D&D shows

This is kind of an interesting topic, although I don't know that this video on it is really deep enough to be interesting in and of itself.

It's interesting that Matt Mercer, the DM for Critical Role, and Travis... er... whatever his last name is, the CEO (and one of the players) from Critical Role, never expected to have more than a handful of views. They seem to have thought it would be a strange one-off experiment, I presume as a favor to a friend at Geek & Sundry or something.  Of course, I wonder if anyone's analyzed who watches this kind of thing and what they find appealing about it specifically, or if they're just happy that it was unexpectedly a big deal that's made them a fair bit of money. 

I would expect that the exact same reasons why I'd presume that they figured nobody would like it are exactly the reasons why I couldn't stick with it for too long. I bailed somewhere in the 6th episode, after watching the better part of twenty hours of Critical Role. A drop in the bucket compared to the content available, to be sure, and they probably got better; I was still at it when they were pretty new, after all. But I just find that contrary to the assertions in this video I embedded, that it isn't very entertaining to watch. And the amount of hours I've put into watching it is more or less equivalent to an entire regular season of a regular TV show; ~42 minutes per episode (pads out to the full hour time slot when you factor in commercials) x 22-24 episodes is only about ~16-17 hours. I've actually watched more Critical Role than that, I think, getting much closer to 20-25 hours.

I suspect that the people who really like this show are people who are pretty invested in D&D as a game and themselves as gamers who play D&D. This is honestly the only interpretation I can comprehend as to why this kind of thing would be popular to watch. To me, it's almost painfully tedious to watch. As they spend a huge amount of time poring over their character sheets for the super-power ability that they have that they can bring to bear, all potential tension and focus gets lost. It's one thing if you're a player in a game, and that can be dealt with mentally or emotionally, but as a spectator, it makes the whole thing lose any narrative or dramatic focus, which makes the whole thing difficult follow (or rather, difficult to want to bother.) It's not storytelling, as the video asserts, if it ignores such basic facets of how to tell a story.

On the other hand, if you're really invested in D&D, then you can maybe enjoy it, because you can appreciate the tactical and gamist elements of it a lot more. Watching them play as a gamer rather than as a person who just appreciates a novel new semi-medium for telling interesting stories is understandable to me, but that's not the angle that the video goes for above. 

Curiously, I think that there'd be a chance to pick up more mainstream success at finding an audience, as opposed to simply gamer success, by doing it a bit differently. Right now, their audience is people who are gamers. And specifically D&D gamers, I'd wager. But if the games were a little more quick-moving, and instead of scrutinizing the character sheet for a power, the players just talked about what they'd want to do in more naturalistic language, and their actions (and the randomness associated with them) were resolved much more quickly, that they could offer what the Ode to Cinema video claims that they already offer. Because right now, they don't, really. 

Once again, I find that a rules-lite, breezy, rulings centric and more naturalistic collaborative story-telling (as opposed to tactical gaming) approach would suit this medium much better. Or is that merely my bias for that type of game showing through? Well, maybe, but I don't think so. What I want my games to resemble is what mainstream non-gamer type people would want from a passive entertainment approach anyway. Not that I want my players to be passive, anymore than I would want performers on a stage to just sit there and not perform and expect that to be entertaining to an audience, but rather that I expect that my demands from a game session are a bit better aligned with a spectator or audience's demands from an entertainment medium. So what I want for gaming is—kind of coincidentally, in this case—what would work better at attracting a more mainstream audience to this type of show.

But maybe that wouldn't really work. Maybe mainstream audiences will never be attracted to this type of show, and the explanations offered by Ode to Cinema are a just-so story. Maybe the only kinds of people who will ever watch this kind of thing are D&D players, who want to see the mechanics of D&D playing out at the table while they're playing. 

Which would be curious, because even D&D players usually tend to see that as a bad thing in their D&D tie-in novels. But this is such a unique sub-medium that the rules about what works and what kind of audience it's really attracting and what they want and demand to see are still, I'd bet, pretty unknown.