What do you do when your players run away from a scenario?
Why do players turtle up instead of pursuing the scenario hooks? Why do some players insist on running off to do their own thing?
Is any of this really a problem? And what can a GM do about it?
The new video pipeline I talked about last time, unfortunately, completely failed. The editing service I hired simply could not deliver usable video files. So I’m re-trenching and will be attempting to find a different editing solution to help streamline my editing process.
Then things got worse because Adobe Premiere updated and promptly started crashing my GPU. Adobe is in denial that the problem even exists, which is… fun.
I’m also looking into potentially buying new camera equipment. My current setup, for reasons I haven’t been able to diagnose, keeps glitching the video in long takes… and all my videos are long takes. With a different equipment I’ll probably be able to do more single-take videos, which will ALSO speed up the post-production time table.
In any case: Stop listening to me grouse about my production woes! Go enjoy the video!
There are lots of short adventures available for RPGs like D&D, Feng Shui, Shadowrun, and Magical Kitties Save the Day. But if you want to do something more than the purely episodic, how can you take those adventures and weave them all together into a cohesive campaign?
This video is the first in what I’m hoping will be a new video production pipeline, featuring a dedicated editor other than myself. If all goes well, this should significantly speed up the production of new videos and let me get back to making regular video releases again. (To put things in perspective, I’ve had the raw footage for this video and three others just moldering away on my hard drive since the end of June without being able to dedicate the time necessary to get them ready for prime time.)
I’ve just hired a professional editing company to help me speed up my video production process. I’ve got raw footage for three more videos after this one that’s been sitting on my hard drives for weeks, so if this works out I’m hoping to get back to regular video releases.
Over a decade ago, I wrote A Nomenclature of D&D Editions, which provided a definitive breakdown of every edition of D&D that had been published (along with the names by which they are commonly referred). I thought it would be useful to update the list and translate it into a video format.
I also thought that it would a quick, fun little video that I could turn out pretty quickly while working on other, more elaborate videos.
I was completely wrong about this.
First, what can basically just be a quick list in text format just… doesn’t work that way as a video. So the project quickly transmogrified into a history of D&D as viewed through the lens of its many editions. Which is great.
It turned out the most time-consuming part of making the video was actually sourcing the cover images for every edition. I had sort of naively assumed that, hey, it’s D&D. There’ll definitely be easy-to-find scans of these covers out there.
But there wasn’t!
Most of the books have been scanned, but it turns out a lot of those scans are from 10 or 15 or 20 years ago and have just been passed around the ‘net ever since. They’re low-res, blurry, and unsuitable for the video. In other cases, high-res scans exist… but only of copies which were in incredibly crappy condition. Boxed sets were particularly difficult to source: people would either only scan the rulebooks inside; or the box cover itself would be bettered and dented from years of play.
(This was particularly true of starter sets and basic games: These are often the first D&D products people buy, and so even future collectors are not yet treating them with care.)
You’d think the official PDFs would make it easier, but these are frequently the worst offenders when it comes to low-res, fuzzy, badly cropped scans of damaged copies of the book.
So I ended up spending hours and hours and hours sourcing cover images. This included frequently photoshopping images and also scanning in items from my own collection.
The most difficult images to find? The D&D Essentials line from 2010-11. I think partly because it didn’t sell very well and partly because it didn’t hang around long enough for people to write think-pieces about it (and scan covers to illustrate it).
(Also because there were so frickin’ many Essentials products.)
And then, of course, there were hours more of carefully incorporating and animating the covers into the video itself!
In any case, it’s done! Hopefully it was worth it!
The PCs just shot the Evil Overlord in the head in the second session. Now what?
People in both the Alexandrian Hangout Club for my Patreon and viewers on Twitch have recommended that I spent some time on Youtube looking at filmic tropes. I think there are some interesting videos to be made along those lines, and it’s certainly a natural fit for the medium.
This video is kind of a beta test, featuring several film clips as I figure out the workflow and pacing for including then. (The short version is that it’s a huge pain in the ass to source the clips, but I think the end result is quite nice.)
Also reminded me that I still need to spend more time with old Hammer horror films.
