I posted about this on another thread, but I’ll share here as well as its relevant. Like many, I was initially dismissive of the whole livestream TT RPG thing. Then a friend of mine got invited on, which led to me being pulled in, and I discovered that its not what I thought.

First, you need to understand there’s two types of shows. Though both appear on Twitch, I’ll call one Actual Play and one Twitch Show.

Actual plays are great for showing how a game works. When done right, its an enormous asset for a game. For video games its also the same as an unpolished video walk through. This is what people generally think of as “D&D liveplay” or whatever game liveplay. Personally, its not that entertaining.

Twitch shows are a different beast. They are done for the entertainment of the audience. I’m sure they initially began as APs, but they morphed into something else entirely. I can’t speak for all twitch shows, but most are a variant of what I got sucked into doing on Friday nights.

For Death From Above: Legacy (a Battletech inspired show), the players get a beat sheet each week that gives a recap for the start of the show, a rundown of what RP scenes we are going to have in the beginning, what the battle scenario is, and then multiple possible outcomes. The only script is for the GM to read or if there is a lore dump that needs to happen. All RP, actions, and dice rolls are done by the players. Where the Death From Above started as game developers from HBS’s new Battletech computer game and various Twitch personalities, for the new season and story arc, the players are almost all improv actors and larpers. It also helps that we don’t sit; we’re standing the whole time.

But there’s something else that happens in Twitch shows: chat happens. Chat is constantly going, interacting with each other, and, through donations, interacting with us. Chat can buy buffs for the protagonists or the antagonists, swinging the fate of the show. For our show, if they donate over $20 they can give a message that is read out by a mechanized voice on the show, and if its an in character message, we try to incorporate it.

So what you wind up with is really an improv show build on top of the chassis of an RPG and that also incorporates fan interaction.

And yeah, its pretty awesome. I was nervous as hell in my first appearance (I had a scripted lore dump to give right out of the gate and I’d never done this sort of thing before), but the cast was great and the show’s a lot of fun. I also have to admit that last night was amazing, awesome fun, enough so that I rewatched the episode just to see how chat reacted, and it was clear that the fun we had was mirrored by them.