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TV Tuesdays Free Talk
Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.
Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.
welp, I've been rewatching LOST. What a great series. I just started S03 tonight. Jack shouldn't be allowed to touch doors.
Anyway, another short series is John Mulaney Presents: Everybody's In LA -- its a talk show and its a bit of a gong show. Pretty good overall. Its only six episodes, so it makes for a nice filler.
I stopped watching Presumed Innocent. I was bored to death when I read the book... and... maybe as a compliment, the series is a lot like that. But its still boring. I went through four episodes and realized that hardly anything was actually happening.
I started "Never Stop Blowing Up" from Dropout / Dimension 20. It is a DnD/TTRPG show, but this specific one is using a modified version of a system called "Kids on Bikes" which is the same one that they used for a previous run called "Mentopolis". Both of these are my favourites from D20 so far.
NSBU is about people in a video store that are basically pulled into a VHS-tape 80s action world, as action stars. The characters tend to be send-ups of familiar franchises; one character is "Vic Ethanol" who was in a movie called "2 Quick 2 Perilous", for example. It is absolutely wild and Brennan Lee Mulligan is a great DM who is enabling some absolutely nutty shenanigans in a hilarious way. If you like watching people play TTRPGs, then this one is especially good, although it is very silly. If you have watched any D20 shows before, then the best way I can describe how absolutely bonkers things are is that Ally Beardsley is the voice of reason at the table. Ally is notable in previous seasons for being chaos incarnate, and they are definitely one of the least chaotic in this show.
Ally having grown so much as a player is so cool to see. Also I love these characters (I'm just at the end of ep.1 so I'm behind)
I love Ally's journey through D20, and I just love seeing them as almost the voice of reason in this season. It's such a switch from their earlier appearances, and you can tell that they've really engaged with roleplaying and gaming, and it is awesome.
This whole cast is just one of the best casts I've seen. Rekha, Ify, Jacob, Izzy, Ally have been great in a ton of Dropout things lately, and Alex Song-Xia is one of my favourite "guest stars". Their performance in Mentopolis was great, and I'm glad to see more of them in D20 stuff.
Both of those games are getting me interested in running a Kids on Bikes game some time.
Agreed, I struggle to enjoy them as Kristen, even now, but I've loved their other roles. (I might like one little peppermint lad in particular) I also love watching Izzy get to be just delightfully weird. I am stoked about the rest of NSBU for all the reasons you described.
I did just back Bitcherton which I think Alex is ok so I get more of them too!
And KoB is on my list of things to run. Have you ever seen Roll for Shoes? Erika ran it on the Worlds Beyond Number Patreon and playing a game of it was a Blast.
I haven't seen Roll for Shoes - I'll try to check it out! Thanks for the recommendation. I'm also excited for Bitcherton; what a great cast.
I didn't get super into the Fantasy High series, but I loved A Crown of Candy, and they were great in it.
To be clear it's a system, and Erika ran a two part (one shot) of barnyard shenanigans. If you imagine a grandma chicken learning to read and write, a possibly devil goat learning magic and a retired racehorse failing to learn to talk every single time, you'd have the gist.
Ha, yup, understood - I found the Roll for Shoes site and I think it looks pretty interesting. I'm getting more and more into micro systems for TTRPG; it seems like a pretty great way to focus on the roleplaying more and the fiddly bits less.
It's okay to love the fiddly bits of RPGs too, but in my DnD campaign, I don't always look forward to things like levelling up, because of the fiddly system of doing so. Part of that is using Roll20 (ugh) but part of it is how many things there are to do when you level up. I'm looking at 6 books on my shelf for DnD, and there are 6 rules for this whole system. That's pretty cool.
DND beyond really helped my whole D&D process but small systems are fun, especially for really silly stuff.