still thinking about moonshine saying “i don’t know where you went to but if you can, come back” 🥺 like when was the last time moonshine didn’t know where hardwon was? it’s tearing me apart 😭😭

CALDER'S HOME IS WHEREVER I AM

murph getting boo'ed <33

love it when murph creates women that cackle <3 <3 @ bathilda & beatrix you are so special to me

I listened to the Marabelle fight and got so emotional I just started coughing and gagging I didn’t even cry I was just so emotional I couldn’t breathe. Good dnd podcast

NADDPOD C3 Ep20 lb

kay doing this half way cause i listened to this half on the train and half now ebiukrjsd

- chestwik- idk who this pathetic man is or how long he’ll be here but i’m in love with his patheticness

- beatrice???? (i won’t lie to you i forgot who that is monka)

- dude calder is HARD aggressive to cheswik and i fucking love it- like how unnecessarily mean lmaooo

- lets gooo keeping chestwik (side note, I didn’t hear much of trinyvale but this guy sounds like lens a bit)

- Calder constantly like ‘i will fucking murder you- IM KIDDINGGGG DONT YOU GET IT????’ and yknow slay

- i got way too excited about that toilet paper I THOUGHT IT WAS ALBIN THEY WERE TALKING TO IFEBOILSKN god i miss that other pathetic sad man :C

- ice giant get FUCKEDDDD

- yessss some more calli development!!!!! (goddan that shit note i cannot do this)

- someone will appreciate your eggs one day sol 

- KEEP IT LIGHTTT CRYING SCREAMING THROWING UP

- wormling is freaking me OUT lol

- =bumpy= 

aabria said “and I’m fucking lord farquaad” with the insistence of somebody who has read shrek/farquaad fic

duck team polycule truthers rise

it used to make me so sad catching up on a podcast that started pre-pandemic but now it’s just like, y’all don’t know what’s coming.

And on naddpod, Jake just said “best year of our lives” because it’s a double crit. it’s January for them

“That brings me down the same way my old man went down”

I’m going to CHEW GLASS

hardwon and jaina still being so awkward when talking about their affection for moonshine is everything 🥹

Okay okay I was keeping it together during this spirit guardian scene but Cobb???? Brian Murphy you're the worst and I am crying

*head in hands* glen looking up to moonshine and maribel and having books about them im going to scream

Re: Em Friedman, I personally always got the impression that they're just a big fan is Aabria cuz I think Aabria was one of their first guests(?) in their TTRPG class

And that's why to me all the coverage about Acofaf, WBN and now Burrows End reads with kind of a biased perspective

Like, I love WBN but as you said, it's not really doing anything innovative per se, and the whole coverage and hype about the Bear episode in Burrows End really made it anti-climactic when the episode aired

Idk, maybe I'm wrong, but a lot of the Actual Play coverage from Polygon (not just Em) seems kind of like D20 and WBN circlejerk while they're more than happy to throw CR under the bus

Oh interesting. Like, I do get that Actual Play is not a particularly massive community and I could see how someone who interviews players regularly might end up becoming close to them and generally that maintaining distance and journalistic integrity is uniquely difficult, but also like. Here's the thing. I know Critical Role is The 800 lb Gorilla in the actual play space; no one else is selling out Wembley Arena. I don't mind if they're not getting the same boosts from publications, because they don't really need it and people love an underdog and all that. It's still not great, that this bias exists, but Critical Role is much harder to keep up with because it is at this point 8 years of content to fully know what's going on in Campaign 3, whereas you could have someone binge watch ACOFAF in a long weekend.

What gets me is that it's not just fawning and biased. It's ignorant of the actual play genre and claiming things that are flat out untrue. "Critical Role isn't as good as Dimension 20" is an opinion. I don't agree with it but it's a valid position for someone to have, and even journalists are entitled to preferences. But like, again: TAZ Balance started at level 1, with the party obtaining a legendary and dangerous artifact at a low level, and it started in late 2014. NADDPod campaign 1 also started at level 1 and ran up to level 20, and it began in early 2018.

Longform D&D/Pathfinder are also not new. Both of the examples above ran over 60 episodes; NADDPod's first campaign was an even 100. Rusty Quill Gaming ran an impressive 218 over 8 years, though they tended to stick to about an hour long per episodes so it's closer to NADDPod in actual hours of gameplay. Obviously Critical Role, while unedited and not a podcast primarily, has had 100+ episode campaigns. All of these were also set in homebrew worlds, though TAZ was extremely loosely based on Forgotten Realms to start, and RQG was essentially a divergent history of our world. So what, precisely, other than the Children's Adventure, makes WBN different? Like...I know fandoms struggle to understand this but it does not do anyone a single fucking favor to act like well-executed but traditional formats (or solid but par for the course work) is radical and innovative genius! It doesn't make me say "wow, WBN is clearly groundbreaking." It makes me go "wow, Polygon's coverage is written by a fucking idiot who's unfamiliar with the landscape of actual play."

What gets me about the bear episode is that it was also, in my opinion, very well-executed and an interesting battle, but it was not like, any different from another battle map except that the production team did a really good job making it slightly gorier than the norm. That's it. And as for the twist...look, again, I'm reserving final judgment, but I keep thinking about this (regrettably it is from Orson Scott Card, who is both a homophobic asshole, and also wrote "How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy" which was my introduction to Octavia Butler and genuinely informs my understanding of the genre to this day):

"If you are using a known foreign language, by the way, take the time and effort to get it right. Among your readers there will always be someone who speaks that language like a native. If you get it wrong, those readers lose faith in you - and rightly so. Wherever you can be truthful, you should be truthful; if your readers can see that you're acting by that credo, they'll trust you, and you'll deserve their trust. But if they catch you faking it, and doing it so carelessly that you can easily be caught, they'll figure that if the story wasn't worth much effort to you, it shouldn't be worth much to them, either. They may still like the story, but you have blunted the edge of their passion."

This is both what I'm worried might end up being true re: Burrow's End (except instead of a foreign language I speak like a native, it's How Radiation Works) but it's also true in that like...all of those longform campaigns? I've watched or listened to them in full. Acting like it's innovation to...do a thing that's been done by so many other prominent actual plays is not even reading to me as bias. It's reading to me as a combination of wildly misplaced priorities (genuinely I think between this and the ask meme I'm like "hmmm have we considered that we're asking a huge amount from a niche medium and acting like it is the responsibility of a bunch of actors with dice to constantly reinvent the artform in which they work and dismantle the kyriarchy and prevent us from getting into arguments with our friends, instead of, as WBN's own page says, play games to make stories out of sound?") and also just. Ignorance. This is a person who is talking about something they genuinely don't know about. Why should I listen? I mean the bias doesn't help, but really it's the ignorance that kills it.

Hardwons diet is sliders, sticky buns, the digestive vein of the shrimp, and crick water, which is compared to 4Loko. And at one point, drugs that make you blow up. It’s impressive he’s in c3. Not a vegetable in sight. He should have died of caffeine overdose

Naddpod C3 ep 15

i love the world already and I can’t wait for them to explore it more

the INSTANT regret after calder pledged himself to the dragon princess lmaoo

aww sol wanting to show albin the knighting is just- so perfect love that 

RAPPORT SPORES bro i was hit with a WAVE of nostalgia hearing that ;-;

THE CALBIN CRUMBSS!!! calder bringing him up mid combat for literally no reason???? what he run through your mind all the time or something??

also callie vaping malfunctions my brain but yknow shes the only one who can do it ok!? only her >:(

oh god they keep dropping in the combattttt

not him faking his death to get out of his knighthood plssss

woo that was a close one monka