D&D Shows

What about Maze Arcana. It's got Zak S. of OSR fame I believe.

>british

intothetrashitgoes.jpg

Adventure zone is top tier desu

Why would you watch people play D&D? Why not read a book, or play D&D?

I recommend everyone check on URealms, it's not D&D but it has similarities, it's also done in more of a show format, with 10 "campaigns" a "season"

>Adam Koebel
talk about a tumblr-tier faggot who is actually a pretty cool DM and I enjoy the stuff he does.

Some DMs are really good and you can learn a lot from watching them.

How is High Rollers?

I've never had a chance to watch it, but Mark is a friend of mine and I don't get the references to it.

>Going to have Adam on my show
>Expect him to be uber hyper-progressive "Everything is offensive we need to focus on being inclusive gamers".
>He's actually crazy insightful about game design and really well spoken about DM topics.
>Only went SJW-modo once for a minute when we talked tarot cards.

Is it good?
I love Monster Factory and the McElroy's stuff in general, but damn son, podcasts are long as shit.

what show?

Just a DM talkshow on the internet. If you go looking for shows Adam and some other industry celebs have done, you'll probably find it, I'd rather not name-drop on Veeky Forums.

Give it a chance, user.

Tell me at least how many viewers you average? So I know if the show is shit or not

Depends on the episode. For the talk show? It's been on the front page before, though that doesn't count numbers-wise. I think like 750~ is probably the most live viewers I've ever had? More often about 75ish. Not every guest is hugely promotable, even if I have fun hanging out.

I stopped watching when they got to the first big city. I was just getting real bored. Has it picked up since then?

Threshold, they take a bit to get into the swing of things, but so far it's been fairly entertaining. They have two separate channels on YouTube, the older episodes are under D6 Mafia, whereas the newer episodes are under D&D Threshold

There's Roll4It. They play DnD on wednesdays and Dark Heresy 2e on Sundays

I thought Critical Role was rolling new characters and starting fresh? I saw a post from them about that so I tuned in and they were just fighting some dragon.

Was I memed?

They fought and beat a dragon, expending a decent amount of resources in the process.

Then half of the group went off away from the other half and picked a fight with a second dragon, at which point most of said half got meteor swarmed down to 0 HP, and that's where they broke it off until the next stream.

Depending on how things go, some people might be rolling new characters.

Oh shit, which episode number was the one where the half got dicked by the 2nd dragon? I didn't see that but I love watching the Critical Role people get knocked out and that sounds traumatic.

The most recent.

You can see that the other half of the group is facepalming or otherwise thinking "oh shit what the fuck have you guys done now".

I sort of hope a shit ton of them die.

I love Critical Role, but I never ever feel any tension because any time a character gets knocked to 0 or "dies" they almost always just find a way to bring them back.

How many fucking times has Grog "died" now? Like 25?

That is kind of how 5e works. It is hard to kill a character of decent level in the system if the party pays attention and the DM doesn't focus kill the character.

Or bad luck of course.

Me and my friend alternate DM 5e and to avoid this we usually just make damn near every encounter "Hard" or "Deadly". Makes thing far more suspenseful.

The most recent up on their YouTube or on their site? I assume you mean site.

I tend to do the same. If half of the party does not get knocked down to 0, the encounter was too easy.

I've only watched a few critical role episodes before I got too annoyed with certain people, but I remember watching an episode of itmejp's "fandom" discussing D&D with Matt Mercer and Adam Koebel. One of the things that stood out to me was that Matt talked about how he always finds a way to resurrect or save a PC from death, which would annoy the fuck out of me if he were my DM. If you can't die, then the game will have no suspense, and it makes for a much less intriguing plot.
So unfortunately, there's a very good chance they'll all be deus ex machina'd out of the situation.

Adam Koebel though is a pretty entertaining GM. And then there's that other guy in JP knows, whatever his name was. He's also pretty great. Oh and that third guy JP knows, the bald one, is great for ad&d stuff

Mercer is a great DM but man, I can see why he has been doing the res bullshit with all the character deaths.

Half of the cast is cool, but there is the other half that whine and bitch horribly if something goes wrong with their character. It is really annoying.

Who is the bitch with the bear? Trinket or whatever? She is really annoying. Every time something bad happens to her, she always interrupts Matt and says something like "OH BUT WHEN THAT WAS HAPPENING I WAS DOING THHIIIISSSSS".

Yeah I assume you mean Steve Lumpkin and Neal Erickson. Both are pretty great. I just wish they edited down some of their series into smaller videos. Each episode is 3 hours long and each series is usually at least 30 episode long. Fuck watching all that.

Maybe I'm just more of an asshole, but I wouldn't sacrifice the integrity of the game for the sake of some whiny autist who makes a scene on camera about the death of a fictional character. The show already has too many players so I wouldn't mind if someone left because the tone of my game wasn't right for them.

Checked.

shilling Tabletop Talk for general rpg show
James ran a great game of Dread, other James ran a great game of CoC (despite being worst girl of show)

I'm not sure I get this reasoning, I mean, Mercer actively implements rules that make resurrection have a chance to fail.

Without that rule, the entire party could be disintegrated and still be resurrected by one of the many 9th level druids within the setting

Audio only and 4th ed but Critical Hit is about my favorite actual play show

I really haven't seen a lot of it so I may way off here, but the fact that he has many Druids with the ability to cast resurrection is in itself a way of making sure that no one ever dies.
Not only that, he made it clear that he tries to stop them from dying in the first place. Honestly just sounds like he's not as impartial as a DM should be.

If you enjoy utterly generic, boring players led by an amazing gm who home brews all his stuff then you'll love it.

The dm is fantastic, three of the players are basically dnd memes incarnate:

>Dark broody drow warlock, has comedic effect dragon to make him appear more than a 1 dimensional edge lord.

>Generic 'Heal everyone I'm really friendly I love nature' druid. Can't even think of anything more to define her she's that simple.

>My first dnd character edge lord teefling murder hobo style monk. Gets angry at everyone because 'I was a slave sniff sniff' goes off on strops forcing dm to give her 1on1s separately.

First two characters are dull as shit, but at least their players are pretty good at describing what they do, etc.

Teefling is worst in the party by a long way. Early into campaign dies due to trying to fight a dungeon alone in one of her characters 'moods', but gets so upset dm Deus ex machines her back to life via a quest for the rest of party while she plays an Npc. I think the player struggles to separate ooc and ic.

Fourth char though is cool

>on the surface a jester gypsy kinda guy, massive player, compliments the hot girls, gets into shit with people and runs away. Imagine captain jack sparrow with less mentally ill and more sleaze.
>Actually has a dark past and a brooding, protective personality that he covers up with all the cheeriness and smiles.

He's so well played that teefling's player genuinely thought that gypsy was just playing himself, as irl he has a similar personality (upbeat etc) and then had her mind blown when she accidentally discovered some of the gypsy's past.

After entering the big city they stopped an assassination attempt, went to the underdark, fought some demons, stopped a crime syndicate from distributing drugs throughout the city, and went up north to hang out with elves and a frost giant.

The guy playing the Drow stopped trying to be edgy after a bit realizing how boring it is to be ~cool and mysterious~ after that he ends up being a sassy smoothtalker

He doesn't have that many druids, but the party has made powerful connections throughout the land, that they could find one indeed.

Also going unconcious, and dying are entirely different things in 5e.

In every death so far in Critical Role it's been a pivotal character development moment. From Pike falling in the Underdark and being brought back to follow the path of her god. From the curse trap that killed Vex outright that set Vax bargaining himself for her soul to the Raven Queen. To Grog's soul being eaten by the his sword that they basically had to force it to give it up. To Percy returning after the Vex's confession to him but not after having his soul eaten a bit by Orthax. Death isn't meaningless, it's pivotal.

Critical Role, while really focused around story it ultimately quite a lethal campaign. Half the party has died before, Mercer has a mechanic that straight up handles resurrection that even with the spell and a willing soul it's never guaranteed. If that final roll goes bad, you're dead despite all other efforts.

It's also no wonder they're so attached to these characters. They're been playing the same campaign for 4 years now. Can you really blame them for the players to try and scrape for anything to stop themselves from dying?

That said, none of them died during the Thordak battle because they came very prepared, and Thordak got debuffed hard half way through with the crystal breaking. The battle with Raishan, they're certainly less prepared, and the party is split in half so we'll see how that goes.

Way off the mark there. They used Jitou the tiefling's death both as a catalyst for a quest and as personal development for the character on her path of The Way of the Elements. How is that bad?

Allura is pretty generic I agree.

The drow warlock, can't remember his name, is quite sassy and weird with the granny persona.

And Buckland is a Fuckland.

Don't you see? It's not his fault that he is conditioned to speak nothing else but a single dialect.

Are you implying that if DM's don't attempt at some horrendously cheesy accent other than their own they're bad?

No, I'm implying that he doesn't want to watch because somebody is speaking traditional English.

Hardcore Heroes. It's actually live right now on twitch.

> Ctrl + F
> No Rollplay

Why do they never get mentioned? They've been around longer than the rest, and were the largest roleplaying stream until Critical Role became a thing. Even if you don't like a system, or a GM, or a player in a campaign, chances are you are still gonna find something you like in their library.
If you're interested, their current campaigns are:
Rollplay: Court of Swords, using the D&D 5e system, set in fantasy not-South-East Asia. This one has a regular cast of three members, with a rotating fourth member.
The other one is Rollplay: Blades, using the Blades in the Dark system, and is GMd by the creator of the system himself.

Ah, whoops, didn't see ya there.

In fairness, it's hard not to see the justification behind Mercer not subjecting most of his players to permadeath yet. They're kind of like comic book heroes. The characters themselves are popular enough to have their own merch and are loved by fans. I'm sure there's an element of thinking "fans won't like it if suddenly the twins croak and don't come back. What are they gonna do with my "I'm Vax that's Vex" shirts now that they're just irretrievably gone?"

How about you go out an actually play the game instead?

Because sometimes it's interesting to see how other people play and what sorts of stories they make.

Some of us are in lonely places in the world with tenuous Internet connections.

What about tabletop related podcasts that aren't just people playing?
I want discussion of systems, discussion of lore, game design, that sort of thing.

Aquisitions Incorporated is the only DnD thing that is the thing.