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Thoughts and Review
Bandit's Keep is a YouTube content repository hosted and maintained by Daniel Norton - a professional photographer with a very popular photography YouTube channel in addition to his side gig as an old-school referee. Update - 2021-05-19As of this update (or sometime before, truth be told) Daniel has cleft the Bandit's Keep channel in twain:
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Bandit's Keep, the original channel
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Bandit's Keep: Actual Play, a spin-off channel to house new actual play content.
The content of this review is based on the older material - though while I don't plan on updating the review based on the newer material: I have continued to watch it and have continued to enjoy it: in particular, his AS&SH game. Thus, per the conclusion below, I recommend the new actual play channel as highly as I did the original.
Delve on, readers!
While not as prolific as the Dungeon Muser, Bandit's Keep houses and hosts a number of different old school game actual plays - including games like Boot Hill and Coriolis RPG in addition to the more commonly encountered B/X, Swords & Wizardry, and OSE: in both one-shot and traditional campaign form - in addition to some vlog elements where he muses on the Dungeon-Mastering experience.
What I Like
Although it's easy to say that Norton is versed and capable as a GM, DM, or Referee - arbitrating where appropriate and presenting an educated view of the systems he employs - that's easy to be said of any OSR stream worth visiting. Instead - I want to focus on what brings Bandit's Keep alive: what sets Bandit's Keep apart from other streams, other channels, that propose they offer the same service - one thing coming to mind immediately is the way Daniel is able to seamlessly and consistently incorporate Theater of the Mind in his encounters.While it's no secret that the original D&D was developed as a supplement to a miniatures wargame, Chainmail, in large part, the beginning of the hobby did not include the mandatory use of miniatures - several big names in the history of the product eschewing them in favor of utilizing the imagination. This was one of the big reasons I was able to get into D&D when I started playing in '97 - I couldn't afford minis then (not being able to afford them now either being a moot point), but being able to participate in a game which primarily utilized the power of the imagination: that was the deciding factor for, at least, this (then) little boy. Consider, then, this inclusion and embrace of Theater of the Mind as a particular aspect of OSR gaming that is frequently missed in actual-plays and frequently mishandled by novice Referees in an age of VTTs and tokens a testament to the resilience of old school gaming, its ability to operate without the support provided by many gaming services and products, and something to consider, knowing that the pictures painted by the mind are always more vivid than the pictures we paint on paper.
That said, despite my fondness for the astuteness of Bandit's Keep at Theater of the Mind combats, the first thing that actually stood out to me while watching the backlog was the penchant of the players to learn. Routinely - especially in the one-shots - you hear players say things like, "Oh! Rookie move!" or "I deserve this," when bad things happen. This is a verbal acknowledgement of developing player skill. Players learn lessons like combat is not always the solution (but can be); players learn that improvising based on your environment can be used to your advantage to overcome situations that seem unwinnable based on character sheet alone. This supplements a common element of OSR games that stands in stark contrast to new school games: failure is an option. It is possible for your character to die. It is possible for your party to lose. This option for failure is a hallmark of OSR gameplay, but a lost art for the new school.
On occasion - players will ask to clarify how something works, or how something would work if it's not outlined in the book: this, again, is learning to play the game in an old school spirit: the Referee is expected to rule on the matter fairly and consistently, and working with them to describe the situation such that an outcome can be reached is an aspect of the game that builds the collaborative experience. The Referee is the final arbiter - of course - but this touches on something key: the game is not referee versus players; the GM is expected to be impartial, an engine to the game presenting a challenge. "Adversarial DMs" are a hallmark of poor DMs; the equivalent of "That Guy" stories regarding problem players. Daniel has a good rapport with his players - and though he's not liable to Nerf it for their benefit, he likewise gives the players a fair shot and will amend the circumstances, or call for special rolls, if the situation dictates based on the nature of the action the player is attempting to describe. This is important: as the game is collaborative - both players and ref - and Bandit's Keep exemplifies this oft-overlooked truth.
What I Don't Like
A listener should be mindful, the sessions recorded on Bandit's Keep can be very RP-heavy. This isn't intrinsically a bad thing - it builds characters you can follow, it builds ambiance (especially in his Dolmenwood streams: where the feel of a fairy tale - something that is implicit to Dolmenwood and to a great deal of OSE games, indeed - is relentlessly reinforced) - but the byproduct is that on occasion it can feel over-done for a listener: especially a casual one who is consuming the media as audio (elaboration below). On occasion, a largely mundane activity such as eating breakfast or buying supplies for a delve can take as long as 45 minutes or an hour. It builds character, and RP is without question an element of the OSR and of RPGs in general (it's almost like they share two letters in their acronyms...) - but done to excess, it can drown out the educational value of the stream and can derail the viewer's sense of the progressing plot outside of RP, their immersion being vicarious to the immersion of the players.What I'm Neutral About
The majority of the listening I've done to date of Bandit's Keep has been as background noise at work. The games and commentaries translate very well to audio - and it makes me wonder about the choice of YouTube as a platform. Knowing about Daniel's other YouTube, and knowing about some friends who - upon converting from an exclusively audio medium to having a YouTube component - dramatically widened their audience, the choice surely makes sense: but I would welcome entirely a Bandit's Keep podcast. To clarify, between when this comment was initially observed and its publication - having been working on this review for a few weeks listening to the actual plays - the referee, Daniel Norton, has indeed released a podcast on Anchor!Said podcast does not contain actual plays - but is focusing instead on rules, creative implementation, and their impact on player mindset in the game, but it's worth mentioning as a "For Further Listening" note, as well - in case you, the reader, was interested.
Most folks can link it in their car, I guess - for audio only - but the inconvenience of the YouTube app (I do know I can pay them to remediate this... but I don't want to) where it forces me to keep the screen open to listen to the video makes it a challenge to do YouTube on my commute - which is when I tend to listen most heavily. Knowing others listen heavily to podcasts and APs during other activities where their hands and eyes are occupied, but perhaps not their ears - this is less an observation and more of a wish-list. I would subscribe to and listen to a Bandit's Keep podcast.
Bandit's Keep runs both traditional campaigns and one-shot or otherwise short-campaign demos for various products in various systems. In the short games, it makes sense that the focus would be on the adventure and on the characters - but in the long games, this focus is maintained. There is nothing wrong with that - of course - but what that implies, it doesn't seem that these games progress into domains and domain management. This does not detract from the value of the channel - truthfully, very few APs make it into domain play, as the dungeon is more interesting - but knowing that, I would be curious as to how Daniel would run (or even how he might reflect) on the inclusion and effects of domains on a classic D&D game.
In Conclusion
All in all, I like Bandit's Keep and I like how it both shows games in the realm of the OSR and also how it muses on them unobtrusively to the stories being told. It provides an exposé into some oft neglected elements of old school gaming without losing the staying power of stories and characters that the listener can follow. For these reasons, I'm giving Bandit's Keep a rating of Chainmail. Some elements of old school play don't make it into the channel - or haven't made it in, to the subset of the total content mass that I've consumed, as of this post - however those elements are commonly the ones that are the heavy focus of other streams: meaning that this stream, in addition to standing on its own merits, serves as a very good compliment to other listening, other AP consumption, that you, the listener, may do.In short, subscribe to Bandit's Keep - and thanks for reading!
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