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Rick posted:Friends at the Table's Sangfielle season has been great. I am feeling some kind of way about episode 50, which I've only listened to about half of. Like I found it very frustrating to listen to even though I think it ultimately was everyone being true to their characters. I don't know what I want exactly, because I love having these scenarios where the characters are going to be in tension with one another, but when that tension comes to the full boiling point, I don't like how that feels either. I dunno. I'm all the way back in Winter in Hieron and I was pretty frustrated listening to the holiday episodes, where it felt like the most of the group was almost going out of their way not to get along and work on objectives.
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Apr 23, 2022 15:24
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Boy are you going to enjoy every plot beat involving the druid!  Drone posted:God, try as I might this has been my entire (limited) experience with Friends at the Table. Austin's definitely why I've kept listening so far. Obviously GMs are hugely important to any AP (or game), but he's clearly MVP of this show by a mile. I totally get bouncing off, because episode by episode it's not always the most exciting show (and the audio really was total dogshit at the beginning), but when the payoffs hit, they can be pretty amazing.
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Apr 23, 2022 18:46
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Rick posted:They talk a bit about it the postmortem, and in the whole Hieron postmortem when it wraps, but they cop to this, basically everyone was going through a pretty lovely time and there was a lot of real life bleed into the game and things went way darker than intended and they were having a much harder time getting on to similar goals. I would say overall most end up successfully teaming up to the same goals in other seasons although yeah, Keith (the druid player) definitely pretty consistently goes against the crowd although I tend to think it leads to more good moments than bad. I will say that Keith's grown on me over the course of the podcast so far. At first I was like why is this guy doing dumb poo poo all the time (and it's not his fault, but I think the druid's shapeshifting stuff is kind of busted), but then I realized he was super young and also he's probably the funniest player, so now that I get that he's just a goofball he's one of my favorites. As with everyone except probably Art, I think I just like his character from Counter/Weight more than I like his Hieron character, so it's been a little bit of a bummer to go back to them even though I was initially really excited to get back to Hieron after how the first season ended. I've been a little tempted to skip ahead to Partizan (since Twilight Mirage seems to have pretty mixed reception?), but I'll stick with this for now.
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Apr 24, 2022 15:55
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I just finished the Sherlock Holmes game part of Winter, and man it felt like it went on forever. I think the timing, coming almost immediately after the anniversary game, was a little unfortunate too. It was cool to have everyone together for a while though? As far as the actual plot goes I think things are getting pretty interesting, so I'm glad to be back to normal episodes. Oh, and I knew Nick was going to be leaving the show, but the way that was handled was super cool.
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May 12, 2022 17:30
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Oh my god, I just got to the part where Fero turns into sand at the Archives. I'm amazed at what a huge fucker Austin is, haha.
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May 14, 2022 03:46
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Rick posted:I always wonder if that was something he improvised or if he just had a list of things that he was going to do when the rolls finally caught up with Fero, since it ended up being such a foundational moment for things to come. I binged the rest of the season while I was sick over the weekend, and from the way they talked about it after that and in the wrap up it seemed like something Austin was keeping track of all season (and it had already triggered for wolves), but I'm not sure if Keith had some idea before then or not. As for how much Austin had planned out the consequences, I think not knowing where the sand was from until he asked in the moment meant a lot of it was improv (they would have been way more screwed if it had been the sand from the mountain). As for the rest of the season, some parts were better than others, but I was really dying to see how everything was going to wrap up, and now I'm pretty impatient to listen to Spring. I don't really think the characters that were new for Winter were my favorites (Ephrim felt a little like he was biting on Hadrian's thing without being as interesting, and Adaire was just kind of dull without much of a link to anything else that was going on), but Ephrim killing neo-Samothes was loving rad. In the wrap up it felt like they were out of their way to indicate that they're all friends and whatever beef their characters have is just part of the game, but it really did feel like there was some OOC beef this season, which was a little uncomfortable, especially as Fero started getting angry at everyone since Fero's obviously pretty close to Keith in personality. Even before everything that happened in the Archives I felt like Jack was kind of exasperated by Keith, but obviously years later they're all still making the podcast together, so either I was reading stuff into it that wasn't really there or they've obviously managed to live with it/get past it.  After listening to the world building episode for Twilight Mirage I'm not really brimming with anticipation, but maybe it was just a lot to take in and it'll be more interesting in practice, idk. Fingers crossed, because it's a long season. Good luck with your game!
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May 16, 2022 20:13
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I haven't listened to many episodes yet because I've been bouncing off pretty hard, but so far early Twilight Mirage is worse than I was expecting, and I was pretty ambivalent going in. To be fair I think their beginnings tend to be worse than their endings, so I do expect the season to get better, but at this rate I think I'm going to end up reading transcripts until things pick up a bit. I think part of the problem is that the setting is pretty high concept, so there's a lot of time explaining it and the not especially relatable characters early on, but hopefully that'll get better. Also knowing they end up ditching the system probably biases me against it, but my early impression is basically 'why did they think this was going to work?'
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Jun 3, 2022 19:16
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Yeah, I'm pretty sure Glass Cannon explicitly said that's not content they'd do anymore (and said so years ago at this point), so it's something they're definitely aware of. For me the bigger problem was that I thought they picked a really boring adventure path to run, so I always sort of meant to get back to their stuff with Starfinder or another adventure path, but I just sort of never got around to it. At this point I'd probably just listen to one of their shorter Presents campaigns to take on a less daunting amount of content if anything, but I'm just now getting into RPPR so it might be a while.
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Mar 9, 2023 04:16
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Rick posted:Friends at the Table is doing a Counter/Weight prequel as an interlude in the current arc. Which is really interesting because in my very slow Counter/Weight re-listen is "I would listen to a show about some of the events that lead up to the world." I think I'm going to check this out just to see if I like their new stuff or not. I bounced off Twilight Mirage hard the first time I tried to listen to it, and just skipped ahead this week to start Spring in Hieron and at least finish out Marielda. Obviously that'll take a while to get through either way, but if the Counter/Weight prequel is good, that'll give me more confidence to try getting back into their space stuff when I finish this season.
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Jan 15, 2024 02:42
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Did anyone else find the Second Spring episodes of Spring in Hieron exhausting? I'm four episodes in so far, and the fourth episode was admittedly more entertaining than the others, but overall it's just been sooooo slow, and putting miniature GM hats on everyone just highlights my biggest criticism of FATT, which is that Austin is a lot more clever and interesting than most of the players. I really hope it keeps the momentum from the fourth episode going in the last two, because the ones before that were pretty bad.
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Feb 15, 2024 20:54
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Lord_Hambrose posted:I liked it over all, but sometimes I feel like Keith is just railing against following a cool narrative that has set up to just do some random thing that just disrupts or deflates other stuff people are trying to do. I'm biased because he's probably my favorite player, but I thought he really toned Fero's disruptiveness down a lot in spring compared to winter at least. Like yeah he had a fit early on when they were deciding who lives and who dies, but he didn't stop participating, he just moved away from the community a bit. The only time I feel like he really turned the group around was when he went to the archives to get the bird, but given that the rest of the trip was just them going to watch stuff happen without changing anything (really looking forward to the post mortem to see if they address that/if Austin had stuff planned that they didn't engage with, or if that was just a GMing misfire), I don't feel like it really disrupted anything. I think my biggest note for him for the season would be that he seemed overly blase about it when Samol showed up to say he was dying, but if emotionlessly plodding through major plot points was a crime, a big chunk of the cast would be in jail.
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Feb 16, 2024 00:57
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Well I finished Second Spring and I do feel like the back half in general was a lot better than the front half. It's so funny to me that they turned a good card that let them finish a project early into a false flag operation that ultimately tore the community apart. It wasn't the ending I expected, or necessarily the one I wanted Benjamin arguably being the pivotal character in both the main finale and this one was probably a bit much for 19-ish year old NPC, right?, but it was so ridiculous that I couldn't help being entertained. I guess I'll jump into the Counterweight prequels next, and then go back to being indecisive about listening to Twilight Mirage.
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Feb 16, 2024 20:50
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I listened to the Counterweight prequels, and it was fun to hear the original cast (minus Nick) back together again. I think they're my favorite group overall, which made listening to these episodes fun, even if it felt a bit tacked on and self indulgent, with the big climactic reveal and epilogue being something that I guess will be relevant if I ever make it to Palisade? On the plus side, I think they probably really were better at playing Technoir than they were the first time, but I still don't think I care much for the system itself. Still, overall a fun listen.
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Feb 28, 2024 23:46
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