I played in my very first livestream AND technically speaking my first Actual Play on Monday with EUphoria, a channel for Europe-based TTRPG creators. And you can watch it if you want! You can also see some character art I made on their Patreon.
I’ve been dreaming of being in or making an AP for years, and it was frankly even more fun than I’d imagined, and I just want to do it even more now. It also raised so many interesting perspectives on the questions and ideas I’ve been having about AP as art form, and really has me thinking more about what can only be usefully explored through practice rather than theory and observation.
I’ve been working away on the next episode of my solo game, though for various reasons it’s going more slowly than I’d planned, but one of the things I’ve been realising with that project is how different solo play is from a group play—which I know sounds really obvious, and I promise I have more to say about it than that, but that post is coming soon. Point for now being, this was really my first chance to experience working on the more classic, ‘standard’ form of AP.
I think the biggest surprise for me was that it didn’t feel as different from a normal table as I expected it to. Obviously there was an extra bit of nervousness and adrenaline, but I’ve thought so much about the performance style of play and how it differs from the way my own tables feel that I was expecting to really be aware of that as I was doing it. In practice, though, I realised I was pretty much just playing the way I do at a new table, when I want to do my best, make a good experience for people I don’t know well, and also give a clear sense of who I am and what I’m like as a player. It probably helps that I have a terminal theatre-kid personality, so that combination probably does come off quite perform-y.
It makes me really curious what a longer-form campaign would be like, or what GMing would be like (anyone hiring?). Does that new-table feel fade, or does it become tempting to let it fade and require work to continue maintaining it? How much does one settle into a player ‘persona’ (a lot, I suspect) and how does that develop and change? How does the already-performative GM role feel with this extra layer of spectatorship?
I really hope I get the chance to explore some of these questions, and will certainly keep looking out for ways to make my own opportunities to do so. If you’ve played AP games, I’d love to hear about your experiences with any of these things!