Fan Club “Blog” #5: Making our first Actual Play!

Well, this whole thing was unexpected. 😅

Live on the Quinns Quest YouTube channel today is a 3 hour Actual Play video set in the world of hit videogame Citizen Sleeper, played with the creator of Citizen Sleeper, as well as a shorter video of me chatting with my players afterwards. Since we're half-way through Quinns Quest Season 1 with three reviews done and three left to go, you could think of this kind of like a funky intermission?

Here's what happened: I'm friends with Gareth, the (basically) solo developer behind award-winning sci-fi RPG Citizen Sleeper. Gareth, currently hard at work on Citizen Sleeper 2, said they were thinking of doing a one-shot Actual Play in the Citizen Sleeper universe for the game's second anniversary.

My dim memory of that conversation - which took place in a London pub - goes something like this:

"You know," says me. "I'm really interested in learning more about the production of Actual Play. It's such a big part of the TTRPG space that it would probably benefit Quinns Quest if I knew more about it."

"Well," responds Gareth, "Would you want to make it together and host it on Quinns Quest?"

"Um," says me, dedicating all of my beer-soaked brain to this question. "I dunno. Maybe. Probably. Yes??"

And so above Actual Play was born. The mechanics of the video game Citizen Sleeper couldn't translate 1:1 to a TTRPG, let alone a one-shot, so for the ruleset we ended up using was CBR+PNK, which is a fancy cyberpunk Blades in the Dark hack designed to (essentially) execute an entire Cyberpunk RED story/job in a single evening. So we took that as our foundation, and tweaked it the tiniest bit to make it less violent and more, well, sad.

But still! Actual Play isn't really something I was planning on doing on Quinns Quest, and ABSOLUTELY not this soon, so nobody's more surprised than me to be clicking 'Publish' on it today in YouTube's backend. But in no particular order, here are some reasons that I agreed to do it:

• Honestly? Quite high on the list was that I like the motto "Do something every day that scares you", and the idea of GMing on camera was just utterly nauseating. 🤢 I was so, so, so nervous, and I think you can see it in the opening minutes as we start playing. (I goofed my opening monologue and we had to stitch two clips together, making it look substantially less professional that I'd like.)

• Far in the past I've been guilty of being quite dismissive of Actual Play, specifically saying that it's more of a slick, commercial product than it is a true representation of how people play RPGs. That's not how I feel today, but still- if I ever want to toss around statements that are anything like that arrogant in the future (or just wanted to enact some penance), I owed it to the TTRPG community to get my facts straight by making some Actual Play myself.

• I'm not ruling out doing an Actual Play series on Quinns Quest at some point! There are certain games and formats that I think haven't been explored by anyone in the scene yet, and that I think I'd get a kick out of creating. I'd also love to see more popular Actual Play that uses more modern, avant-garde games as their foundation (not dissimilar to Friends at the Table). So this felt like a super low-risk way of (a) seeing if I enjoy making this sort of content, and (b) seeing if my existing audience enjoy watching it.

So in this behind-the-scenes blog I wanted to share a little bit about what it was like making the darn thing. Some not-particularly-enlightened observations follow...

First off, and perhaps most obviously: Making great Actual Play is harder than it looks!

Start to finish, as the GM I was extraordinarily stressed, and at least part of that is that this was a one-shot. I had to fully execute the story setup I'd planned within a tight time limit, while still being respectful of my players' agency to take the story in different directions and create scenes of their own when they wanted.

Additionally, I felt haunted for the entire shoot by the knowledge that I couldn't make any big mistakes that would undermine our story. It's comparable to driving a car for hours on end: It's not that any part is enormously challenging, but you simply can't make fuck up in a big way - it's just not an option - so you get a particular grind on your soul from remaining in a state of hypervigilance and focus for the entire time.

As a group, me and my players were also taken aback by how much focus is required from the players. In a normal RPG night if your character isn't super involved in a scene you can go to the bathroom, zone out, doodle, or be reading some bit of game material. In an Actual Play? Not an option! You have to sit there because your character could get called upon at any second, and if they do then you have to be in-character and ready with a response immediately. So again, players are kept in a state of hypervigilance for hours.

So take all of that, as well as any residual nerves you have from just being on camera, and then remember that you need to make all this look like play. You have to be having fun! You have to be earnest and own all of the inevitable tiny mistakes you make when playing an ttrpg, because those are often the best bits of the video! But you can't do this too much, because that reads as unprofessional or self-indulgent.

It's a lot.

That said, here's maybe the biggest revelation I had on the day, and the thing I had most wrong about Actual Play when I was watching & making observations about Critical Role years ago, at least partially jealous of their success:

I thought Actual Play wasn't representative of actually playing RPGs at home.

In truth, now I've made some, I think it actually is. Or at least it can be!

I was really surprised that both on the day that me and the "test" play session we did the week before, 90% of what we did involved me switching my brain off and just... playing a roleplaying game. What you can see in the above video is honestly how I GM in real life. If you want to know what my home games are like? They're like the above video. Except with more pee breaks. And maybe a few more moments where I candidly talk to my players about what they're enjoying and where they want the story to go.

(In fact, Rob, who plays Gimble in the video, is actually one of the players from my home games. I brought him along because he's a great player, but also because I know we play well together & him being there would chill me out a bit. Also he basically brought the character of Gimble back as a character for our Mothership campaign, which is great, as I wanted to spend more time with that nasty old guy.)

Also, final observation: On the last hangout I did with my Sinister Benefactor-level patrons, I mentioned I was playing an RPG set in the iron age with a couple of players who are a historian and an archaeologist. A patron asked me if I found that stressful, and truthfully, I said I didn't. I loved when I got corrected and I loved what they added to the worldbuilding.

You know what IS stressful though? That in this Actual Play I was running a game ON CAMERA, in a universe where the CREATOR WAS ONE OF MY PLAYERS, in a piece of fiction that WOULD TECHNICALLY BE CANON if I didn't screw up.

That I pulled that off, and Gareth told me after the shoot that they were going to put some of our characters in Citizen Sleeper 2? I felt incredibly pleased with myself. 🥰

Overall I just feel proud. I feel proud to have been brave enough to try this, I feel incredibly proud of my players, and I feel proud that Gareth is happy with the finished product. I hope you folks get a kick out of it.

Will you be seeing more Actual Play on Quinns Quest in the future? I think probably, yes. Assuming you don't hate this. I'm going to be pitching a stage show or two for PAX Unplugged 2024, and I have a good feeling one of those might now be an Actual Play of some kind. Assuming I can find an RPG that plays in an hour.

Which is an insane proposition. How do other folks do it?

-Quinns xx