Are RPGs Watchable?

[Morrus]

Spinning off from the Perkins thread. RPGs are fun to play, often great to read, but are they actually watchable? Can you watch an RPG being played (live or on video)? There are thousands of gameplay videos on YouTube; some of them live at a table, some of them via online VTTs and the like.

Have you watched an RPG session all the way through? If so, did you enjoy it?

I know WotC produces gameplay videos with (a) themselves and (b) Chris Perkins plus showbiz types. The latter tend to involve a bunch of people - the DM, all the players - every one of which is performing for the camera, and knows how to do that. Does that make a difference to the watchability of an RPG session?

Here's my personal experience:

1) Generally speaking, I find watching an RPG to be pretty tedious. They're great to play, but I'd rather eat my own foot than watch one. Mainly, they're unwatchable. It's just the nature of the beast.

2) The exception to this is when the DM and all the players are professional (or at least know what they're doing) performers for camera. However, in that case, what you see is a mix of an RPG and professional improvised comedy.

3) I'm hoping Tabletop changes this with its new RPG show. That said, they'll all be professional actors and the like, and it will be very expertly edited and cut, so I'm sure it will be very watchable.

 

[delericho]

Generally, they're not fun to watch. However, with the right group, and especially with someone willing to edit the filmed material into just "the good bits", it's not impossible.

But, no, I've not as yet managed to sit through the entirety of one of those videos. I very rarely get past the introductions.

 

[Umbran]

Generally, watching RPG play is, as you put it, tedious.

Yes, watching professional actors, comedians and celebrity geeks play might be entertaining - but really, the *play* isn't what'e entertaining. That's merely the frame for the acting and comedy, the situation. Basically, these things are situational comedies - sitcoms. I don't watch many sitcoms these days.

I'm afraid watching celebrities play the game for me is kind of like D&D jumping the shark, in the classic sense of doing something flashy to get eyeballs on something that wouldn't be watched otherwise.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

One more voice in the "oh no!" choir.

RPGs are, by their very nature, spontaneous, uncontrolled affairs with stretches of (relative) inactivity and outbursts of action. Or do your players always behave in an orderly fashion, talking only when cued to do so?

 

[gamerprinter]

Sometimes I can watch a single encounter if it were from a really exciting part of some dungeon that I've run myself in the past and might have interest in how a particular other group is running that, or if a particular GM was initiating something really unique and I caught it happening. But anything more than a single encounter, no way, I'd get bored to death, so for the most part, no.

 

[Celebrim]

I have enjoyed watching people I know RP live for lengthy stretches without participating, but in general I find RP unwatchable as well. You have to have some sort of personal investment in what is going on, and typically you don't have that watching someone else's session.

I think you could make an entertaining show by carefully editing live RP footage and adding supporting material to help the audience understand things from the perspective of the players. So, you might add some additional narration and exposition done in a style more conducive to the audience experience than the player experience, potentially replacing some of what was actually said in play. Battle mat footage idly would be animated and annotated to give the viewer a better sense of what is going on, perhaps clay motion style, with little pop-up 'pows' and '-18 h.p. lost' boxes, and interspaced with cuts of the players describing important actions and decisions. Props at the table are probably far more important to an audience than they actually are to players. And not every declaration to attack and to hit proposition is inherently interesting even in play, and draggy combat experiences are even more draggy when you aren't participating. Certainly the DM's mental and logistic pauses, which are often necessary or inevitable need to be removed, as does a lot the party planning nonsense that tends to be OOC even with experienced group. Idle chatter that isn't entertaining also needs to go, though obviously some of the OOC asides and jokes can be entertaining (though this is usually a sign of inexperience, as IC jokes are usually more entertaining).

The important point is that probably only 30%-60% of play time depending on the session style is actual story building and so engaging to a non-participant. A four hour one shot could probably be condensed to a core 1 1/2 hour story. This is even more true of dungeon crawling, which tends to be what you see in one shots.

The trick here is producing this sort of thing and making it entertaining is probably almost as expensive as a low budget TV show. You've probably got a DM investing 20-30 hours prep a week, plus 4-6 hours working on the show, and additional 2-4 hours working on post production, that needs to basically be doing this for a living. You need probably multiple camera angles and a sound guy. You've got to do hours of film editing. You need probably an animation team doing images for the DM's narration (maps, pictures, whatever), clarifying combat, and putting footnotes on the screen in post production (thought bubbles by the actors, notes on rules or character sheet). It's basically 'reality TV'. Right now, I'm not sure that the market is large enough for the cost involved.

 

[Umbran]

Sometimes I can watch a single encounter if it were from a really exciting part of some dungeon that I've run myself in the past and might have interest in how a particular other group is running that, or if a particular GM was initiating something really unique and I caught it happening.

I have enjoyed watching people I know RP live for lengthy stretches without participating, but in general I find RP unwatchable as well. You have to have some sort of personal investment in what is going on, and typically you don't have that watching someone else's session.

Yes, there will be exceptions. And I think Celebrim has a good point about personal investment. If you give the viewer some reason to care, that goes a long way.

I think the form has great potential as a GM teaching tool - "here's a segment where the session went completely out into left field, and almost crashed and burned. Let's look at it, review it, and talk about what happened...", "Here's where the party went out of the area I prepared, watch how I improvised my way around it" and so on.

 

[Rod Staffwand]

I think RPGs can be entertaining and informative even if they aren't tailored towards spectators. Obviously, there is a sliding scale of 'watchability' that mostly depends on the charisma of the DM and players as well as pacing and understandability (of the rules and the situations being portrayed).

I don't think RPG watching will ever have mass (or even significant) appeal as a spectator sport. I like them because I'm fascinated with RPGs as a thing (game mechanics, group dynamics, styles of play, GM presentation, player characterizations, creative uses of miniatures and maps, and all that other great stuff) and I find it interesting to observe games and gamers in their natural habitat.

Definitely looking forward to the Tabletop RPG spin-off and I'm curious to see if they can make entertaining for larger audiences. I quite enjoyed the Dragon Age RPG episode they did.

 

[Morrus]

I think there's definitely an issue with who participants are performing to.

First, to be a spectator event, all the participants have to be performing, not just talking. They need showmanship and screen presence. Most of us do not have those things.

Second, they need to be performing for the audience, not for each other. The DM needs to be performing for the audience, not to the players. The players need to be performing to the audience, not to the DM. This is contrary to how RPGs are generally played.

Third, given the above, they need to do so consistently. You can't watch someone looking in a book. You can't watch periods of inactivity.

And finally: your in-jokes are NEVER funny to outsiders.

So the very nature of an RPG does not lend itself well to audiences.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I think Morrus is right on the money. Which is why I can watch the Acquisitions Incorporated videos that are filmed in front a live audience all the time, but could only last a few minutes watching WotC's playtime videos they did on Fridays.

The A.I. guys (and girl) all play to the audience... dropping in pop culture references, in-jokes to previous A.I. sessions, jokes at each other's expense, etc. So we're not necessarily involved in the game itself, we're more compelled by the group "shooting the shiat" as it were. The game of D&D is just the reason used to bring the players together to shoot the shiat. I would also suggest that it also only works because there is an audience there laughing as well. Laughter is infectious as we all know... so hearing the audiences laugh at the A.I. gameplay makes us more likely to find amusement and enjoyment in the videos, than we'd be if they were playing by themselves in a room.

Celebrim's "personal investment" comment also applies here, in as much as that if you are invested in who is playing, you are willing to go on the journey with them more readily. Thus, if you were already a fan of Mike, Jerry, Scott, Wil, Patrick, Morgan, and Chris... you'd be more apt to care about what they were doing during the game because you're more apt to be interested in what they might be doing in general. And by the same token... if you have no vested interest in any of the players or don't even recognize them... watching them play is less likely to be as compelling.

In fact... the only time I watched a D&D gameplay video in which I did not know any of the players, it was not taped in front of an audience, and I still found myself enjoying it... was the Robot Chicken series of videos. And I suspect the reason for that was three-fold-- I knew of Robot Chicken (if not the participants) so I was more primed to understand perhaps where they would all be coming from; I knew and like the work of the DM (Perkins) so there was at least one familiar thing to hang my hat on; and most importantly the videos were broken up into 25 separate parts each lasting no more than 10 minutes... so I never had a chance really to grow bored, because a video would end before I got there. So as time went on, I was often willing to give up 10 minutes to watch them and grew to get involved in what was happening over the 10(?) weeks the videos were uploaded. Whereas a video uploaded complete at one to two hours long is much less likely to get me to stick with it in one setting, plus is less likely to have me watch a bit, stop, then come back to it at a later point in hopes of finding where it was that I left off. That's purely a psychological thing, but I think has a real effect.