Great idea, bad execution.
The guest stars often reveal that the story is pre-written and that they were roughly told what to do and what will happen.
The fights are completely meaningless. Why bother to say that a character took damage if he apparently has infinite health and never needs to recover health? If a character died, the player could just get a new character in the next episode. That would make things more interesting.
Other urls found in this thread:
youtube.com
youtube.com
youtube.com
youtube.com
twitter.com
>It's "GM Railroads the Players into being co-writers for his personal novel" episode
>Except it's not an episode, it's an entire series.
I bet /tg/ would be having conniptions if they even knew this existed.
>Why bother to say that a character took damage if he apparently has infinite health and never needs to recover health? If a character died, the player could just get a new character in the next episode.
probably to make it easier on the people in the party or guest stars who never played DnD
>The guest stars often reveal that the story is pre-written and that they were roughly told what to do and what will happen.
i never watched the show but i wouldn't be suprised if this was true since I'm under the impression that it was done infront of a live studio audience based on the ads I've seen
Its really hard and time consuming to produce something like this otherwise.
You have to understand that an actual tabletop game with strict adherence to the rules and no limits on the freedom of the players wouldn't make for a very exciting show. And there's usually a half an hour or more of extra bullshit cut from each episode to make them fit for time. If this were just Dan, Erin and Jeff playing without the cameras and animators then sure, Spencer would probably go ham and try his best to kill these motherfuckers, but this is TELEVISION™, baby.
I can't stand the guests. I find most of them so painfully unfunny.
Harmonquest is super watered down D&D (actually Pathfinder) formulated into a comedy show.
It's not meant for Tabletop RPG fans who want to experience an emerging story centered around a loose narrative and guided by game mechanics
Dan Harmon sure is popular and successful for a guy who made a couple of TV Shows That Were Fine
I miss chip.
Man I hate 3.5.5
we.. I mean they know
>Having to game with your bitter feminist ex wife in front of cameras
This is a type of gaming hell I'm sure of it.
I disagree. Watching a campaign get derailed from a grand high adventure, to an insane GTA-esque crime show due to the insane and idiotic actions of a bunch of murder hobos would be much more entertaining than whatever Schlock Harmon could come up with.
For what it is it's fine. It's a Pathfinder themed improv comedy show, I don't think the intention was ever to portray a straight up serious roleplaying game session. They go up on stage and make RPG-flavored jokes around a pre-written scenario, there are a few good bits (Paul F. Tompkins is hilarious as always), and then edit the best parts into an animated show. At best, it might end up being an accessible gateway to convince some casuals to go out and try a real RPG.
If you're looking to watch a real game being played live, there are countless groups (both amateur and celebrity) that stream full sessions of D&D/Pathfinder these days. I don't see why those and something like Harmonquest can't co-exist.
Also, nice 7's.
That doesn't exactly make for a good 25 minute episode of television though. It's not like real life where you can sit around a table for five hours fumbling your way through an adventure with a bunch of other enthusiasts, stopping every few minutes to look up a spell or do math on a die roll, with a plot that can go literally anywhere. It needs to be somewhat structured and streamlined to keep episodes concise and consistently entertaining so as to be accessible to mainstream audiences, as well as easy to produce from an animation standpoint.
What the show does makes sense for the specific format they're going for.
I was listening to the harmontwon d&d games. Erin had no interest until this was going to be a "television show". She's a manipulator im sure of it.
Checkity Beckity.
Good post.
I advise listening to Adventure Zone. Sup Forums got me into it.
youtube.com
Finally hearing Wonderland III in the show put me at outstanding levels of hype.
I cried during the finale...
the first guest was the best one and it gave me misleading expectations for the rest of it
I just wish Erin would calm the fuck down with the "lol I tear out your bones" shit.
Dude, it's supposed to pander to all audiences not just to autistic D&D fucktards
Yikes, that art style is horrendous
Spencer isn't the problem. Most of Spencer's ideas never get used, even in the original campaign. He lets everyone get with everything too much but in his defense, they fight with him all the way and slamming out the rules in front of the audience wouldn't reflect on him well.
Yes, it's shitty to get railroaded when the whole idea is you can do WHATEVER you want but Dan is incapable of being told what he can and cannot do. He died with the ice giant Jarl and while I did think it was hilarious, it goes to show that Spencer's word isn't law. I give a lot of props to him for having to put up with so much bullshit. Spencer has been allowed to do so little I don't even know how capable he is for building an actual story and world.
Related. Harmonquest is shitty but I like the fan animated segments. I kinda feel bad for him/her since I feel like they got the idea for an animated Harmonquest from these.
youtube.com
youtube.com
I'm still trying to plough through the first few eps.
I'm glad between Harmontown and The Adventure Zone D&D seems to be making more of a comeback.
To bad my new group already fell apart.
>why isnt this comedy about a roleplaying game that isnt even mentioned by name and could be something spencer made up for the show where comedians roleplay about the comedy and not serious gameplay?
I like it, it's like Improv meets D&D, I just love it
But DnD is improv.
Spencer is a terrible person who applauded the Berkeley riots on Twitter and I can't listen to Harmontown anymore because of him.
Yikes,
I was already never gonna watch this but thanks for a reason.
You can't listen to them because of what Spencer said about that, as opposed to everything else they've said? They're all terrible people. Dan is the biggest piece of shit enough that I stopped listening for awhile myself and everyone just enables him.
I looked at Spencer's twitter once and all I saw was all some shit about russia. I make it a priority not to follow anyone on twitter that isn't only there to post updates and artwork.
I've been listening to Harmontown for years and there's enough political rambling and circle jerking in it. I just want to be entertained and listen to funny people riff off each other since my job is so repetitively boring I need shit like podcasts to survive since I ran out of music.
I'm talking Improv the comedy, you know when your trying to get a laugh with the first thing that comes to mind, and with regular D&D your supposed to take your imagination seriously with how you play, here it's all supposed to be for fun
I've never dm-ed for real, but I do run a quest thread on another board, and I've learned sometimes it's more important to keep the entertainment going and the players happy and interested than to adhere strictly to the rules. I honestly only wound up very vaguely keeping track of health to keep the flow going and the story moving, usually at least giving them a chance to turn things around if they're getting beaten badly. Quest threads do not move fast even at the best of times.
Entertainment is going to mean different things to different people. Some like the challenge the rulesets provide that can put their characters in real danger, some like to just joke and goof around. Had a friend like the latter type- almost would never try to actually play games, just tried to dick around. He spent an entire game of settlers of catan just amassing as much coal as he could for no particular reason.
So Harmontown gets the guests up to speed and gives them the story ahead of time and the ideas of what they're supposed to do so that they don't bog down the flow of the 'game' trying to catch up to what's going on. Sometimes they're good about it, sometimes they spill their spaghetti and just spoil everything like whatsherface from the OP picture.
I guess I never got as far into the podcast as you.
Dan is probably the biggest piece of human garbage. He admits he can't stop abusing people, he's so good at abuse, he recently bought a gun to kill himself, always threatening to kill himself, twitter rants telling people to kill themselves because they don't matter, didn't shower for a month when his ex-wife went to ireland, he's been fired from shows because he's a tyrant etc.
It's surprising he can get work at all and it's just a slow motion trainwreck and sad because his friends on the show get genuinely concerned how he is feeling only for Dan to rip them apart. For the most part Spencer just sits there, occasionally to crack a joke until they play.
I don't keep up with everything every week anymore but at this point I skip through Dan's ramblings. In his defense, it is HIS show and he made it so he could talk and rant about what he wanted too in the first place but eh.
I've seen Dan say nice things to his fans. Just, not on Twitter. Twitter somehow brings out the worst in him.
When he was on still on twitter, those rants were usually when he was drunk on a plane according to him and his friends.
In his latest podcast he is just shitting on his audience and he's been doing that a lot lately anyway.
Kinda depends on the group. You can have a serious story and also have fun encounters.
That is fucking disgusting.
user we know that all of these online rpg podcast things are bullshit