Problematic Monetization
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“I'll start by saying the roleplaying between the characters is extremely good. Particularly Fahima, Lily, and Uggo, with Siv starting to get there as well. The world that Jeff has created is also excellent. The one downside is that there is a small amount of railroading going on. Jeff will tell the party their options on occasion when they are discussing what to do. Limiting them to a binary choice.
The party is also very early on (with everyone at level 3-4) basically told they are to be the saviors of the world. This is a strange story setup coming from Jeff, who himself has been opposed to games that give you this big epic quest and then allow you to run off and do side activities.
Across 9 episodes, the party has only had a single encounter of consequence. Outside of that, there have been zero stakes. Every enemy has died in one shot, without doing any damage, and an entire episode was one long battle where next to nothing happened.
All of the above can easily be forgiven. It's a new group playing together for the first time, and a DM that I believe hasn't DMed in quite a while. Things will gel with more time.
The thing that can't be forgiven is the monetization. Caffeine designed a monetization scheme and then built a show around it, rather than the other way around. In effect, viewers are paying money to have their name called out on the show while providing a buff to the players (there is the possibilty to provide a negative to the players, but those are quite rare in comparison.) There are two severe problems with this. First, these buffs remove the stakes of the game. Almost every roll on the show is made with advantage, and occasionally the buffs are even more dramatic and eliminate the need to even engage with the story. There are way too many get out of jail free cards. Second, these audience shout outs frequently interrupt the game. The frequency with with the party is interrupted while discussing something becomes laughable. There is no way to stay in the story when everything is stopped to announce that ButtJuice has paid to give a player a buff. (That is literally part of a name that has been called out multiple times.)
I believe Caffeine has been struggling, so they are trying to bring in money any way they can, but this show would be significantly better if it was not built on Caffeine's monetization.”Read full review »
Dalfiuss via Apple Podcasts ·
United States of America ·
06/24/19
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GameTekGuy via Apple Podcasts ·
United States of America ·
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