On the topic of “actual play” podcasts that do not seem to actually be play to me I provided the following some months ago during a discussion on that topic on a discord I’m on (blur for a moderately not family friendly metaphor)
I think the difference is the group’s engagement in the performance vs engagement in the activity
NADDPOD is presumably an emergent performance. All the participants are there to perform and are engaged in the idea of performing at a level that’s different from engagement in the activity
This is why I really dig Whartson Hall, a group of British gamers that have been recording for years now
They are a gaming group recording play. Not performers using the game to create a performance
What I recoil from is trusting new folks to collaborate in an activity I’ll enjoy. There’s a list of about 12 people I’d run a game for on ten minutes notice because I enjoy collaborating with them. Trusting a new person with that is something else
I once drunkly said tabletop RP has more in common with group sex than with business meetings even though all three could be on the same linear scale.With NADDPOD I suppose that metaphor could stretch to pornography being different from relationships
For me the dividing line falls somewhere between “this is what our games sound like, and you could do it too” and “we have a full production crew making this look effortlessly improvised”. I have genuinely seen posts from novice role-players lamenting that they can’t have a “good” game because they aren’t voice actors and costumiers.
As I understand it (@BigJackBrass ?) the modern “Whartson Hall” is technically the Whartson Hall Aethernauts, an offshoot of the original group when some players moved away and they shifted to gaming remotely. But it started as a bunch of people round a table, with a microphone - much like the yog-sothoth.com crew.
I don’t listen to many actual play recordings; How We Roll can be fun when they’re doing Cthulhu, and Scott Dorward is a regular GM for that. (But they play on roll20, I think, and foley in dice rolls later. Why?) @Shimmin 's Librarians & Leviathans can be great fun.
My issue with pages and pages of historical backstory for settings is that (a) it feels like homework to have to read and memorise all this stuff, (b) history is written by the victors and later re-written by those of their descendants who have an axe to grind or a nationalist narrative to support.
“And then the people of Earth welcomed the Glorious Martian Empire to their planet with open arms, and gladly gave us their unobtanium and surplus manpower to assist in our war against the Venusian scum…”
This was the source of the discussion on the discord. One of the folks had been listening to a performative actual play, got excited to run something, then froze considering it could never be as good as what was performed.
That re-frame from going to the table to play as opposed to going to the table to perform helped a bit. It was a signal moment for me though in the idea that a “good” game can be strongly affected by first experiences of the hobby.
Whartson Hall is the only actual play I listen to currently. I did go through some of the other groups on RPGMP3 dot com back ten years ago but Whartson Hall has always stood out as the nearest to the experience of being at the table with my friends as I expect I could find.
And not just first experiences! This was an individual with history in the hobby.
The idea of confidence in play is probably more a developmental psychology topic, but the environment around the hobby the last few years just shows it’s as strange as it’s ever been.
Never would have thought sitting on concrete steps at the school playground with a red box that folks would be concerned about the quality of their props but at least folks aren’t bored?
Whether we’re talking about brand new players or GMs or both, I’d say that the following are necessary.
Being interested in the setting or premise. This could be a particular IP (“I want to be Spider-Man!”), genre (“I want to solve a murder mystery.”), activity (“I want to kill monsters!”), or whatever.
Having structure and guidelines about that is possible and what is expected. This is why dungeon bashing seems to work so well. The collapsed options of PbtA are helpful, but I think the playbooks are even more useful in this regard.
Adventure board games (Gloomhaven, Venture, many others) seem to be very popular these days. Certainly they are much better than the old Dungeon! or Heroquest board games. I wonder how well they could serve as a bridge to roleplaying games.
And more bits of it is written by people who live so long after the events that all context for the histories has been worn down to a few texts on public monuments that no-one has looked at in centuries and what they know are rewrites of fictional accounts of the public version of the official history.
See Marcus Rowland’s DIANA WARRIOR PRINCESS for what a future history might look like.
Reading setting details bores me, whether we’re talking ages of world histories or the political machinations of a particular city. As GM, I paint with a very broad brush and use thin paint.
However, if a GM likes setting detail, then they should feel free to go as deep as they want. Do what you think is fun. Not only can this help improvisation, but also many players appreciate that the details are there, even if they never fully plumb those depths.
I think there are two instances when setting details get in the way.
The GM insists on expositing to the players about details they don’t care about. It can be disheartening to a GM who wants to share with the players, but they should not assume that details left hidden are wasted.
The GM interrupts the players with details when their actions or manners don’t fit. Players rarely want to forced to read 20 pages of details just to know how to play their characters properly.
Both of these are issues of GM behavior, not the setting detail itself. The more alien a setting is, the more #2 becomes an issue, but there are good and bad ways to handle it.
We converted it to shares in the Whartson Media Empire. There may have been beer involved.
I suspect that players who don’t want to read on briefings should probably not try to play in settings very unlike the ones they live in. If fiddly honour codes, rules of social precedence etc., are involved, the characters know this stuff and the players need to know it to play the characters. (There’s only so far a GM can get with “ah, you wouldn’t do that because you know…”)
That said I remember finding real history very dull at school, and I suspect there’s a lot of room for making this kind of briefing more interesting as well as as short as possible.
Digressing - the mention of “in my wheelhouse” got me curious enough to look it up. It turns out that, while “wheelhouse” mostly means the enclosed bit on a ship housing the wheel (helm), a second meaning is found in baseball, where it means the zone around the batter where they can strike the ball most powerfully (presumably because they can… wheel round and hit it hard?).
This sounds to me like the meaning of “wheelhouse” being referenced in the metaphor. But I’m guessing.
I first met it when it was the phrase of Gen Con in the game that Robin Laws and others played (may still play) each year, of trying to get non-players to say the phrase without their being aware that they’re being prompted.
A wheelhouse is also the part of a wind or water mill that holds the machinery that transmits the input rotation to the load, whether that is a mill wheel, saw, or more complicated mechanisms like a lineshaft to drive multiple machines.
The baseball metaphor is pretty common. But most sports metaphors are stolen from somewhere else, so it would not surprise me to learn that the baseball meaning came from somewhere.
