Here’s a great article from the NY Times Magazine. (Gift link.)
Great article! Vice had one a few years ago detailing the nuts & bolts of how prisoners play D&D with DIY dice and other ways they got around the rules for contraband.
Touching article, and while I’ve seen a few NYT articles that touch on “D. & D.”, I never would have expected to read an NYT article that referenced Eberron.
If anyone wants to read this story with a few more images included and without using an NYT gift link, it’s also posted at The Marshall Project.
I suppose this could have gone in the Music 2023 threads or even in the BG3 thread, but here’s a catchy story and beat.
Well it needs to go in the BG3 thread at the very least!
I kinda laughed at a Cleric(al) Dwarf filing paperwork…
They sure are jonesing for some of that sweet, sweet Critical Role action.
I laughed hard:
The People That Time Forgot is really good, because David Bowie’s ex-girlfriend Dana Gillespie is in it, and she got them big, ole, tit-tays
I think they would be doing better if they just made it on demand. Who watches anything live anymore?
They have finally started to have the shows available on demand.
I wouldn’t subscribe to a service that would provide only those shows, but there’s at least one that I wouldn’t mind checking out (the celebrity-heavy one).
If they did want to make this into a network, and honestly I’m still hazy on the game plan here, what shows would you pitch that you’d want to see? You know, to really pad out the daily schedule.
I suppose many of these were features in the old Dragon magazine, and might not be in line with the underlying strategy of boosting Hasbro’s (and only Hasbro’s) stock price.
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Rules Lawyer. Hypothetical situations come up around the table and different interpretations are argued between players and the dungeon master. What’s a DM to do? Cut to the Rules Lawyer! The Lawyer would give an official ruling from the Wizards of the Coast perspective, and explain the methodology that led him or her to that conclusion.
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War Stories. Players and DMs reminisce, with the skill of spoken word artists and the expertise of Rescue 911 reenactments, about some of their favorite in-game experiences. There’d be a special spot at the bar for Veterans of Previous Edition Wars, and maybe the vets could determine what was the best old edition.
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Review Show! What first- and third-party products have come out recently? Are they worth it? What ideas can a clever DM plunder from them, or how would an exasperated DM remix them to playability, Alexandrian-style?
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Cosplay Roundup! Maybe only tangentially related to RPGs, but video packages from recent cons about all the pretty costumes people make, and also how they make them.
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The foreign channel! This would be dedicated to Let’s Plays of non-WotC TTRPG games. Blades in the Dark, Star Trek Adventures, Shadowrun, Path/Starfinder of various editions, the old Palladium Ninja Turtles game, West End Star Wars and Ghostbusters, etc. etc.
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Very Special Movie Presentations – all those shitty (and some worthy) '80s fantasy movies, from Sorceress to Red Sonja to Wizards to Willow.
Would any of these be worth watching? Maybe, if my whole identity revolved around TTRPGs and knowledge of mass media began and ended with the dawning of Warner Bros. “Prime Time Entertainment Network” but didn’t see how that ended.
I’m not even sure they know what they’re doing. Saying they’ve started a “TV channel” is crazypants. It’s three new original shows, reruns of the old cartoon, and re-streams of other already successful play sessions like Rivals of Waterdeep that started in 2018. There are Twitch groups with more varied content.
I don’t think it’s inherently a bad idea for Hasbro to dip into live-action series production centered on their products, but I don’t think a whole channel’s worth of content based solely on D&D is going to work. They’re already going outside the lines by trying to make a cooking show with loosely D&D-themed recipes. Plus, as already noted, no one is going to show up to watch any of this on a set schedule.
Hell, if I could commit to anything on a set schedule, I’d play D&D with my friends.
There is only one Rules Lawyer that I recognize, and he exclusively does videos on Pathfinder!
Haha. That guy is amazing.
I mean hell Games Workshop literally sell a monthly subscription service that purports to be a TV channel and I think now, like 4 years in there, might actually be enough total actual content there to justify buying it for a month, and yet it persists and those folks eat it up, so maybe Hasbro has a shot here. . .
I didn’t see it specified, but it’s a free channel accessible via Plex or FreeVee. I’ve checked out a few episodes of Faster Purple Worm, Kill, Kill, and it’s pretty fun. Right at an hour long, so it’s not the commitment of a Critical Role episode, and usually several celebrities. Ep1 has Seth Green and his wife Clare Grant and Wil Wheaton (and someone else I didn’t know) and Ep3 has Deborah Ann Woll and Matthew Lillard. I found them both very entertaining. I didn’t know anyone on episode 2, but it was still fun.
Largely, though, you guys are right. There’s very little original stuff there. I like the actual-plays, but the live schedule just doesn’t work very well these days. Mostly, it’s just the old cartoon.
I’m trying but I must be a luddite and Amazon has no clue how to run a streaming service:
I search for Freevee and find this, clicking where it says “Watch now”
Seems like I’ve found the right spot, as it has ads for Freevee shows and movies
I then search, but no dice although I find the inspiration for the show’s name:
