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Graduation has been a wild ride. It started off with a teaser and a trailer and everyone was interested after some folks fell off during Amnesty and then it came out and... meh? The first episode had something like 20 NPCs introduced with a handful of spoken lines from the PCs. Everybody loved The Firbolg. Travis had a weird cartoon baby voice that he was speaking in at almost all times. Overall, there were some tweaks that could be done, but it showed promise. Ten episodes later, people really started dropping off. Most of what was happening was single interactions with NPCs and PCs where the players were completely alone with the DM. The plot was nonsense and unfollowable for a lot of people. The players were not being allowed to really push events forward. Justin was saying like one sentence per episode. Travis was saying "no" to any prompt the players were giving him. It would probably have still been charming if it was not so boring and full of itself. Travis was showing up on panels and interviews like he was a top Actual Play DM when Graduation was probably worse than the average campaign being played at tables around the world. Another ten episodes later, and it's genuinely become the worst Actual Play out there. It can't have more than one episode without completely changing gears. The plot is so convoluted that the players sometimes remark on microphone that they have no idea what's going on. Everybody at the table has so much fatigue from either being shut down or pulled along that there are still long stretches of silence where the players are trying to figure out what Travis wants them to do to get to his next prompt. And then he gets interviewed by Brennan Mulligan for some reason. It's kind of interesting because I participate on a DnD DM message board, and TAZ comes up more than any other Actual Play as an example of identifying problems and how to not run a game. One of the posters on the board referred to it as "The Vickers Valiant of DnD Campaigns," which refers to a WW2 tank that was so terrible that it was canned like an hour into its trials and was kept on an army base as an example for engineers to examine its flaws. It's kind of a tortured simile, but I find it pretty apt. Travis has now run my two favorite single episodes of TAZ (those two live shows), but I think he's waaaay more suited for quick, improv-based one-offs than whatever he's trying to accomplish with Graduation.
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Mar 23, 2021 17:25
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Amnesty would have been better with another years' worth of screwing around with the players all in the same room as one another. I think it was a fine campaign, but it lagged when the parties were separated and not hunting down mysteries.
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Mar 23, 2021 20:23
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Hot take but Riddle Me Piss, Play Along at Home, and Sad Libs are all better than Munch Squad.
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Mar 24, 2021 00:44
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Good Listener posted:I stopped listening to Graduation after the imp hospital, did it ever really do much with the weird sort of...theater/wrestling kayfabe of the heroes and villains or is just the setting and that never has really come into play? I have listened to every episode and I still don't know what's going on. The players were confronted with a BBEG, then another (?)-ish(?) BBEG and then they were approached with a character-based antagonist so they decided to try to assassinate the BBEG but Travis didn't want that so they... I don't know. It's genuinely so hard to follow that Griffin straight up made kind of a meta joke that he had no idea what was going on in the latest episode. It's a mess.
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Mar 24, 2021 03:09
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The problem was that Travis laid out the premise very poorly and didn't let the players explore and learn the space at their own pace, so everyone had to fellow the premise and plot at the pace that Travis dictated they could. So genuinely even the few people who claim to like Graduation have trouble following what's going on.
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Mar 24, 2021 03:17
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ghost emoji posted:Celebrity Wine (Why Not) hive rise up Wine Not was a good bit and would have been a fun five minute break every once in a while.
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Mar 24, 2021 03:41
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I don't think Munch Squad is paid ads or attempts to grab corporate attention. That's kind of dumb to think so. It's really just Justin trying to get his bit out there and when you live in suburban Appalachia like he and I do, you have to mock ridiculous things around you. And since you can't really do anything but go see lakes and eat at roadside food places, the only thing you can relate to the outside world about is dumb corporate food poo poo. It's just that he's regurgitating "check out this wacky food thing!" articles a week after everyone's gone "ha that's dumb" on Twitter to basically incite the same reaction you feel when people try to share a Chuck Norris/Florida Man meme with you.
Pennsylvanian fucked around with this message at 10:12 on Mar 25, 2021 |
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Mar 25, 2021 09:14
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inferis posted:The Popeyes fish sandwich is really good but I think that chain has the biggest gap between a good location and a bad one The biggest gap in the world is the distance between me and the nearest Popeye's. An hour's drive is almost worth it.
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Mar 25, 2021 20:15
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Alaois posted:lmao at not recognizing evo moment #37 2004 Winamp crew reporting.
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Mar 25, 2021 21:49
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Android Blues posted:The closest the game in practise comes to illustrating that, I think, is the fact that Althea is comically bad at her job despite being a high-ranking hero, which seems like an accident because I think she's meant to be competent. This probably came to pass as a result of Travis being a little too in love with his NPCs. When they were all introduced, they were all introduced as amazing and impressive and none of them really had flaws. He seemed to be having trouble joining in on goofs in early episodes because he couldn't really imagine his characters as being jerks or jokey. I think now that he's trying harder with his campaign(and he is trying harder), he realizes that his NPCs can't keep outshining the PCs at every turn.
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Mar 26, 2021 02:20
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The World Inferno posted:Wonder if that's just the smile someone makes when they don't feel like they've really figured out how to do a normal one and just way over commit to showing the teeth. I feel like I made that face a decent amount as a thirteen year old and being super self-conscious of how my smile might look. Having a media-presentable smile is something that you have or don't have. There's a reason why people point out that some celebrities have the one "face" that they always show in photographs of themselves. I think thumbnailface is just easier to self-effacingly wave off as being whacky or dumb when someone's worried that they don't have the confidence to do a camera-friendly smile. The other part of it is that it probably works better for small images and banners that you'd see on phone screens or small, thumbnail-like images. I think Graduation got better. It's still probably the least-good of the top 10 or so currently-running Actual Plays, but it's no longer on-its-face bad. I think a big turn was when Travis was finally comfortable with letting his NPCs be flawed and start doing bits with the players instead of just going "...huh" or "...okay" all the time. He also massively toned down the scripted bits and one-on-ones and dumped the squeaky baby voice he was talking in for a long time. It's still got very little focus which I think that comes from all the course-correcting, but at least players are all talking to each other again.
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Mar 31, 2021 00:28
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TL posted:https://www.instagram.com/p/CNEJur8lfFL/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link What's up, you cool baby.
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Mar 31, 2021 03:50
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I don't mind the non-questions as long as they get a good response. "Raw Fettucine*" and the "Sock Aisle" stories were pretty great examples. But yeah, there are a whole lot of "whoa hey check out my wacky friend!" stories that are just total mood vacuums. *I'll always love Travis' deadpan "you're a monster" line.
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Apr 3, 2021 01:25
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Syd has a good deadpan.
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Apr 8, 2021 01:20
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SNL has also gotten out of control with close-ups on goofy faces and it feels like the actors now corpse in half the skits.
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Apr 14, 2021 02:26
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Elvis_Maximus posted:There's definitely an alternate world where the classes figure heavily into the campaign with a grading mechanic, and they need to get a certain GPA to get access to some sort of special room in order to advance the plot or something at the start, nice and low stakes. It's a much better world imo There's a guy on Reddit who's been posting long-form friendly critiques of Graduation from the lense of an experienced DM talking to less-experienced DMs, and he had the idea of doing a Chrono Trigger-style opening sequence where the players are given a series of tasks to perform. Based on the actions of the players, the DM would then assign the players to the hero or villain schools. He outlined it a lot further, but it actually sounded more interesting and dynamic (while still being easy for a new DM to work with). The problem was that Travis definitely had the game laid out pretty rigidly and I think he didn't realize that what he had planned was going to take as long as it did.
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Apr 15, 2021 01:28
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AuroMarshmallow posted:I'm probably in the minority with this opinion but I can't see ever giving TAZ another shot if they went free-form Mission to Zyxx style. For me, having the PC's be constrained by the rules of the game is the most interesting part of this type of podcast, so without that what little interest I have left in TAZ would just evaporate. I liked the Just Us episode that Travis DM'ed a lot, and one of the things that made it great was him using lots of rolls as story improv queues, even for simple things like squirting ketchup on a hot dog. Amnesty misused MotW because much like Graduation, the structure of the campaign largely seemed to be around the GM putting the players in rooms and letting them go once they felt like enough boxes were ticked. Just like how Graduation was a campaign that seems like it was supposed to be around school intrigue never did anything with the school, Amnesty was a monster-hunting campaign that did relatively little monster hunting. So the gameplay system was never really being used. Pennsylvanian fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Apr 16, 2021 |
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Apr 16, 2021 01:20
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Zyxx gets way better after about the first season and hits its stride when it introduces AJ. I'm not a fan of the constant ragging on Pleck as like the sole source of comedy in the first season.
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Apr 17, 2021 01:47
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Ainsley McTree posted:All I know about Mission to Zyxx is that Paul F Tompkins played a character called "Rip Seeso" on it and that's very funny to me. mcelroy-adjacent even It's been over a year and I just got that.
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Apr 17, 2021 17:06
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Lots of the "problematic" criticisms probably wouldn't have been given the time of the day if the general reception to Graduation wasn't so negative. I think the general reception wouldn't have been so bad if Travis had approached the campaign like "Hey, I'm new to this and I'm going to try stuff out. Things may work, things may not." Instead, going from pretty much day one, he started hosting panels where he was either giving bad advice or spitting out bad advice that he himself never followed. It all kind of felt... "entitled" to the TAZ legacy for lack of a better word, and people weren't sure if it was going to be salvageable for the duration of its run.
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Apr 29, 2021 20:03
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Yeah, and to be on record, while I thought the first 15 or so episodes were really dull, I think he managed to make it something entertaining in the latter half.
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Apr 29, 2021 23:01
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For anyone still curious if Clint would be good on MBMBAM, here is Exhibit A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alAbyXGLLEA
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May 6, 2021 00:27
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mary had a little clam posted:Excited for the new season, I really like the world setup so far and the use of Quiet Year. I think it's a neat way to build this thing out and hopefully reign in their admitted tendency to pre-write the Big Emotional Story™ too early. Yeah, this was the problem with Amnesty/Grad. They kept filling up on appetizers first, trying to worldbuild and tell backstories, when Balance was most fun when it was three brothers and their dad poking each other into having some fun fictional improv. Also: Who says they have to have a big emotional story as part of this? What's wrong with just fun and funny times and the adventure ends? Especially if they plan on having these shorter campaigns.
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May 7, 2021 00:03
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After Amnesty and Graduation, it was kind of interesting to hear them bouncing ideas off of each other rather than trying to come storming in with pre-planned individual character segments. I re-listened to their post-Balance mini-campaigns recently and I still like them a lot (oddly enough I liked Amnesty the least of them and Commitment the most). I'm interested to see what they're going to do with a trash geyser.
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May 8, 2021 01:19
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Elvis_Maximus posted:Tbf I feel that way about every DND podcast. If I try to listen to them while working I just end up having to rewind it a lot cause I missed something This is why I fell off of NADDPOD recently. I'll get distracted during one of Brian's "In this room, you see..." monologues. Ten minutes later I'm finished with my task and realize I have no idea what's going on.
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Jun 1, 2021 03:41
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Sustained growth being hard to maintain kind of sums up Maxfun. The problem is that they could stand to grow, but they've built a little too much of a box for themselves. They don't have any real trend podcasts. It wouldn't kill them to get a video game cast, or a true crime cast, or something starring a comedian that has some bite. As it stands, I get that modern "millenial daycare" vibe from their whole channel.
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Jun 3, 2021 15:10
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thebardyspoon posted:Don’t they have a video game podcast with Jason Schreier and two other videogames people who I can’t remember right now on it? I feel like your confusion kind of adds to my point. I listen to Triple-Click in episode blocks and it's low-energy topical discussions where everybody seems afraid to take opinions on even simple topics, which is very Maxfun. Or, I can go listen to something like Giant Bombcast (RIP) or Castle Superbeast where nerds will have high-energy funny conversations about DMC lore in addition to topics like game politics. fatherboxx posted:But have you seen that ENGAGEMENT on the TAZcirclejerk and those upvotes?! The lower amount of fanart!!! the McElroy media empire is freaking finished! I genuinely have no idea what your point is. The things you said are perfectly reasonable signifiers of lack of engagement with Graduation. Pennsylvanian fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Jun 3, 2021 |
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Jun 3, 2021 15:29
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As opposed to Superbeast/Best Friendcast where Pat is "that guy" but it's done with the purpose to energize everyone else on the cast. I would love to see someone on Triple-Click screaming at Jason Schreier about the Game Boy library or something.
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Jun 3, 2021 18:13
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It felt like such a timewarp to hear them goofing around in a TAZ space again without having to worry about getting to pre-planned backstory or waiting to be the guy with the best stinger. This was frankly better than a lot of recent MBMBAMs if you just want to hear some McElroy family goofs.
Pennsylvanian fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Jul 9, 2021 |
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Jul 9, 2021 11:25
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Didn't mind Travis' voice, but I don't like Justin's being a whisper. I had to struggle to hear some of his lines.
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Jul 9, 2021 17:07
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A Youtuber is making an edited/abridged version of Graduation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH-CM37sBh8 I'm not going to be all "McElroys, hire this man!" but I think it's an interesting listen if like me you found the pacing to be a bit weird (they cut up to 4 episodes at a time into a one hour block). I don't really notice what is removed a good amount of the time.
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Sep 25, 2021 19:15
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Captain France posted:I suppose I should just listen to it sometime, but this feels like a fool's errand. All of the best parts of Graduation are stuff you'd cut for not being important, and most of the stuff that's actually important is all right at best. It's more like they leave in the good, fun, relevant bits while cutting out chaff and awkward bits.
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Sep 26, 2021 05:12
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I feel like the only person with this gripe, but I hate that Justin's voice for Amber relies on him whispering. I listen to TAZ in a somewhat loud work setting and I frequently have to rewind the cast to figure out what he just said.
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Oct 24, 2021 22:59
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Remember the wildest take where Justin said that the Avengers game was a close second to Spiderman for best superhero game?
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Jan 29, 2022 00:04
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They're also doing weekly TAZ and trying to fit in more profitable projects. I could see them dusting off Monster Factory for the upcoming WWE game, though.
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Jan 29, 2022 01:05
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Bip Roberts posted:The Trinyvale short campaign in NADDPOD is my favorite dnd podcast product with DM Caldwell absolutely letting the players go fully rampant and be their absolute worst selves. Trinyvale also helped me to realize that I think Jake is my favorite of the group when it comes to improv skills. He's always giving people something to work with.
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Aug 2, 2022 01:21
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Empty Sandwich posted:I normally dislike the live MBMBAM but these last two were full of actual jokes and moments where one of them made another break down completely and also some bullying of question askers Jabbing with/at question askers always produces some of my favorite moments like the fettucine or sock store bits.
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Aug 3, 2022 17:22
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TL posted:I’m really digging Steeplechase so far. It’s the boys flying by the seat of their pants and goofing, which is what TAZ is when it’s at its best. I love that I feel like Justin only had the broad strokes planned and is letting with the boys do dictate where stuff goes. I gave it a shot after seeing it mentioned in the thread and the first good sign was Justin cutting Travis off when Travis started giving his character's entire life story.
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Oct 18, 2022 01:21
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Sudden Loud Noise posted:This gave me a massive amount of hope as well. And to be fair, that's not just a Travis dig. The last few TAZ campaigns felt like the boys all had too much planned for the characters. Steeplechase felt slightly less loose than a live episode, which I like.
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Oct 18, 2022 15:17
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Finishing Steeplechase episodes just to have that Dust arc start during autoplay really points out how I missed goofs in TAZ. Also, conversations in recent campaigns have been absurdly slow. Steeple has been nice. Justin's "No" energy works well when he's in the DM seat.
Pennsylvanian fucked around with this message at 16:24 on Oct 20, 2022 |
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Oct 20, 2022 15:35
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