The very earliest version of this newsletter was going to be about actual play, before I realised that I absolutely did not have time to watch and listen to enough 100+ episode series to consistently review them or even just generally write critically about them.
However, that interest in actual play as an art form, and the belief that we should treat it seriously and critically, hasn’t gone anywhere, even if I’ve waffled about what to do with it. I’ve wanted to make my own, but struggled with the idea of asking performers to work for free. Finally, during a conversation about the solo mode of one of my favourite games, Legend in the Mist, I realised that I could just try doing it myself.
Already, a solo actual play is a different beast than the kinds of things I’ve watched and listened to, but I think Legend in the Mist is a pretty perfect system for it. Playing through my first session (episode? idk), I realised that the Mist Engine’s focus on characters’ interiority—the reasons they make the moves that they do, the strengthening and fading of aspects of their identities—is really perfect for a solo show, which I think inevitably needs to feel more novelistic and thus more interested in the main character’s psychology. Basically, it’s exactly the kind of thing I’ve been thinking about when it comes to experimenting with actual play: what happens when we stop defaulting to D&D and trying to be really conscious about pairing story and system?
You can listen to the first episode now on YouTube. I haven’t decided if I’ll also be uploading it to any podcast platforms yet, though I’d love your thoughts, but at the minute it definitely feels a bit too rough and experimental to try and promote out of context.
One of the main things I want to do differently in the next episode is reconsider my approach to ‘liveness.’ I basically played through that session as I would a normal TTRPG: I planned a little bit, but then I just rode straight through and improvised as I went. I cut a few things, and I re-recorded some lines that were confusingly phrased, but mostly it’s as I played it (minus some very long pauses to think about what to do next). But without a live audience or fellow players at the table, I don’t think the sort of performance of spontaneity adds very much. It certainly doesn’t add as much as I think could be gained by giving myself more time and space to maybe structure a bit of a plan and do some pre-rolling, then leave the improvisation to when I’m actually working out the scene. I’m planning to experiment with a few different forms of this over the next few sessions, and so stay tuned to hear what is gained and lost with different configurations of pre-planning vs improvisation.
Similarly, I think that just as a multi-person actual play strives to sound cinematic or theatrical, I can lean into sounding like a novel. I want to speak less in the voice of the theoretical DM all the time, and instead try to sit in a close third person, to give a more direct sense of playing this character rather than observing her.