I wasn't sure whether I should post this in Gen. Discussion or Advice, but I figure your average person is gonna see this as an ad post either way (and it kinda is, I suppose) so I'd put it here. If this sort of post isn't ok, I apologize, I'm not terribly familiar with the goings-on of these particular forums.
We recently got the opportunity to bring the Pathfinder livestream we've been doing on Twitch for a few years over to the official Paizo channel! We've been running various first-party adventure paths for about 3 years now, going from Dragon's Demand to Skull and Shackles and most recently finishing off Strange Aeons a few months ago. Now, we're working our way into War for the Crown.
Most of us are relatively new to the scene. We haven't been playing Pathfinder (or even tabletop RPGs at all, for most of us) any longer than we've been working on the livestream, so we're surely much less experienced in the game system than most people here. Mostly, we sit on the bridge between "theater of the mind" style full RP, and number-crunching Mathfinder.
I want to know what advice you guys have for making our show as good as possible!
What do you like to see in a live Pathfinder show/podcast? What turns you off from live play sessions? What can we add or remove to make the show more watchable/interesting?
Presenting a tabletop game live through a visual medium like Twitch is always difficult because the medium itself isn't terribly visual. This is extra true given the fact that we play over Roll20 and don't have an actual live table. We recently adapted the cast to include at least the webcams of all the players, something we've never done before (it used to just be my ugly mug).
Now, I know regardless of me asking for advice here, this is going to come off as a self-promotion post. And admittedly, sure, it half is. But I really do want to know how to make our show as good as possible. I've listened to some of the more popular shows like the Glass Cannon podcast and Called Shot, and have taken some of what makes those shows so great to heart in trying to improve our presentation and my own GMing. I spend... what's probably an unhealthy amount of my free time looking up GM advice and discussions and ideas trying to figure out what things I can do to improve both the player and the viewer experience. Recently, I picked up a Syrinscape subscription to add sick soundboard effects and background ambiance.
Since this is getting ridiculously long, guess I should bold the main idea up above and give you guys some links:
-The show is live every Monday at 4PM EST/1PM PST, over at the official Paizo twitch channel!
-The full playlist beginning with Songbird, Scion, Saboteur is also here on the channel.
-We do also have a podcast, hosted over on Podbean.
-Any other useful links, like our Discord with the quick story catch-up (and an almost full mini-novel of our adventures in Crownfall) or the various players live on the 2 Perception twitter page. If this post is half advertisement, screw it, might as well advertise.
And finally, seriously, thank you to anyone who does take the time to check out our new-ish show, and especially to anyone who has any feedback. Of course I want visibility, but I really do want to make this show as enjoyable as possible. I want to grow this by putting on a real entertaining stream, not by spamming links all over subreddits and forums (hence why I haven't really advertised here in the 3+ years we've been streaming, save the mini-novel write-up I was pretty proud of).
If you don’t self-promote, you get no promotion at all, neh? I don’t really understand those who say one shouldn’t toot one’s own horn - perhaps in a fifty-folk hunter-gatherer tribe excellence could speak for itself, but in this day and age it’s a bit harder to get the word out.
Not being a podcast-watcher myself, I don’t suppose I’m part of your target demographic. Still, I wish you the best of luck!
Ha, true. Nobody else is gonna advertise for me!
It's just always felt odd to me, I've been doing the Pathfinder streams for over 3 years and content creation in general for a damn decade but I always just feel wrong advertising. Truth be told one of my players had to basically force me to even post this!