Rigaroga's Odd Order

Summary for the month of May 2019

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Rigaroga
in

Here’s a summary of activity for the month of May 2019.

In mid-May, I finally hit 500 hours of live streaming on Twitch since my first stream back on Sep 5, 2014. It’s been a long, uneven, and strange trip. There’s been periods where I haven’t been able to stream, and periods when I only uploaded videos to YouTube, but over the years, off and on, in fits and starts, I’ve managed to stream 500 hours. Yay me!

Rigaroga Twitch 500 hours May 2019

I’m also seriously amused that even with all my struggles, I’m in the top third of content creators on Keymailer, a service where developers can send keys so people can check out their games. There are other services, some have come and gone, others still exist, which I’ve tried, but Keymailer has been, for me, the most useful. Okay, enough of the hype; except you might consider checking them out if you’re a creator interested in playing new things often.

But … I mean: just how long is that tail anyway? And, the spike in the top third must be enormous! I do wonder, sometimes, how much more I would have to stream, and be watched, to move into the top quarter. I’m sure it’s way more, but just how much more? I don’t know, and will probably never find out.

Rigaroga Keymailer top third May 2019

The only tabletop I’ve been doing this last month has been Weave by Monocle Society. I really have been enjoying the simple elegance of how it plays out for me as a solo player, even though solitaire play wasn’t part of the design. I did run into a hiccup where the game, which I had in front of me on the table, ready to stream another session, was unplayable because the app couldn’t connect to the server-side service, though there were no errors displayed; but the app was empty. My season was gone, no character information, all my playsets were gone … just empty space in the UI. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling, but nothing worked; until it just randomly came back a little while later. Welp. I experimented by turning off WiFi, and, indeed, the app does not cache anything useful locally. If I’m not connected to live Internet, the game is unplayable. That’s not a happy state for a game that I have physically in front of me. But, in spite of that, I did go on to play another session once the app was back.

I posted about the story so far, my game journal, through the first 4 streams, unboxing through adventure 3. And have continued to play, and, you know, learn how to play whilst playing.

As I’ve sat down to think about and plan to play other tabletop roleplaying, like Invisible Sun, the current preview for backers of Seas of Voldari or Humblewood, I’ve just been unexcited by the complexity of game play for my purposes. Too much work for too little payoff at this point. That’s also how I’ve been feeling about Gloomhaven or trying to bastardize a new, DIY Illimat, so I could play without supporting the solo-averse game designer, for further solo play, using the cards from Weave, or D&D / Gale Force Nine’s Tarokka as Luminaries, or something else. Although, I did get and unbox whilst streaming the Gloomhaven: Forgotten Circles expansion. There’s also plenty of new and old print-and-play things I have that I could play, full games and demos, but, again, just so much unfun work just to get to the point of playing hasn’t been exciting to me. So, the only thing I’ve played for tabletop this month has been Weave.

As an aside, I found myself idly wondering about and find it odd that video and tabletop games don’t have a “streamer kit” much like a press kit, but for streamers, with assets pre-cleared for use in stingers, interstitials, and thumbnails, and so on; static and motion graphics for streamers to use in videos and actual plays. I messaged a few people about the idea for some games I’m waiting for, and am thinking about streaming, and they hadn’t thought of the idea before. Seems like a good idea to me! But, I’m biased.

At some point, maybe, this next month, I’ll finally get my deluxe edition of Expedition RPG box, and be able to try that out … but, the status of that has been very murky, so I can only guess that it may arrive. I have high hopes that I’ll be able, and can sustain interest at the table, to play that on stream for a while.

I’ve had my eye on some other games, but my budget has been really very tight lately. I’m at the point where, unless I know 110% that I’m going to play something for tabletop streaming, I just cannot justify it at all; and even if I can justify it, I have such a limited budget that I’ve not been able to get anything new.

So, it is what it is. The month has passed, and I survived. I continued to stream games and tabletop. Also, I turned a half century old. Yeah. That happened. Wild, right?

Posts on the blog this last month

Here’s videos and archived streams

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