fantasy 50s americana setting of Fantasy High? The answer apparently is - you don't.

While you can gloss over killing of corn cuties and other monsters, the things get problematic when you are fighting humanoid NPCs, especially when they are a part of the same school the PCs go to. Unfortunately, Dimension 20 being a D&D show and one with an episode structure of there being a fight every second episode, there are some times when things get really iffy if you think about them.

In Episode 3 the PCs learn of Johnny Spells, a greaser teen that likes to hit on high school girls despite not going to the school. They get some cryptic message telling them to investigate him to try finding some lost girls. At the end of the episode they find him in his greaser joint with his buddies doing some aggressive dance routines. Overall, the character came off as a cross between someone cool and kind of creepy, but it's never really been established by that point that he was a scumbag or anything.

But oh no, the clock is ticking and it's almost the end of the talking and investigation episode, and you know what that means, it's time to start your regularly scheduled fight. The format must remain unchanged, and a lot of people have put in a lot of hard work to make some cool minis, so instead of confronting Johnny and trying to figure out what his deal is, or even getting the magic mcguffin they came in here for, the team decides to steal the mcguffin and the keys to Johnny's car and book it.

Episode 4 is a street race fight, where the PCs fight Johnny and his gang that are trying to get his car back. This being D&D of course involves a good deal of violence, since the mechanics inform the playstyle. So the PCs murder a group of teens after stealing their ride really for no reason at all, other than this is a Dimension 20 show and the episode number is even, so we have to fight.

And again, I'm not saying that Dimension 20 did a bad job at making the fight itself entertaining to watch, or that the minis weren't cool to look at, it's just that the script being so rigid and you having to have a fight every second episode will inevitably lead to the PCs being murderhobos. I would love to instead see a system where you have different resolution systems so you can have competitions that aren't just murdering each other. Or a system or setting where it's okay to fight one another since the people don't get murdered at the end (make it like a campy Transformers episode or something, where people shoot one another but that's okay, there will be there to shoot one another many times more). But no, this is D&D and violence is always an option.

Sure, you could argue that in that world it's okay to murder people, but late in the season the characters do go to jail for murdering people and the police do explicitly say it's not okay, so the text of the show doesn't support that argument.

So if you're planning on running a game where you don't murder everything as a way of resolving your conflicts by default, D&D doesn't have much to offer in this regard.

It's there to sell you toys

D&D is not only a game about fighting, it's also a game with deep roots in miniature wargaming that's owned by Hasbro, a toy company. If I was a cynic I would say that chances are a game pushed by a toy company will want to sell you toys, and I might not be far off. There are so many miniatures you can buy for the game it's crazy, and when you see a show like Dimension 20 playing with their cool minis your brain might go "boy, I want some of that plastic tosh to play with! Let me get my wallet!".

Luckily, I haven't seen Dimension 20 try to push their own line of minis in the merch store, but I'd kind of be weary of promoting a game in good conscious that kind of encourages you to buy overpriced plastic and a lot of books to be able to play "like the cool kids on TV".

This also means you can't really run D&D as an audio-only podcast without making it really dull to listen to or cutting a lot of boring content out. Not everyone has the budget to set up cameras for the crew, buy minis, paint them well, do some action shots during the fight and so on. Even running it virtually in some third party program to create a virtual arena you still have to have a good enough computer to record and render everything. This creates a much higher startup cost for anyone wanting to run the game than something that can be comfortably played in the theatre of the mind.

And again, this is more of a deeper discussion about whether it's okay to support a game that is not free of controversy and possibly creates a pressure for the show's audience to buy its merch through peer pressure of sorts. But that's a bit beyond our today's discussion.

The flip side

Of course, things can't really be clear cut. While D&D is really an awful game for an Actual Play when looked through its mechanics, that might not really be that important. D&D does being in a lot of eyes to the show because it's popular and people know it. A lot of people won't tune in to the show to see the Dimension 20 crew, they will tune in to see a high-production D&D unfortunately. So it's up to the show producers to weigh in the drawbacks of using a system they have to struggle with the benefits of a large audience and possibly a large corporation to boost their visibility.

Conclusions

Dimension 20 is probably the Actual Play with the highest production value I have seen. It executes its premise and works very hard within its constraints to bring perhaps the best version of what it sets out to do. It is unfortunate though, that what they have to work with is D&D.

D&D from a mechanical standpoint is a liability for any Actual Play show. It limits what kind of stories you can tell (everyone must be a murderhobo or an accessory to murderhobos), has a tendency of killing characters off prematurely, puts players in a timeout box when they do avoid death, and is something you have to have a good setup to record your minis, play areas and so on so your viewers don't get lost in the action.

In return the game rewards you with nothing but its BRAND. Sure, that might be good enough for a lot of people, but personally I'd love to see some more indie games getting the love and attention.

Of course, playing the game yourself is different from doing it as a performance. It is a different kind of engagement since you are in control of the action, rather than just witnessing what's happening. You can still enjoy a game even if it's not a good fit for an Actual Play.

And hey, if anyone from Dimension 20 want a pitch for a cool game, why not copy our Fellowship game in the Transformers universe. It's another Hasbro product, and it would be cool to see what you do by taking the existing toys and modding the heck out of them. The game can support someone playing Tripticon, a giant godzilla, while someone else is a tiny Mini-Con on their shoulder. Now design your show around that and it would be a spectacle just to see what your players could do with their cool, transforming, modded toys! ;)

Make this a game Dimension 20, I know it will be awesome!

And if you're in the mood for something with similar vibes to Fantasy High that doesn't use D&D, I remember enjoying the Offseason Monsterhearts episodes from the Arms of the Tide podcast, using the Monsterhearts RPG.