Quote from: Zevious Zoquis;974602100% this for me as well.  The amateur thespianism is something I generally find pretty embarrassing.  The fellow that wrote the Dungeon Alphabet and Stonehell has some gameplay vids of his Labyrinth Lord game on Youtube and I enjoyed those somewhat.  My enjoyment is derived primarily from the Tactical/logistical/dice roll aspect of the game and the story that arises from that rather than any manufactured drama from players trying to act out the situations...

Just for kicks, I went and looked up some of those LL vids I referred to and had a look.  They are a pretty accurate representation of my experience and the type of game I enjoy.  I noted in the comments for one of them some guy advises that the GM needs to not use "math" so much in describing things - "you see a 30 foot corridor" etc - and that he should "never" refer to monsters by name even if the players are familiar with it and know it's a bugbear for instance.  Instead he should always describe it as "the hairy, over-muscled bipeds mouth breathing and drooling before you resemble bugbears"...yeah...screw that.  lol.  As a player, if you and I both know it's a bugbear, just spare me the English Lit exercise and say its a Bugbear and lets move along.  

Not just saying what the monster is, especially if the characters given their background and experience in the world would know what it is, is super silly.

Quote from: saskganesh;974622Eh, some people watch TV. Some people will watch Anything on TV. And YouTube is full of Anything.

That sounds like an accurate explanation to me;).

Quote from: Ulairi;974623Not just saying what the monster is, especially if the characters given their background and experience in the world would know what it is, is super silly.

it would get to be like a videogame where some action you take causes a text balloon to pop up every.  single.  time.  Enough already...I mean I walk up to a dog on the street, I know it's a dog.    "The furry long-nosed quadruped barks and tries to hump your leg.  It might be a dog..."

Quote from: Zevious Zoquis;974626I walk up to a dog on the street, I know it's a dog.

That's fair, but keep in mind there's a strong contingent in the OSR that advocates using batshit insane grotesqueries in dungeons precisely to avoid the "been there, done that" reaction.

I think a lot depends on how much a group bothers to separate player knowledge and character knowledge.  As a veteran player, I might know full well what bugbears, ogres, ogre magi and hill giants are and the difference between them, but if I'm playing a 0-level DCC funnel, my sword fodder certainly doesn't.  In a case like that, should a DM describe the monsters, or just say "they're bugbears/ogres/ogre magi/hill giants"?

Quote from: Ulairi;974559I guess my groups and I have been the odd ducks out because we've always prioritized RPGs as games over storytelling platforms.

I am going to move this up to the top. You are not an odd duck in this (and I know my ducks). There's huge amounts of digital ink spilled across the internet regarding the storygamer/non-storygamer distinction. Pure Storygaming (as in preferring storygaming-specific systems) seems to be a low-popularity, but high visibility crowd. However people who bring bits of storygaming into their gaming has always been around, and it's rarely an all-or-nothing situation.

QuoteOver the last couple years (it seems to coincide with the release of 5E) there have been a lot of shows of people playing table top RPGS and I finally watched an episode of Critical Role and I was bored out of my mind.

I would probably put the trigger being the rise of twitch, U-tube becoming a mature social media technology (along with the computer technology which has grown up around it), and video-game live plays making this seem like a good idea. I can't think of a reason why 5e would engender this kind of thing more than 4e or 3e, so I think this is just a point-in-time kind of thing.

QuoteA couple things from the show that really bothered me: They really skirted the rules so they could make their show more "dramatic" or "cinematic" not in the cinematic rules sense but in the "it looks good on camera" sense.

Just like sex and violence, pointing a camera at someone while they're doing something changes how they do it. :-P

QuoteA lot of these shows tend to really focus on role-playing or telling stories which is fine...but maybe this is just me and my 27 years of playing....but am I the only one who really doesn't remember any story shit from my gaming history? I don't remember role-playing but I do remember game play results/outcomes. What I mean by that is the time I ran a character with weird stats or the player whose roll succeeded when we really needed it to. But when it comes to role-playing a scene or some story thing nothing really stands out compared to things that are a direct result of....play.

Neither. I'm not going to remember stories, and I'm not going to remember dice rolls. I'm certainly not going to remember that one time a player really needed a 20 and got it. That's right there with Rimmer recounting his Risk successes*. I'm going to remember events. Not stories, not rolls, events. Like that time Joe's thief tried to sneak up on the sleeping dragon with the rope to tie it up, but it woke up and took off while he had just one toe tied, but his leg got caught and the whole battle happened with him dangling and yelling, "don't kill it until I can get free!" Now that is an outcome of dice rolling and DM adjudication, but it isn't specifically not role-playing/storytelling either.

*Rimmer: "So there we were at 2.30am. I was wishing I'd never come to cadet training school. To the south lay water. We couldn't cross that. East and west, two armies squeezed us in a pincer. The only way was north. I had to go for it and pray the gods were smiling on me. I picked up the dice and threw two sixes. Caldicott couldn't believe it. My go again. Another two sixes! "
Lister: "Rimmer, don't you realise that no one is slightly interested in anything you say? You've got this psychological defect which blinds you to the fact that you're boring people to death. How come you can't sense that?"
Rimmer: "Anyway, I picked up the dice again Unbelievable! Another two sixes!"

Quote from: Ulairi;974577When I say rules over story what I mean is result of play over "story" and by that I mean: the players making decisions and how their decisions impact the game via the rules. Like what Skarg mentioned above if a player says: I go up to the guard and try to flirt with him to let us into the castle.... is much more interesting to me (and the results determined within the rules of the game/world) than hearing some community college drama major prattle on.

Edit: Okay, so I should have read to the end. This conforms to my position.

I think this is a generational thing. Kids are too lazy to play games (video or tabletop), so they'd rather just watch people play them instead. Because doing anything besides staring at your phone is just too much work.

I think this is like the most boring generation in history. Their music is boring, they dress not outlandishly, but as blandly as possible.

Quote from: JeremyR;974638I think this is a generational thing. Kids are too lazy to play games (video or tabletop), so they'd rather just watch people play them instead. Because doing anything besides staring at your phone is just too much work.

I think this is like the most boring generation in history. Their music is boring, they dress not outlandishly, but as blandly as possible.

Subtract the being able to watch actual-plays, this sounds exactly like the generational complaints I heard about Gen X in 1992.

Quote from: daniel_ream;974634That's fair, but keep in mind there's a strong contingent in the OSR that advocates using batshit insane grotesqueries in dungeons precisely to avoid the "been there, done that" reaction.

I think a lot depends on how much a group bothers to separate player knowledge and character knowledge.  As a veteran player, I might know full well what bugbears, ogres, ogre magi and hill giants are and the difference between them, but if I'm playing a 0-level DCC funnel, my sword fodder certainly doesn't.  In a case like that, should a DM describe the monsters, or just say "they're bugbears/ogres/ogre magi/hill giants"?

absolutely!  I'm all for the classic Sword & Sorcery "cthulhu" type of tentacular blob monstrosities that can't really be described/categorized.  I also think the first time a group of players runs into a bugbear, a bit of descriptive flair is fine...but not every time after that.  A D&D dungeon crawl is sort of a thing unto itself though.  You're likely to be encountering certain critters over and over again...there's a point beyond which the effort to avoid just naming names becomes sort of silly.

Of the gaming-related podcasts I've watched, I find the visuals distracting.  Not just in actual play, but any of them.  It's just some guys sitting around talking.  Sounds like radio to me.  Given an audio podcast of a gaming session, where the audio was clear, I might give it a try while driving on a long trip.  Audio books are too distracting to my driving, but if you miss a few points in an actual play, no harm done.  Would be a nice break from music back in those times when I had 4 hours there, 4 hours back, all by myself, for the business trip.

People still ham it up for a radio broadcast, of course, but unless they are explicitly instructed to do so, most people will be more themselves, without the camera stuck in their faces.

Quote from: daniel_ream;974634That's fair, but keep in mind there's a strong contingent in the OSR that advocates using batshit insane grotesqueries in dungeons precisely to avoid the "been there, done that" reaction.

I think a lot depends on how much a group bothers to separate player knowledge and character knowledge.  As a veteran player, I might know full well what bugbears, ogres, ogre magi and hill giants are and the difference between them, but if I'm playing a 0-level DCC funnel, my sword fodder certainly doesn't.  In a case like that, should a DM describe the monsters, or just say "they're bugbears/ogres/ogre magi/hill giants"?

Yeah, considering all the push in the backstories thread that 1 level characters are just fell off a wagon from the farm in front of the entrance to a dungeon ( ) they very well might not what some of the more common beasts look like. OTOH, the reaction to stringing more than two adjectives together when describing anything in some earlier threads...

They're way too slow moving for me. Edit a 3 hour play session down to say 25 minutes and I might well watch it.
I do though appreciate that the Critical Role actors at least appear to be playing D&D, as opposed to those Chris Perkins things that are a hideous gurning self-conscious parody of a game. And I've watched plenty of short GM advice videos from Matt Mercer - he's a good GM and he gives good concise advice.  Matt Colville is certainly my favourite GM-advice-giver, he takes a pretty similar approach to mine, but Mercer is worth watching too (and God there are some really awful Youtube GM-advice channels out there*!)

*Obviously this guy is complaining about terrible GM advice, not giving it. Looks like I blocked most of the really bad Youtube channels so they're not showing up on my search. Nerdarchy are pretty bad but that pompous Australian railroading GM is probably the worst - can't seem to find his channel which is probably a good thing.

I am old. I find it hard to believe anyone would watch that shit EVEN WHEN I KNOW IT FOR A FACT. My mind does not want that to be true of the world.

Finding a good role-play game session online to watch is rare.

Quote from: Simlasa;974596That's my main gripe as well... jokers hamming it up for the camera/microphone (on the podcast versions).
I actually took part in one of these things at a convention, and while chunks of it were good immersive fun early on I also felt this weird expectation to 'perform' and by the end it was feeling like a competition at the Junior Thespians league night.
Maybe those guys play like that at home but I doubt it.

Of all the ones I've watched I haven't seen any that were worth the watch time for information or inspiration, unlike the video game versions where I do get to see how the game plays (preferably free of too much extraneous interjection by the host) and maybe good info on how to get past difficult bits.

Amen... This is it! Everyone is an 'over the top' wannabe actor as you pointed out. Actually, that is one of the reasons I stopped listening to podcasts as well (role playing ones anyway). As they all (or most) seem to revolve around jokes or constant messing about. And the content just became a secondary afterthought.

If I wanted to listen to a comedy show, then I'd listen to (or watch) Alan Partridge or something. It's rare that these people manage to get a decent blend of 'good' content and comedy. Some do it better than others... But I'm too lazy to sift through the detritus these days.

I watched a session and a half of Rollplay Blades, which I found reasonably entertaining. However, I had a specific purpose in watching, in that it's a system that uses some assumptions that I wasn't familiar with, and I was  attempting to better grasp how to run the game.

I stopped about a third of the way into session two, as I had learned what I needed, and it wasn't entertaining enough on it's own merits to keep following. I can understand why some people may have enjoyed it, however.