1KM1KT Free RPG Community

This thought keeps popping up. People are always saying that RPGs are about the story, and yet, stories are about sharing an experience and we rarely share our games. I've seen session reports, but they're not a big draw of readers.

It's not that way everywhere though. I hear that in Japan "replays" are game sessions that are written up and illustrated and that they actually sell them on shelves in game stores.

It also makes me think of the series Tabletop. Will Wheaton commented that when they first started, the show was boring. Then Felicity Day suggested editing the show in a specific way and it made all the difference. He never elaborated on what the suggestion was that changed things.

It also makes me think of Rob's campaign end comic that he did for his players. It's an interesting read. It doesn't go into details but it gives you the feel of the characters and how crazy the games were.

Lots of gamers long to share the experience of their games. Is there a way to do it right? Have you ever thought about sharing your games? What when right, what went wrong?

I have found a few tabletop RPG Let's Plays on Youtube. Some just have a blank screen and the effect is like a radio show, others have virtual table top software, and a few others have means of showing the players.

The big problem, is like any media adaptation, you need to add something in the transition, as well as know what you're losing. In-jokes among friends or casual discussion don't always translate into fun banter for listeners.

Kikoskia is one of my favorite video game LPers, and has run a few sessions of the game Paranoia. Klyka, one of the players, got the better quality sound capture though, so here is the latter's recording: Kiko is a long time lets-player of video games and an excellent voice actor.

Shadowhawk2012 is also running paranoia, first session is here:

has some sessions of werewolf, Warhammer, and his own game Rayd (X-com like tabletop game) in his playlists.

I'm currently listning to the Starwar's LP, but r also has Dragonage, ShadowRun, and Doube Cross tabletop recordings.

For a few years of an D&D game, is your sources.

One more for the road, .

The anime was based on players in a tabletop rpg. And in full circle, here is someone's free rpg adaptation of it: .

Interesting, I've seen some youtube games, but they're very long to watch. I'll check these out a little later. I wonder, would players be interested in an editing service that cuts the slow parts, ads some transitional dialogue to cover the trip to the market and distill a three hour youtube game down to an interesting session to watch. Even if it was a half hour, it would be more palatable than three. Adding in some stock images or short video clips (of say a monster) to show the viewer what the players are dealing with would be cool too.

A service like that would be time consuming. For one, you'd have to at least watch the whole session. There's three to four hours. At minimum wage it would still be $30 just for that. Then the editing would probably take just as long. So at minimum, you're talking $60 in labor costs and almost a full day of work. Most businesses need to double their costs to make a profit so let's just wag it at $120 a session.

So it looks like the business of editing youtube games is dubious at best. Maybe it would make sense for a game designer though. A day's (more like three days to get things right) work would not be a huge investment to promote a game. I'm sure someone's doing it out there. If there's a few ads, you might even make a buck or two off it.

Now, what if you did the editing for a smaller price (say $30) and then you got to host the session on your youtube account, the business gets the ad revenue and anything over the $120 dollars made by ads gets split between you and the gaming group. The chances are that most sessions would be stinkers, but you might get a few sessions that are real hits. In addition, it would put all the sessions in one place and provide a channel of games for people to come and watch.

At first if someone like me were to try it, the editing would probably stink but after doing dozens or hundreds, the skill level would improve and the time to edit would be cut down considerably.

As another possibility, here is a blog about the events surrounding a wargame: .

Most of the YouTube sessions I've mentioned above also preform video game lets-plays, and thus have some knowledge of presentation and maintaining banter. I would not be too surprised to learn if they edit some stuff out, or have at least a basic script, but so far as I can tell, everyone just stays focused. Most also split their videos into 30-60 min videos, rather than upload an entire session. Games like star-wars or Paranoia that inherently keep things moving are preferable to some others.

RPtools.net or possibly roll20.net seem to be the tools to bring session visuals to the public, if you have a recording program that can screen capture.

Monetizing a channel and finding subscribers is one thing, but an editing service, even for low prices seems a bit untenable.

Roll20 can be played inside Google+ Hangouts now, so that solves the recording part pretty easily. On the other hand, in my experience, it has some flaws, because the both the Roll20 and the Hangouts toolbars are present, leading to an overcrowded screen.

RPG reports tend to be too long and un-edited. I rarely have that much time to commit to somebody else's game - I'd rather spend it doing some work on and own campaign or doing something non-related. I'll have to check out those sessions Chainsaw posted - maybe I was disposed to all the wrong reports!!

There is... one report I enjoyed, but maybe for all the wrong reasons. Maybe not enjoyed... but it's hilarious, lame & funny. It's called and it's about porn stars and strippers and assorted adult industry workers playing D&D. I know, I know, it'sa dubious concept, but please don't judge me. They are pretty short clips (5-6 minutes), just some snippets, collections of funny moments, so it's not about the story or campaign or the characters really, but more about the cast and the general atmosphere. I watched maybe a dozen, not more. But I thought I'd add it to the list, as a novelty item.

I still like reading Warhammer battle reports sometimes (even though I'm not playing anymore), but I guess the key is that those automatically keep to the basic scheme of turns and phases, which leads to a dry, yet understandable and short text. Also, most of them have photos and/or schemes, so they also provide tactics advise, etc.

As a note: if you have a transcript of the session available, it's not that hard to use software like to make a session replay that can be clicked through. You just need images for all the characters, plus some stock art for the backgrounds.

That looks interesting, I'll have to investigate it when I'm feeling ambitious.