Architect Address - November 2022 (Patreon)

Whaaaat!? It’s the architect address!? Crazy! Who could have possibly seen this coming??? Err, you probably seeing as you clicked on this video. Anyway, the architect address is a semi regular what I’ve been up to recently mini vlog thing that I put out occasionally for all patrons where I just sort of ramble on for about five minutes about a variety of topics and the first one on my list is the subject of video lengths.

As we close in on the end of the year I’m evaluating what it was like making a lower number of longer videos, previously my average was anywhere between twelve to fifteen minutes now they’re all pushing 20 plus and I’m middling on it as an experiment. I think by far the longest part of my writing process is the messing around trying to get my ideas in order so I can actually start writing the damn thing portion and so in a weird way making longer videos is more efficient but equally I think I’m kind of feeling things get a little… algorithmy in the process.

So if you don’t know youtube absolutely loooooves either super long videos or really really short videos and seeing that youtube shorts are a terrible medium for video essays, many creators end up making these marathon multi hour deep dives and I’ll be honest I think the overwhelming majority of these are bloated monstrosities that I would love to take a bonesaw to but I can kind of see why they end up like that. You get to do less editing, keep more of your precious baby favourite anecdotes and get financially rewarded for it! It’s great! But I think maybe I’ve been a little bit less disciplined in that regard this year than I’d like to have been, lots of stuff that I think could, in retrospect just be cut out of a lot of videos but I kept in because it’s just sort of interesting even if it doesn’t service the core point.

On the other hand maybe the slightly expanded length fits my bigger picture more abstract style? I’m not the kind of person who likes talking about a single game or a single mechanic and I like to draw influence from across the gaming space to talk about these big broad subjects so maybe pulling in a lot of different examples is better? I dunno, eager to hear some feedback there because I’m oscillating between thinking that I’m either hanging onto bloat or arbitrarily cutting potentially interesting ideas purely to keep length down. I’m saying this as someone who thinks my hour long video on disco elysium is a monument to self indulgence and something that I could EASILY get down to two thirds of that length if I had another crack at it, when many people in the same space wouldn’t bat an eye at a video two or three times its length. WHO KNOWS!

Anyway, one of the videos that came out recently is Why Classes are D&D’s best idea and my god was that a surprisingly contentious title. Lots of tabletop rpg people are REALLY not into classes as an idea and I totally didn’t see that coming. Weird. Now, talking about more traditional tabletop games on the channel is hard because there are no accompanying visuals I can easily get but I think what D&D either does or doesn’t do well is an interesting conversation. Because… for the world’s flagship roleplaying game it is BAD at a lot of stuff.

Combat in D&D historically takes absolutely forever, there’s a lot of really fiddly granular systems and generally if you’re not doing dungeon crawls the skill system doesn’t really feel well balanced, with stuff like persuasion being hilariously overpowered and survival being even more borderline uses. As for classes, I think actually D&D does them pretty well though a lot of people don’t like the hard and fast roleplay restrictions that D&D usually bundles in with them like making paladins commit to certain oaths or druids have to do druidy things but speaking from experience actually running campaigns, players need as many incentives to actually make interesting characters and roleplay them well as possible.

Alright, as far as the actual vid goes, this one really came together in my head when I made it less about how to make classes good which is always a dicy and not very interesting position to start from and more of a focus on WHY they as a system have stuck around so long. Seriously, once you figure out that classes are in just about everything you’ll realise that their utility is so much more than just balance or creating a specific class fantasy - the need to categorise things into particular roles is just a natural part of psychology and so it’s only natural that the most enduring gameplay systems would end up reflecting that in some way.

Honestly, with how passionate people are about RPGs and dungeons and dragons and stuff I honestly thought the video would do… better? I guess it’s just a matter of luck at the end of the day but this video did kind of… eh.. When it comes down to it. Maybe that’s due to the framing around baldur’s gate 3 as the sort of spotlight game and people didn’t want spoilers? Maybe. God that game is really good by the way, I legitimately had to stop playing it because I want the complete experience when it’s done in… I dunno ten years.

Adn the second video that’s come out recently is Losing Is Fun, and let me tell you this is maybe the biggest case of title first development I’ve ever had, I just knew there was a killer video idea orbiting around that concept and by god I found it. One thing i did discover though is that I made a video waaay back sort of about failure states already which is a bit of a shame because I had to avoid repeating myself in a few instances and also that video called finding the fun in failure MIGHT be one of the worst ones on the channel, it’s a fuckin mess, real bad stuff.

Anyway, I think a lot of my stance in this video is sort of a reaction to the classic gamer take of oooh errghhh stop dumbing down games for casual babies waaaaahh which is… mostly nonsense and also misses the point of why the most successful really hard games work so well - it’s because they’re not the masochistic and actually have quite lenient and forgiving approaches to death.

Related to the sort of self flagellation subversion that I did in the video is I was really really wondering what the thumbnail was going to be over the entire writing process, sometimes I have a vision of something cool I want to do and other times I really struggle and this one ended in me looking over wallpapers of various games I was featuring eventually leading to me seeing the flagellant from darkest dungeon and I just fell in love, he’s such a perfect fit for the title and premise, love it.

Performance wise I think this video was a bit weird, it started off doing kind of bad, then it had a big old spike of popularity and now at time of writing it’s starting to tail off quite quickly meaning that it sort of did broadly above average overall which I can’t complain about. I think a LARGE factor here is people “correcting” me about dwarf fortress or reminding me that dwarf fortress is getting a steam release soon even though I… use the trailer for exactly that in the video. Oh well, more engagement for me!

Alright I’ll leave it there, hope my nonsense bullshit ramblings were interesting, I’ll see you next time!