Also, did you actually watch all of those EXU episodes? I have heard incredible things about how Aabria She-Boon DMs. Any opinions you wanna share with the group?
You know how in the Devil May Cry series if you suck enough ass the game will take pity on you and offer to enable Easy Automatic Mode? That’s playing a game run by Aabria.
There are some things she does that I can appreciate, namely granting Inspiration to players when they do something inventive or funny, which is an optional, official rule (as opposed to some homebrew batshit Matt came up with). She doesn’t do it so often as to encourage breaking the flow of the game so someone can show off or tell dumb jokes, either, so she seems to have a sense of keeping the focus on the group being entertained, and therefore hopefully the audience.
But holy fuck I have never seen a DM go so far out of their way to guide players away from bad decisions. At least once an episode there will be a “bear in mind that…” or “are you sure you want to (x)?” and that shit sets my teeth on edge because that’s really bending the purpose of the game away from collaborative storytelling and into “everyone just wants to win and have a good time”. It’s worth noting that at the time the miniseries was recorded one of the players, Amy, had never played D&D at all, ever, period. To my mind that would make me ask “okay, so what the fuck are you doing
here, on a show where people play D&D to entertain an audience?” but perhaps that’s just me. I don’t know what sort of relationship she has with the core group. It’s whatever. But carefully steering players into a particular course of action isn’t the same as helping a newbie with the intricacies of combat; you don’t need to have rolled dice for a year to know that peering over a cliff edge in a rainstorm is a potentially very bad idea. Aabria is more or less overtly what everyone accuses Matt of doing covertly, in terms of railroading the narrative, at least.
And yeah, “but it was only eight episodes worth of filler to bridge the gap between campaigns”, and I can see that point, but I dunno. Sometimes you just wanna see a character doing something dumb get smushed by a boulder or whatever. It’s a
game. Not everyone has to be victorious 100% of the time.
I also wasn’t a fan of how imbalanced the story was in terms of which characters were the most “important”. I won’t go into spoilers but if you watched the first two episodes you’ll likely have worked it out.
Aabria’s fine as a DM for what EXU was I guess, since I suppose not as many people would be fine with seeing a character getting cacked during a miniseries, despite the stakes not being nearly as high as a group playing a campaign spanning over a hundred sessions.
