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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8647342" data-attributes="member: 19857">I had this discussion with my kid recently - it's all about audience.  They're a huge fan of The Adventure Zone and we were talking about how the McElroys' games aren't like the games I run or the games my kid runs.  But it's because the audiences for these games are completely different. The McElroys are performing to a wide audience, the players are all acting towards that audience, and the game that they're running has to have a narrative throughline to it to be a satisfying podcast and keep listeners. And the game itself is often more of a tool for guided improvisation than it is a game.  The DM and the players truly are there to entertain a large audience, and so there are a lot of things that make sense in that environment - like having the DM talk as multiple NPCs in different voices, or letting one PC monologue for a substantial length of time, or many of the other things on that list above - because those things are entertaining to listen to when professional entertainers are doing them.In contrast when you're running a game for friends the audience is the folks at the table and that's it. There's no concern about how it's going to play for an audience and you're not trying to keep subscribers enthralled by your performances.  The narrative only really needs to make as much sense to the extent that the folks at the table care that it makes sense (which may be a lot, or may be not at all, or may be anywhere in between).  And the DM and players probably aren't professional entertainers, so listening to folks go on for long monologues isn't going to be nearly as much entertaining as it is when you're a passive consumer of entertainment.In short, Actual Plays are great for evangelizing the game and teaching some of the basics to players who don't have a group to teach them, but aren't so great for showing what a "typical" game is going to be like or even what it should be like.</blockquote>

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