RPG Storytime is at Last Coming Out

I started my series RPG Storytime on Youtube with the intention on doing one season of four different shows every year.  Each show would have six episodes per season.  Star Trek would be in the spring, D&D would be in the summer, Outbreak Undead would be in the fall, and Star Wars would be in the winter.

Somewhere deep down in me I knew this was unrealistic, but I hoped I would rein myself in enough to make such a schedule possible.

I didn't.  So it's taking longer to make the videos.  But something bigger has interrupted the schedule.

At a certain point I found myself writing one series while planning a game for another series while playing yet another and recording stuff for the other.  Added to that was another future series I'm planning on doing, and some other games I simply like to play.  It was getting confusing!

I also discovered that the Star Wars game, which I admittedly overdid a bit, has grown into many storylines, all of which need to be clear to the audience.  In fact, they all have multiple storylines, but the Star Wars one is the most complex.  I started realizing that if I told that in 6 episode chunks, no one would understand it.  I didn't even know what 6 episodes to play with one another.  Added to this was the fact that I wanted to get Outbreak Undead out of the way to make room for Deadlands.

So the decision was made to run entire series together, rather than 6 episode chunks over several seasons.  Outbreak Undead is first.  Its first episode back is today and will run until Halloween.  There will be a break while I finish the rest of those episodes, which will come out in December.  I'll have a couple other games, then I'll be running my Star Trek series until it reaches the end.

The one exception I'll have to this is Dungeons & Dragons.  I want to have some episodes come out when Game of Thrones plays, so I'll have a few episodes of it in the spring.  Then, once I've put out some other game videos I've meant to edit for a really long time, I'll begin releasing the huge epic of Star Wars, which will run until the end of the year, coinciding with episode 9 in theaters.

I'm planning on doing a separate channel that is only RPG Storytime which will play all the videos in order without interruption.  I'm not sure when I'll do that, but I won't start shows on that until the last ones are finished.

If you'd like to see Outbreak Undead from the beginning, you can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpaiVtbtoQQ&list=PLJ55yyr7uUQCa9GdXrvG7dhrEsh30kDV_

The Troubles with Telling a Zombie Story with Yourself in it

On my Bandwagon Games Youtube channel I do a series called RPG Storytime.  In it we play role playing games and I tell the story through narration, sound effects, and miniatures.  One of the games we do this with is called Outbreak Undead.  In it, players take the role of survivors during the zombie apocalypse.

One of the interesting features is a method by which you can create a character in the game based on yourself.  So you can literally be a character in the game.  This made for an interesting element in the show where the players on screen were the characters in the story.

We were all excited about this at first as none of us had ever played ourselves in an RPG before.  But the joy of this wore off as the realities of the concept set in.  When the players were faced with the reality of a zombie apocalypse and everything that came with it, the game became much more stressful as they were forced to think of all the people they would have lost in such a situation, and all the things they would need to do to survive, and save those they cared about who hadn't died yet.

When we play fictitious characters, and even, to an extent, when we create fictitious characters, we often don't think about all the aspects of life.  For instance, when you have a character in a game or a book, you don't think about all of their parents, their siblings, their cousins, their friends, etc.  You think of a select few of them.  The characters in this game had cats at home they were concerned about, and the thought of them being eaten by zombies was too much.  Had they been playing fictional characters, they wouldn't have that stress on them.

The high and low of it was that, though they went into the game excited to play themselves, the stress became too much, and one by one they wanted to switch to fictional ones so they could just enjoy themselves; and you see that reflected in the game.

Outbreak Undead, Second Edition is now on Kickstarter in case anyone is interested in taking a look.