So I’ve been thinking about the boys combining their powers recently and I ended up really wondering about what would happen if a supercharged Mikey (time/dimensional powers) mixed his abilities with a supercharged Leo’s (space powers) and all I could think of was:
even if they don't make a full chronological season of weird wonderful world! it would be so cool if it turned into a show with sporadic surprise episodes popping up whenever the idea strikes, or if they get to go to a weird and/or wonderful place
the most annoying thing about me/cfs is that it's more like 10 different illnesses in a trenchcoat. i'll wake up with a new symptom and be like "oh okay, guess that's what we're doing today"
sometimes i think about what would happen if you put palamedes sextus and alphonse elric, the best boys sci-fi/fantasy (broadly defined) has to offer, in a room together. because the way i see it, we're looking at two potential results:
they usher in scientific advancements the likes of which this dimension has never seen.
or they co-found the SFF version of a gossip girl blog.
Kdin's mistreatment dates back to 2013. The RH shit dates back to 2016. I remember Gavin's answers in old Jackbox gameplays had to be censored. I remember someone was telling r*pe jokes in a 2015 episode of On the Spot. Mica, Fiona, and other POC faced harassment from trolls and were never defended. There are probably a bunch of other shitty things that happened that we're unaware of, but a lot of the stuff that has come to light occurred during the supposed "Golden Age" of RT/AH.
So can people maybe stop wishing for the "Golden age" to return when you actually mean you wish you could go back to watching "Things to Do" and RWBY while being blissfully unaware that a lot of terrible things were happening at the same time?
No one will ever love me the way Shane loves to take Ryan to places off the beaten path and find new ways to refer to each other as friends and that literally kills me!
Sort of a distant tangent off my post about Ashton, but I'm growing more and more suspicious of the fandom claim that there's no time for small RP moments in Campaign 3. I do think that it's been challenging to get deeper party bonding or serious conversations that aren't about the big philosophical questions they're facing, since those do take much more time; but then I think about Calamity, or Candela Obscura. I can genuinely give you at least a couple paragraphs about pretty much every relationship in the two Circles, or in the Ring of Brass. I can also point to no shortage of small moments between characters in the Mighty Nein Aeor or Vox Machina Vecna endgame episodes, which were all extremely plot-heavy and fast-paced, and D20 consistently nails character relationships in a fraction of the time.
I think it really does come down to, as Brennan Lee Mulligan always says, the character creation phase. Laying down a solid groundwork in which everyone has a detailed, rich backstory and sense of personality and relationship history (in the case of characters who knew each other prior to the start of the series) is absolutely crucial, and even in the case of characters who don't know each other before going in, a good amount of time spent in character creation ensures that it's easier for them to develop those interpersonal relationships on the fly. I know in actual play there's some degree of finding the character as you play, but there are games for which there is a very short runway, and I don't think it ever hurts to do more extensive character prep than the bare minimum. And if there are gaps, I think it also helps to go back and fill those in mid-way, away from the table - Travis clarifying Chetney's backstory being a great example that allowed the history of Chetney and Deanna to feel realized and full, despite only a few episodes.
I'll also be blunt: most of the time when people complain that there aren't moments because the plot keeps moving...they're mad about shipping. Which has always rung hollow to me. It was a common complaint in C2, that no time was taken for character relationships, despite them taking an entire half of an episode for the Beauyasha date and despite no shortage of moments for all three of the other couples (and plenty of platonic moments between friends). The issue was never a lack of time; it was that the characters they wanted to talk to each other didn't actually have the relationship in canon that the fans had dreamed up, and so, when the chips were down, they went to other people.
It takes two seconds to say something like "I hold their hand", even in the middle of plot-heavy adventuring. If someone doesn't say it, it's rarely the GM rushing them; it's the player either choosing not to do so, or not remembering to do so, and either of those is quite revealing regarding how the player feels about that relationship and where it stands in their priorities.
I'm never going to get over "The Bands Break Up" and the fact that Stormer has a framed picture of herself and Kimber on her bedside table that she sighs at wistfully.