Critical Role... and other stuff.

[kane_magus]

As of last night, I'm up to the start of episode 18 of Critical Role (campaign 1), so far. Yeah... I've actually watched two episodes per day on some of the days when I had time available to do so (sometimes staying up way later than I probably should have to do so), in lieu of, like, playing video games or whatever, but definitely at least one ep per day so far. It does go by a little faster than it seems like it would, watching on 1.25x speed (bumped up to 1.5x for the after-session stuff) and skipping the 10-20+ minutes worth of breaks at the start and in the middle.

I've said in the past that I don't give a fuck about sports and I don't give a fuck about (fak)e-sports either, but... this, this right here, watching these guys play D&D... I'm going to have to say this is my "sports," now.

Counter Monkey was kind of the gateway drug, I guess, though that only involved Spoony talking about playing, not actually playing (I haven't watched his Pathfinder stuff). That, along with reading things like Old Man Henderson, The Ballad of Edgardo, and That Guy Destroys Psionics (though those, funny as they are to read about after the fact, would be more like reasons not to play tabletop games, honestly). And there was stuff like Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights, and, of course, Planescape: Torment (also Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, and Torment: Tides of Numenera, though I haven't completed a full playthrough of those as of yet). However, aside from when I watched Wil Wheaton DM Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana a few years ago, this is the first time I've seen actual Dungeons & Dragons (since, well, Titansgrave technically wasn't actually using D&D in the first place).

Still don't know if I'll ever get involved in actually playing this stuff myself... but then, I'll never play in the Super Bowl, either. *shrug* I'd watch a million hours of these guys playing D&D before I'd willingly watch another fucking football game, though (and would actively seek out a game of D&D or whatever to play before I'd ever willing play a game of football, either). ¬_¬

Comments

[owsf2000]

Pretty sure the bulk of my D&D days are behind me at this point although I played it heavily in highschool and a bit during college. There have been a few sessions since then with family although those were just playing premade adventures. (You can buy adventure books for DMs that either can't or don't like designing an adventure for the players - there was even a "Dungeons" magazine back in the day that had nothing but one shot adventures to put players through. I use to have a large stack of those as well as a large stack of Dragon magazines which generally had new rules and other things for players to try out for something different)

Given that you'd normally need something called 'friends' to play D&D, an alternative would be to check at your local hobby shop to see if they run campaigns. That's of course if you -have- any local hobby shops, particularly those that at least sell D&D merch. I could technically do that here in town (Well, once the covids is over...) but I doubt it would be convenient for me to go to unless they were strictly a weekend group.

There are also online groups although I don't know much about how those are set up. One of my sisters regularly attends an online D&D group or use to a few years back, so I know they exist!

(And lastly, while definitely rarer and harder to attend I suppose would be going to game conventions that host D&D sessions. Both of the main cons I use to go to had those although I was always too busy digging through the dealers room to attend any. ;)

[kane_magus]

Yeah, that whole "other people" thing is pretty much the biggest roadblock for me as far as doing tabletop gaming, either in person or online or whatever.