Will do man, will do. @oblivioncubed, we got us a true honest to god #OldGuard here man. You may want to pick Lex's brain sometime about ttrpgs.

I think it might be more accurate to just say "I'm old" rather than "old guard."

On the positive side, that just means that I've seen all of the big mistakes that you can make it a gaming table – albeit doesn't mean that I don't still make all of those mistakes in one form or another. I've just seen them happen before. That's where the challenge is.

I have noticed that the "gotta be Matt Mercer" performance style of play does not really mesh as well as you'd expect at the table. It can work well if the player is engaged in the world as well as being an actor within it, though. If you have players willing to put in some after-hours time, which I think those shows rely heavily upon, it can pay off in spades and they are almost ghostwriting parts of the campaign for you.

Part of the way that those shows pull off the coherent narrative so consistently every time is not just having the players engaged in the world – but sitting down before the show and effectively sketching out what's going to happen during the show. There is a definite aspect of improv performance but that performance is not born from both the GM and the players doing the age-old dance of reacting to one another but instead there being a relatively set narrative being pushed top down and the players improvising within that framework.

And interestingly enough, that is a very antithetical mode of play taken in the context of the traditional game designs that they pretty much throwdown. It is very much the difference between gaming-as-performance and gaming-as-game. For the most part, they are not playing the game in order to find out what happens to their characters or to the setting, the playing of the game provides a contextual excuse for them to interact with one another on camera.

That's an important distinction to make because a lot of more modern game designs have a strong player-interactive nature (often referred to as "story gaming"), to the point where in several there is no GM-role whatsoever – but even in the most narrative, most decentralized power game architectures, you don't have the same dynamic as you see in the "performative gaming" that you see being streamed.

While I would never deny the entertainment power of their shows, I don't think they're doing as much good for the gaming hobby as it's often said because the unrealistic expectation of experience can really be disappointing. I've met people who were really put off on gaming in general for themselves after having watched a number of shows, picked it up to play themselves, and discovering that the experience at the table really has very little in common with what's being presented.

I will definitely check out the liveplays of Kingdom and Microscope. Wow, 2013. I'd consider that to be ahead of the game for posting ttrpg's online. I sure didn't know that was a thing back then!

I've been playing tabletop RPGs online since the early 90s, back when the best tool for managing a shared experience was a text-based MUSH/MUX with some roughly implemented game mechanics tools. It's not so much that people weren't playing tabletop RPGs with digital intermediaries that whole time, it's that it was much harder to record and share those experiences back then. The rise of podcasting followed by the rise of easy video casting really changed the kind of things that we could share with one another in the hobby.

I will be the first to admit that the stuff in those videos is pretty rough in terms of presentation, but it does reflect actual gameplay experiences and the sort of thing that can happen at your table. I keep meaning to get back to doing some more of that, but other things keep getting in the way. You know how it goes.