The Case for Actual Plays

In recent and continuing vintage, a common, persistent, and occasionally pernicious distaste for actual plays rears its head in the blog and podcast sphere. In some cases, it's a statement of simple "I don't get it, but more power to you" - in others, invective enters the mix: but in any case, the Actual Play being somewhat dear to my own heart, a personal necessity for this post has come to its own. Herein, I will not attempt to convince others that they should enjoy actual plays if they do not - but instead, define the actual play and attempt to illustrate the attraction of the actual play to its audience, perhaps justifying or at least explaining some of its growing successes.

To Define the Actual Play

An Actual Play is defined by Fandom.com as performative role play, wherein the game is broadcast to an audience wider than those playing: specifying that they may be live or prerecorded, in video or audio. As of this writing, video actual plays make most headlines - with YouTube and Twitch streams and re-watches of the stream - but the definition notably includes both live (e.g. streamed) actual play experiences as well as prerecorded and audio (i.e. podcast) actual play experiences as well as video.

But I know what an Actual Play is. Why do you need to define it? The definition is important because of the media which it encompasses - the actual play genre is bigger than YouTube live streams: which is key to understanding the durability and popularity of the genre.

Why Actual Plays? (A Case For)

Vicarious Gaming

Not everyone is able to game: and while actual play casts are not a substitute for playing, itself, it is a way to immerse yourself in the genre external to the event. A listener might listen to a podcast actual play - or stream one, audio only - in their car: on their way to work or, if they work in transportation, potentially while working in lieu of listening to the radio. New parents, or people with other unpredictable obligations, may not be able to carve out a consistent time to play - and as such, this may scratch the itch for them during the downtime they do have. 

I could go on - but the point is made. At least one element of value in favor of the actual play is that it allows someone who is not able to game to participate in an adventure. In the same sense that someone who can't fly might play Flight Simulator or - more accurately - someone who doesn't have time to read the novel might find time to watch the Netflix adaptation, so also someone who does not have the ability to participate in a game can consume an actual play.

Learning and Engaging

Traditional wisdom in the OSR is that in order to learn the game, you have to play the game. While that wasn't entirely accurate - many of us bought the books, read them and the example-of-play sections, and ran the game until we figured it out -  but with the advent of actual plays, another mechanism of learning the game has come about: watching other people, or listening to other people, who know the game play the game. This was an original driving factor for including reviews as part of this blog: to help identify actual plays that empower the consumer to learn the game, to engage with the hobby, prior to either making the commitment to dive into the hobby or to participate blindly.

Improving your Own Game

How many times have you read a book and thought, "This would be awesome to incorporate into my game!" If the inclusion of Appendix N in TSR publications is to be noted, it logically follows that the consumption of media external to the table and game preparation is a way to improve and build your own game - be it adapting ideas for your players to overcome, immersing yourself in a theme to produce consistency of tone in your game, or otherwise. Actual plays likewise serve to fill this role with the added context of the ruleset in use. Not only would the watcher be able to say, "This setting is neat; I'm going to crib this idea," but also, they would be able to crib the idea - or adapt it - wholesale, with context as to how players might react, with rulings that come up during the actual play, and so on.

Tuesday Knights: White Sands, an OSE actual play available from
Mr. Hobbs' Gamerhood: the first Plate rating of the Clerics Wear Ringmail
actual play review series.

When I was in college, we ran a local gaming league at the comic shop downtown: after, the DMs would meet at Waffle House and make fun of exchange stories of how players handled situations presented. The actual play presents a static version of this midnight Waffle House experience: seeing how other DMs handle situations, seeing what other DMs are doing, empowering the viewer (or listener, as may be) to learn from the experience of others, improving their own game in the process.

Entertainment and Genre Enjoyment

The most obvious - and commonly mistaken to be the only virtue of - actual plays is that people who enjoy watching the game can use actual plays to watch games. I present this as the last in the series of consumer benefits because it is, to my eyes, represents - though a valid reason - a trap that someone new to actual plays may fall into: namely, the biggest, most popular, and best produced actual plays quite commonly represent the worst actual plays in terms of actual representation of the hobby.

To speak to personal experience, the podcast that got me into actual plays back in 2016 or so when I started listening to them (compared to reading play reports, which I'd done off and on prior) was (embarrassingly) Critical Role. Not being interested in 5e, I've moved on - and I've since penned an opinion on the Critical Role product - but more importantly: as you look at the progression of Critical Role episodes, you see a gradual move away from the game and more towards a theatrical experience. The purpose of the product is to produce story arcs, not to highlight the game - the focus is on the production, on the characters, and on the show. This is a key complaint from old school gamers against it - and it's a valid reason: it's a preference element - this stresses the necessity of finding an actual play that suits your preferences - both for rules content, for theater content, and for the length of episodes (which I will elaborate on shortly in the Case Against.)

But I'm diverting from the point. There exist people who like the genre, there exist people who like the game - my readership is exclusively member to this group - and of that group, a subset simply enjoys the system. 

You can listen to a podcast as background noise at work.

You can watch a playback of a stream when on the exercise bike.

Actual plays provide a mechanism to continue to experience gameplay when not playing the game: and at the end of the day, it's important that the gameplay represented caters to your sense of a good one. In the same sense that a disgruntled player would quit a campaign which had disgruntled them, so also should an actual play consumer quit an actual play which doesn't suit their needs - however, the disgruntled player isn't going to (or shouldn't) quit gaming entirely: they'll find a new table, find a new system, find a group and game which caters to the thrills that the old game didn't. In the same sense, it's important to - when using an actual play - identify what about the actual play appeals to you and match those desires to the product presented. Understanding that there is more than one out there - and that "entertainment and not gameplay" is only one demographic to which actual plays are able to cater - is key to understanding the continuing appeal of actual plays and to finding actual plays that appeal to you, as a viewer.

Selling Your Product

My primary motives for actual plays exhausted, a bonus reason sourced from exterior conversations: for a production company, actual play communities are an avenue to market your product and your experience. Why author and edit lengthy example of play clauses when you can point people to your company Rumble account? 

• Swords of Jordoba, which I have spoken favorably about, was recorded and published by the author of Swords & Wizardry.
• Monkey Blood Designs - which publishes The Midderlands, among other highly acclaimed OSR and RPG product - maintains an actual play page to showcase the setting: run by John Alan Large, of whom I have spoken favorably in a separate, OSE context.
  
• Dice, Camera, Action - a 5e actual play run by WotC's Chris Perkins - was expressly released to drive interest in the (then) new Curse of Strahd publication.
  

Are all actual plays designed to drive interest in the product that they showcase? Of course not - but that's immaterial to the point that they do. If you are a small time publisher looking to sell a system, a setting, an adventure - actual plays (optimally, good ones, but c'est la vie) are an avenue to market them: showing a potential buyer both how they work, how they can work, and providing an example of players diving in to whatever it is you're bringing to the table.

Why Not Actual Plays? (A Case Against)

Why Watch when you can Play?

Do you watch football? Why watch football when you can get with some buddies for a few hours and toss the pigskin around?

Less facetiously, some if not most actual plays will run for long stretches: exposing the length of a full game session. An argument can be made: if you have 2-6 hours to spend watching YouTube, you have 2-6 hours to invest in actually playing the game, yourself. While this - on the surface - is valid, it fails to take into consideration that not everyone can play.

• Your 2-6 free hours may not line up with 2-6 free hours with a compatible group.
• Your 2-6 free hours may be distributed: watching one actual play over the course of a week, one hour a time, at lunch or on your commute.
  
• Your 2-6 free hours may be inconsistent - having it one week, but not the next, due to a swing-shift or maybe family obligations - which is not conducive to traditional play.
  

While I agree - I would rather play than watch (and I'd rather run than play!) - the use case for the actual play does not fill the same use case for the game session. It's a different niche.

This argument is occasionally phrased, "when I watch someone else play, it makes me want to play - not watch." The above commentary applies, but in addition (for this permutation specifically) this is a feature, not a bug: a benefit, not a drawback. For some players, the desire to play (or run, specifically) can fade when life gets in the way; the use of actual plays to stoke that desire can produce a better game. For others, knowing that no one plays 24/7, the use of actual plays to fill your downtime, producing that same sense of desire, will help focus thinking about the game, preparing for the game, building anticipation for the game. 

Note, some folks don't like thinking about the game between games - I have not and will not claim that actual plays are for everyone: if actual plays reduce the quality of your experience, or reduce the quality of your life, don't watch them! But the same can be said for any hobby - too much sunbathing giving you squamous cells? Stop sunbathing!

Bandit's Keep Presents: A Thousand Thousand Islands DCC Campaign,
a definitely not boring actual play series by Bandit's Keep and Bandit's
Keep Actual Play: of whom Clerics Wear Ringmail speaks favorably.

Watching People Play is Boring

If your game is boring to watch, that's your problem.

That said, this is actually a very important point in that some actual plays are better than others, in terms of presentation and usability. This is the exact reason I rate actual plays on this blog. A well-done actual play is both entertaining and informative - showcases the game, allows the players freedom to explore the world and the experience, and involves the onlooker seamlessly, as would any other fiction media. So - if an actual play is boring, or taking too long: don't consume it! Find another that has a shorter runtime. Or find one that has better editing to chop out the chaff and present the game better.

Finding a good actual play is a challenge - especially if you're looking for an OSR actual play: as 5e dominates the larger space. In part, the reason for my review series was to document that process and help others who enjoy actual plays navigate the morass. So - to amend my initial (facetious) remark, if your actual play is boring to watch, I would suggest investing in editing; and if the actual play you are watching is boring, I would suggest either jumping a few episodes forward, seeing if they improve, or finding another.

They Don't Play the Game

Actual plays that don't play are a pox on the genre. Again, this is a reason that I review actual plays and rate them on this blog. The success of some big-name "actual plays" has jaded the larger genre, and although it's usually easy to tell which ones are going to be playing and which ones are intended as improv theater, again - the purpose of the blog reviews are to help separate the wheat from the chaff in this regard. As a caveat, if you enjoy improv theater - more power to you! Though this blog likely doesn't cater to your demographic: knowing that, it may be useful to consider my reviews will frequently give an opposite qualitative assessment than yours. That is. if I indicate of an actual play, "they ham it up too much" - try it out: you may like it!

Is the production value too high and are the rolls just too coincidental? Do the rules just never come up - and does it seem like the action is entirely characters interacting with one another?

You might be watching improv theater.

Who Has the Time?

The applicability of this argument tends to evolve from streams. Yes - if you are watching a game live, you've now tied up several hours of your day into watching someone else game - but consider that even on Twitch, the king of streaming platforms, streamed hours are only a subset of total hours watched. A viewer does not need to sit through a six hour session if it's recorded and accessible. Sure, context may suffer - watching 30 minutes of a film, then coming back for the next 30 minutes later - but as I've implied above, it's distinctly possible to watch what you can, then come back for more later when time permits. This was the primary mechanism by which I consumed actual plays when I first found them. Having twin infants and not being able to play - anyone who has taken care of an infant can tell you, waking up every three hours 24/7 for six months is a fairly effective way to upend your normal schedule - meant that I was able to consume RPG media effectively for just over an hour a day: the mornings when I would watch or listen to actual plays while exercising. From that experience, I can vouch: the time you have - be it exercising, be it on commute, be it whenever: there is more time in the day that most of us realize: and it's very feasible to fill that time rather than to try to carve out a full sitting.

Second, consider that not all actual plays are long-form. The Delvers comes to mind - or Iron Tavern - some of the earliest reviews I did, but also two podcasts that ran for short sessions: less than 45 minutes, as I recall - a span of time sufficient to occupy an episode of most television programs. Edited actual plays, or episodic actual plays, exist: if you are avoiding actual plays only for the temporal commitment they require, or if the actual play you are following is hard to follow because it is difficult to maintain context day to day, watching subsets of the episodes at a time, consider finding an actual play with more concise editing or better separated, better delineated breaks: such that a single session might occupy a smaller amount of your time.

In Conclusion

If actual plays don't do it for you, even after accounting for the various mitigation mechanisms can be applied for your reasoning, that's ok. The purpose of this article is not - and never was - to convince the reader to like something that they don't like: instead, the hope in its publication is to clear up some questions, some observations, and some criticisms of the culture around actual plays: to provide an answer for when the statement arises, "I don't get why people watch these things" or to provide a rebuttal for when the assertion - or assertions in kindred - arises, "Actual plays don't provide value to the community or to the new player."

As a consumer of actual plays and a proponent for their production, I will tell you that some actual plays are better than others - and I will tell you that both on a game qualitative and a production qualitative sense - and as such, I would encourage you not to discount them out of hand: if they aren't for you, like I said, they aren't for you - but it's possible, too, that it's not that you don't like onions or celery: it's just that you haven't tried jambalaya.

Play on, readers!

Open license artwork retrieved from Pixabay and adapted for thematic use. Attribution in alt text.
Still captures from Mr. Hobbs' Gamerhood and Bandit's Keep used with permission of the respective party.