Back House Garbage

This is something of an ungenerous image to post, but I feel it says in a screenshot something very important about the pattern of streaming D&D that continues to proliferate, in search of the money Critical Role made.

The moment is from the WOTC's Dungeon Masters, episode 8, campaign 1 Finale. I'm not going to give the time stamp, you'll just have to watch this to find the moment. Yes, the fellow on the left is definitely picking his nose. The fellow on the right is not smelling his armpit, though the freeze suggests that; he is, rather, apparently checking out some growth or something to do with the skin behind his elbow... apparently because he's so bored with the ongoing campaign that he's forgotten that a camera is running.

This is a problem I have with the "actors" from all such things that are being presented by some sort of "official" organisation or corporation: while they may be actors or even have experience with improv, they aren't "professional."  The lack of immediate attention from moment to moment allows them to slip into a habit that all unprofessional actors do... get bored, start looking around, allow their faces to express momentary contempt at what the dungeon master says, or another actor... all of which produces an effect more like a reality show full of bored jerks (in other words, normal) and not a D&D session.

The assumption that professional discipline isn't necessary comes from the belief — again, in from a very unprofessional point-of-view — that improv doesn't need to be professional. This is an amateur's assumption that because something is improv'd, it doesn't require pacing, timing, care, attention, mindfulness and respect for other performers. In the scene above, the fellow on the left is talking to the DM while performing the act, while the fellow on the right is ignoring that the fellow next to him is talking. Professional actors know to turn and look at whomever is talking, because it draws the audience's focus to that person. NOT doing this isn't just poor acting, it's flat out disrespectful. I shouldn't be able to capture one second of two actors in the same shot, with one talking, and the other doing anything.

True enough, at an ordinary table, people scratch themselves, they check their phones, they make side jokes, they get up for snacks and ignore the other players, or roll their eyes and so on. They naturally behave much of the time that it's their turn that counts, that when others are playing its fine to look over one's character, look off blankly, yawn, stretch, whatever... because it makes little difference to the game: but the WOTC isn't presenting "a game"... not really. The WOTC is presenting something it hopes will encourage sales, interest, attention, a willingness to follow... and, one hopes, the fostering of a positive attitude towards the game itself.

This video fails utterly to accomplish this. One doesn't need to take my word it. This is the "big finale," presumably the most important episode... and yet, after 13 days live, 52K page views. In the scene of the screen capture, we're talking about the Alchemist's character's abilities and spell slots, as though that ought, on camera, to be something we need to highlight in a 1 hour, 35 minute episode. In D&D terms, that's not very long. If I were to run a session that short, it would be over in a finger snap, so far as the participants and myself were concerned. Instead, this hour and a half drags... nothing really happens. There's no build of tension, just display. The DM is making a lot of show, but there's next to no actual game play. The players are told things that happen (with the DM's voice literally enhanced technologically to sell the scene). This is a terrible representation of what the game of D&D offers.

On some level, this is what hurts D&D, and always has. Going back to the Dragon Magazine, there's always been this sort of... let's call it a "lets-go-camper vibe" with respect to the game that's always been very successful at undermining the game's credibility.

When I was 14, I worked one summer as a camp counsellor at a camp that was just a half-mile from my parents' cabin in Sylvan Lake. Junior counsellors ranged in age from 14 to 17, and seniors 18 to 19... presumably, in retrospect, because we could all be counted on to work for the experience for free. I certainly was willing.  Each cabin of eight boys had a senior and a junior counsellor. My senior liked to use the evenings to get together with the other seniors and drink (legally, in Canada, this was always possible at 18), leaving me to look after the eight boys, aged 8 and 9,  between eight and ten at night. Bedtime was eight, but it was always at least an hour of sitting in the cabin getting them all to sack out, boys being boys. Mostly, I let them talk, because I get along with kids. I could easily remember, then, being 8, and I liked being looked up to.

One of the things the boys like about me was that I wasn't rah-rah-rah all the time. I'd just talk to them like people. This was 1979, the same year Meatballs came out, meaning I hadn't seen it, but I would talk to the boys like Tripper talked to Rudy. You know, normal. Turns out, kids like that. Makes them feel like they matter, like they're mature... like they're respected.

But that was not the other camp counsellors. With them, it was all Morning Has Broken every morning and Kumbayah every night, like some hellscape of virtue signalling that went on relentlessly for hour after hour, day in and day out. Because, by gawd, these kids were going to "enjoy" their camp experience, no matter how hard it had to be shoved down their throat.

From the beginning of the Dragon Magazine, I've felt as a participant in this game that the game itself was assumed never to be enough for me. I had to find dragon cover art to be "cool," I had to swoon over critical rolls, I had to be fascinated with beholders and I had to stop dead in my tracks at the very idea that Gary Gygax, the Gary Gygax, had deigned to write an article for the magazine that was, after all, selling his shit. And that has more or less been the official position for the last 40 years. I'm not supposed to just watch this latest manifestation of Critical Role. I'm supposed to wet my pants because the DM's voice has been deepened with an echo effect when she speaks as "Lord Soth."

I'm frankly just sick to fucking death of it.

Let me repeat: I was fourteen when I noticed that the counsellors standing around the camp's flag pole at the abusive hour of seven A.M. in the summertime, their hands on their hearts as they sang a 1931 Christian hymn made popular in 1971 by Cat Stevens, having rousted the kids out of bed at 6:30 — who were still waiting to be fed, remember — were also hung over from drinking hard the night before. This kind of fucks with your head when you're young and your eyes are open. I was between grades 9 and 10 and was already beginning to see that a lot of life was a sort of ridiculous performance art, where adults pretend that we're all wonderful good people for the sake of children only to become, well, themselves when the kids are all in bed. It wakes one up to things... like, politicians on camera and off, teachers in a classroom and not, front house and back house in a restaurant.

My game sessions are like a bunch of cooks occasionally burning the food, dropping a chicken breast and then throwing it on the grill anyway, grazing at the fries while waiting, getting the line swept enough to keep from slipping, but not so that it's really clean... that only happens after close. Whereas the WOTC is like the front house, pretending our eggs only come from hens that have never had sex or that yes, absolutely, the fish is fresh, even though this is Sunday and the order was delivered Thursday. And I can't unsee the reality of this just because the WOTC wants me to wet myself with glee every time it churns out another product like this video. Which is full of stuff that reveals this was made in the back house, not the front.

It is full of shabby reality, made worse by the truth that whoever edited this video ought to be fired. Today. Without a good reference. The failings on camera here are accidental, amateurish, incompetent. Garbage. And there's no value to branding garbage like this while selling me on it being an immaculate chicken.