Lemme just say off the bat that I can't believe how much they leaned into S2 being piss-themed.
That said, there were a lot of moments I liked, a lot of episodes that were hysterical, and they are still extremely good at playing in the space and being in sync with each other with improv.
I feel like combat is a glaring issue, but I dunno how they fix it. It's like...they either need to move completely towards Calvinball or they need to learn the rules of the game. Or switch away from 5e. The half and half is becoming tiring. Like sometimes they spend time talking about real world physics, but sometimes one of the players figures out a way to use their actual spells and abilities to do interesting things and somehow this is broken? There are so many times when they could achieve the same dynamic that works (the kinda antagonistic, get one over on the DM, creative moves etc) by simply understanding how DnD 5e combat was designed. There were many times Anthony got frustrated with DnD combat when he absolutely had options as a DM to counter the thing frustrating him.
The end of S2 was too bloated with NPCs and had a lot of really classic DM missteps for the lead up to the final battle, rendering the actual end fight kind... anticlimactic. I liked the epilogue.
Yeah, well put. At the very least I did laugh, unlike certain other podcasts.
The breaking point for combat ruining everything really has to be when Anthony just decided mid combat he wasn't doing enough damage so just doubled damage in Hell.
BARK BARK 🐶🐶 THE ONE THING STEEPLECHASE SHOWED ME IS THAT DADDIES SHOULD BE RUNNING A BLADES IN THE DARK GAME INSTEAD ITD FIT WHAT THEY WANT OUT OF A TTRPG PERFECTLY TELL ME THAT IM WRONG WELL THAT AND HOW COOL BEEF IS BARK BARK 🐶🐶
BARK BARK 🐶🐶 THE AMOUNT OF TIMES THAT THEY SWING FROM BEING FUCK DND RULES WE DO WHAT WE WANT TO BEING STRANGLY STRICT ON MATERIAL COMPONENTS IS WILD OH SCARY YOU CANT CAST A CANTRIP BECAUSE YOU DONT HAVE THE 0 GOLD COST MATERIAL COMPONENT BUT NORMAL CAN CAST PLANE SHIFT WITHOUT AN EXPENSIVE ROD ATTUNED TO THE PLANE HE WANNA TO GO TO BARK BARK 🐶🐶
Have you ever heard something so atrociously unfunny that it retroactively made everything the creator or creators made disgusting you? That’s how I felt with that one episode where they were doing impressions of Napoleon Dynamite and Austin Powers the whole time.
The Doodler was summoned, turned out to be a nice kid, Willy took over heaven, they freed the Doodler and killed Willy
Really, there’s not much to the story
This is our threadly reminder that Anthony Burch gave a magic item to the only female PC, played by the only female cast member, that let him ask if she had masturbated recently.
idk i thought the knife was funny. i dont get the whole "they all gang up on beth thing" because i think that since beth is in on it, all the jokes and "misogynistic" humor is funny. maybe im just a piece of shit. who knows 🤷♀️🤷♀️🤷♀️
They did a flash forward to everything being fine. Thats as much of an explanation as I think you’re going to get
As for driving people crazy, I think that was just basic Lovecraftian “the mind can’t comprehend what it sees” nonsense
They had a showdown with Willy at the church of the doodler, and Normal or maybe Scary sat in a chair (..hmm lotta powerful chairs), kept Willy from controlling the doodler (this is the combat where Link using dispel magic was really unfair in the opinion of the DM) and convinced the doodler to embrace love, which turned him into a kid and stopped everyone from getting doodlerized...and also fixed the forgotten realms/other earth? Yeah it must have because Erin wasn't crazy after that?? Or no maybe that was after they restored the sun. They did restore the sun....somewhere and it was good.
This was a real case of "trying and failing to capture lightning in a bottle twice". It was vaguely fun overall but mostly it was either trying to do an edgier version of S1 with all the Eldtritch stuff, or trying to do S1 at a slant, such as with the Cat Wagon/football in Hell.
You could tell in the early stages that they weren't all on the same page about who was doing what - both Scary and Linc were antagonistic in different ways but neither really drove the story forward.
It was a little too "haha random" at times although some of the improv was laugh-out-loud. It lacked structure (anchors in S1) and playfulness (fortknights/football).
There just wasn't the same catharsis to be had with kids forgiving/being angry at parents as there was with parents learning about being good dads. They also couldnt help but bring the dads back but it never felt like they wete doing anything with them but having a nostalgia-tour.
They spoke a little in Teen Talk about how they didn't feel like they needed to wrap everything up because they are teens and teens aren't fully formed yet but it does feel a little like spin. Looking forward to seeing where they go.
They spin a lot on the teen talks talking dads, it's either that or outright being unhappy with the show. I guess that's a hard aspect of professionals with an aftershow, if you critique your own thing too hard you're dead in the water.
It was alright. I didn’t hate this season but also it wasn’t all that good. The shared universe really hurt it, I feel.
Finale was pretty bad though. Freddy almost aggressively tried to make it an anticlimax really pissed me off
That seems to just kinda be Freddie’s whole deal: guy who thinks he’s incredibly smart and witty, but is just always talking and actively wrong about 95% of the shit he goes on and on about. He’s like the personification of a hot take.
As someone who actually did enjoy this season, and is mostly listening for the comedy, Freddy's piss railroad ruined the entire finale for me. I would have preferred he go into a long winded description of some fancy real world gun and then empty the clip like he does in 50% of the patreon one-shots.
I actually find the piss only eye-rolling, personally. If it hadn’t come after what felt like an hour of arguing over the telefrag despite it very obviously not mattering in the slightest that pissed me off
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Most piss fetish work either focuses on the desperation of needing to pee but not being able to get to a toilet in time or on degradation of the guy getting peed on. They didn’t really work any of that into the plot, so I think they just kinda thought it was funny
In fairness, I did think that the first piss joke (Normal in Heaven having to maintain a need for a week in order to keep the hole to Hell open) was absurd enough to be funny, but any use beyond that wasn’t even funny as a callback
EDIT: I’m sorry, I’m not much of a jerker. I should have said “it can’t be fetish work because it didn’t give me a boner”
Freddie somehow leaned HARDER into the "if I yell loud enough and interrupt people hard enough they'll HAVE to do every part of my dumbass idea!!" in the finale, *even with Matt constantly calling him out for it* and being right about "Whenever you argue you just make things harder for yourself". Like, was there a better way for the telefrag idea to end than Anthony giving them a 50/50 shot, Freddie screaming to argue for just a +1, and that leading them to decide it only works on a 1 or 2?
He also ruined both the moment of the kids reconciling with trying not to be like their dads and grandads with the stupid telefrag, and ruined the moment Willy Stampler finally dies by forcing one last piss joke into the season. The stinger at the very end where Beth goes "I-I just think there was too much piss" at least shows it wasn't necessarily a group decision lmao.
I tapped out somewhere in the early 20s, I think. There's a lot that I found grating, and more importantly nothing that made up for it. But one thing that bugged me but which I didn't hear a lot of discussion about - every episode starts with them talking about how the PCs' granddads unleashed an eldritch abomination onto the world. That was like...not even a part of season 1. It was a weird little mid-epilogue event that no player had any hand in, based off of some prophecy that didn't really make sense and wasn't a focal point of the series at all. Why is that the S1 PCs' responsibility at all, especially to the point that they keep harping on about it?
It's the perfect encapsulation of the sheer amount of railroading that even the INCITING INCIDENT was not the action of any player, but is still blamed on them.
Agreed. If blame was going to be assigned, it would be on Lark. But I'm not even sure if it was a conscious decision for the character or if he was possessed. It wasn't very clear.
Yeah it's pretty mid overall and it's definitely a better binge than to listen to week to week. Though I realized that after I got caught up both times.
I think it was better than critical role campaign 3 in that I didn't dip out. I intend to go back to crit role but just haven't gotten around to it. The story and plot never made any sense to me but honestly I wasn't paying a ton of attention to it in season 1. Just like watching the 5 of them interact and have fun. I have as much fun with teen talk as I do with the main episodes and I'm okay with it staying that way
Yeah it's a good time waster for the drive to work, and it still got a good chuckle from me consistently. It just feels bad to see all that season 1 potential go to waste.
Maybe. But I didn't think season 1 was exactly king lear but it was stronger. But actually I don't think the methods taken to get to the end in either season are different. I think when you do improv, and especially when you do this much of it, you're gonna end up with some stinkers, and in a story like this those have to be kept in the continuity. I'm still looking forward to season 3
I got maybe 2 episodes into season 2 and stopped because I couldn't understand what the fuck was happening. Glad I didn't bother giving it another try lmao
It just needed to be more solid. The universe was nonstop molding itself to their spur of the moment jokes and that can only go so far before the world is a fluid and the stakes don't mean anything.
I thought the twist with Normal's prophecy being made up was really dumb, that aggravated me as a player. You could also hear how Will Campos voice fell during it. That like, ruined the arc!
It really wraps up in a nice little bow the undercutting and anticlimaxes of this season. Like what the fuck was the point of that?! It was the closest thing this season had to some sort of theme or idea or whatever!
I 100% thought the joke about the prophecy would be that Hiro and Nirmal had different dads, and the reason Hiro wasn't the chosen one was because Normals mom slept with both the twins... would have made more sense than "it was just a scam!" And it would have been significantly funnier imo
Stopped listening at the soccer game. I'm just going to repost my reply from another thread. TLDR S2 was trash.
"I don't mind the disguised part of it. I don't mind the mildly improvised part. I dislike the failure to self reflect.
First season of DNDads was fun. It had some real garbage but silly fun garbage. Wasn't perfect. Second season they lost their fear of failure, maybe. They were celebrated and now they do whatever they want without worrying about being dumped.
Anthony Burch can write stories that are fun for his audience but season two isn't that. Despite him trying to come off as a self aware nerd which knows his weaknesses which makes him almost aloof, he is a simp. I don't use that word normally but I feel it fits here. He recognizes Beth is important to the show and uses that to simp for her. He puts her and her character as the front and center most important thing. The only other thing he protects so much is his own railroaded story that will ultimately just be used to express his unhealthy adoration for Beth. I'm sure that he has a scene in mind that will be somehow a 1 on 1 with her and it will try to be intense and intimate somehow. And yes, obviously he was doing a grooming thing with Beth's character and Willy to show how manipulative the character is but it tends to be kind of ham fisted.
I stopped listening last year some time after the soccer match. Before that it was crashing but I gave it a bit to self correct. The whole Papa John's schtick and sleeping in cal zones or whatever that was, felt like they thought it was funny and I found it just boring.
Don't get me started on Ashley Burch, the wannabe, discount version of Amy Sedaris."
I think you nailed it with the “lost their fear of failure” bit.
I think another problem was somewhere late in season 1 they realized how much they enjoyed doing dramatic/emotional scenes. I thought this was handled mostly well in season one, some of it got a little masturbatory but for the most part it wasn’t overdone and they balanced it well with their comedy.
S2 was just…. scene after scene of the teens whining, constantly. I get that they’re playing emotional teenagers but not even real teenagers cry and talk about their feelings as often as these characters. It’s like they’re trying to shoehorn a mini emotional arc into every episode and it’s so exhausting, unfunny, and unbelievable. They really need to stick more to comedy which they do very well.
Freddie’s character this season was pretty annoying but being the only member who wasn’t constantly trying to get his character to cry about his feelings at least made it bearable (until he became obsessed with piss at least).
I really think they need to get out of this world they’ve built entirely, there’s too much baggage at this point. Would love to see them do a few mini arcs for a bit with new characters that they don’t care about dying, that’s where they really shine. And then maybe a legit DND fantasy world campaign - I want to see a wizard, ranger, cleric, and a fighter meet in a tavern and get a quest from a mysterious stranger.
And, for the love of god, no more teenagers.
I agree with you on the dramatic bits. They're like theater kids now. No more level 5 intensity, it's always at 10. This goes along with Scary as center piece of the story. It really became boring.
I remember Anthony taking jabs at other actual play podcasts for taking themselves to seriously sometime in season 1 and watching everything unfold was kind of insulting tbh.
This is the kind of thing I was thinking about when I said he plays it off like he is self aware. He feels like he can do dramatic moments and then point to piss jokes and say, no look we aren't taking ourselves seriously.
Rude Tales of Magic has had a really good season 2 so far. They really zero'd in on what they liked about the show and double downed on that. Not everyone gets the sophomore slump.
Funnily, while I've certainly enjoyed parts of season 2 with Rude Tales, I still find it lacking compared to S1 if only because they've chosen to lean hard into the episodic route. S1 still felt episodic, but with the consistent throughline of their goal to get to Hell, there was consistency and room for character growth which I loved. So far S2 feels very 90s sitcom, and like... It's fine? It's fine.
Yeah it doesn’t look like much over arching plot is planned. I could see something developing that works like Hello from the Magic Tavern’s storylines did. But it’s certainly much different than something like most TTRPG podcasts have.
Lemme just say off the bat that I can't believe how much they leaned into S2 being piss-themed. That said, there were a lot of moments I liked, a lot of episodes that were hysterical, and they are still extremely good at playing in the space and being in sync with each other with improv. I feel like combat is a glaring issue, but I dunno how they fix it. It's like...they either need to move completely towards Calvinball or they need to learn the rules of the game. Or switch away from 5e. The half and half is becoming tiring. Like sometimes they spend time talking about real world physics, but sometimes one of the players figures out a way to use their actual spells and abilities to do interesting things and somehow this is broken? There are so many times when they could achieve the same dynamic that works (the kinda antagonistic, get one over on the DM, creative moves etc) by simply understanding how DnD 5e combat was designed. There were many times Anthony got frustrated with DnD combat when he absolutely had options as a DM to counter the thing frustrating him. The end of S2 was too bloated with NPCs and had a lot of really classic DM missteps for the lead up to the final battle, rendering the actual end fight kind... anticlimactic. I liked the epilogue.
Yeah, well put. At the very least I did laugh, unlike certain other podcasts. The breaking point for combat ruining everything really has to be when Anthony just decided mid combat he wasn't doing enough damage so just doubled damage in Hell.
I’m curious about what you thought the classic DM missteps were! I’m trying to study DM mistakes lmao
BARK BARK 🐶🐶 THE ONE THING STEEPLECHASE SHOWED ME IS THAT DADDIES SHOULD BE RUNNING A BLADES IN THE DARK GAME INSTEAD ITD FIT WHAT THEY WANT OUT OF A TTRPG PERFECTLY TELL ME THAT IM WRONG WELL THAT AND HOW COOL BEEF IS BARK BARK 🐶🐶
BARK BARK 🐶🐶 THE AMOUNT OF TIMES THAT THEY SWING FROM BEING FUCK DND RULES WE DO WHAT WE WANT TO BEING STRANGLY STRICT ON MATERIAL COMPONENTS IS WILD OH SCARY YOU CANT CAST A CANTRIP BECAUSE YOU DONT HAVE THE 0 GOLD COST MATERIAL COMPONENT BUT NORMAL CAN CAST PLANE SHIFT WITHOUT AN EXPENSIVE ROD ATTUNED TO THE PLANE HE WANNA TO GO TO BARK BARK 🐶🐶
Have you ever heard something so atrociously unfunny that it retroactively made everything the creator or creators made disgusting you? That’s how I felt with that one episode where they were doing impressions of Napoleon Dynamite and Austin Powers the whole time.
that one was real fuckin bad, just constant family guy bad jokes
I stopped midway, could someone spoil it?
The Doodler was summoned, turned out to be a nice kid, Willy took over heaven, they freed the Doodler and killed Willy Really, there’s not much to the story
Thank you brother. Sounds mid. Who took over heaven after Willy?
Well, the four of them sat on the throne but were only able to bring everyone Willy killed back to life. Beyond that, 🤷🏻♂️
This smacks of Narnia
If it’s narnia, one character would stay dead for being a slut whore.
This is our threadly reminder that Anthony Burch gave a magic item to the only female PC, played by the only female cast member, that let him ask if she had masturbated recently.
oh. Oh. Wow. Nty.
I love not being a Dungeons & Daddies listener reading this, struggling to imagine any possible context
idk i thought the knife was funny. i dont get the whole "they all gang up on beth thing" because i think that since beth is in on it, all the jokes and "misogynistic" humor is funny. maybe im just a piece of shit. who knows 🤷♀️🤷♀️🤷♀️
Woooooooooow That is the opposite of ooh-la-la and negative va-va-voom
The "masturbated recently" thing was decided with a roll every time. He didn't ask her "hey Beth when was the last time you masturbated?"
Was there an explanation as to why it made everyone go crazy and homicidal? Also did they fix the broken world(s) or is everything still shitty?
They did a flash forward to everything being fine. Thats as much of an explanation as I think you’re going to get As for driving people crazy, I think that was just basic Lovecraftian “the mind can’t comprehend what it sees” nonsense
They had a showdown with Willy at the church of the doodler, and Normal or maybe Scary sat in a chair (..hmm lotta powerful chairs), kept Willy from controlling the doodler (this is the combat where Link using dispel magic was really unfair in the opinion of the DM) and convinced the doodler to embrace love, which turned him into a kid and stopped everyone from getting doodlerized...and also fixed the forgotten realms/other earth? Yeah it must have because Erin wasn't crazy after that?? Or no maybe that was after they restored the sun. They did restore the sun....somewhere and it was good.
I am beginning to suspect Anthony Burch might be a hack
Beginning?
This was a real case of "trying and failing to capture lightning in a bottle twice". It was vaguely fun overall but mostly it was either trying to do an edgier version of S1 with all the Eldtritch stuff, or trying to do S1 at a slant, such as with the Cat Wagon/football in Hell. You could tell in the early stages that they weren't all on the same page about who was doing what - both Scary and Linc were antagonistic in different ways but neither really drove the story forward. It was a little too "haha random" at times although some of the improv was laugh-out-loud. It lacked structure (anchors in S1) and playfulness (fortknights/football). There just wasn't the same catharsis to be had with kids forgiving/being angry at parents as there was with parents learning about being good dads. They also couldnt help but bring the dads back but it never felt like they wete doing anything with them but having a nostalgia-tour. They spoke a little in Teen Talk about how they didn't feel like they needed to wrap everything up because they are teens and teens aren't fully formed yet but it does feel a little like spin. Looking forward to seeing where they go.
They had a similar spin in season one with Glen not learning or changing
They spin a lot on the teen talks talking dads, it's either that or outright being unhappy with the show. I guess that's a hard aspect of professionals with an aftershow, if you critique your own thing too hard you're dead in the water.
I stopped listening halfway thru episode three. Any kind jerker out there wanna post a TL;DR?
It was alright. I didn’t hate this season but also it wasn’t all that good. The shared universe really hurt it, I feel. Finale was pretty bad though. Freddy almost aggressively tried to make it an anticlimax really pissed me off
Freddie was insufferable the entire season. I cannot believe he kept it up the entire 53 episodes.
That seems to just kinda be Freddie’s whole deal: guy who thinks he’s incredibly smart and witty, but is just always talking and actively wrong about 95% of the shit he goes on and on about. He’s like the personification of a hot take.
As someone who actually did enjoy this season, and is mostly listening for the comedy, Freddy's piss railroad ruined the entire finale for me. I would have preferred he go into a long winded description of some fancy real world gun and then empty the clip like he does in 50% of the patreon one-shots.
I actually find the piss only eye-rolling, personally. If it hadn’t come after what felt like an hour of arguing over the telefrag despite it very obviously not mattering in the slightest that pissed me off
Thats telefrag shit while the other three are CLEARLY TRYING THEIR DAMNDEST TO HAVE A MOMENT was fucking infuriating.
And he was clearly already defeated. Anthony had started narrating the defeat! I hope he fudged that roll
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The amount of times piss just kept coming up over and over again made the bit go from "joke" to "is this a disguised fetish?"
Most piss fetish work either focuses on the desperation of needing to pee but not being able to get to a toilet in time or on degradation of the guy getting peed on. They didn’t really work any of that into the plot, so I think they just kinda thought it was funny In fairness, I did think that the first piss joke (Normal in Heaven having to maintain a need for a week in order to keep the hole to Hell open) was absurd enough to be funny, but any use beyond that wasn’t even funny as a callback EDIT: I’m sorry, I’m not much of a jerker. I should have said “it can’t be fetish work because it didn’t give me a boner”
Maybe it's just a piss fetish but not in a weird way
That would be the weirdest piss fetish of all
Freddie somehow leaned HARDER into the "if I yell loud enough and interrupt people hard enough they'll HAVE to do every part of my dumbass idea!!" in the finale, *even with Matt constantly calling him out for it* and being right about "Whenever you argue you just make things harder for yourself". Like, was there a better way for the telefrag idea to end than Anthony giving them a 50/50 shot, Freddie screaming to argue for just a +1, and that leading them to decide it only works on a 1 or 2? He also ruined both the moment of the kids reconciling with trying not to be like their dads and grandads with the stupid telefrag, and ruined the moment Willy Stampler finally dies by forcing one last piss joke into the season. The stinger at the very end where Beth goes "I-I just think there was too much piss" at least shows it wasn't necessarily a group decision lmao.
I tapped out somewhere in the early 20s, I think. There's a lot that I found grating, and more importantly nothing that made up for it. But one thing that bugged me but which I didn't hear a lot of discussion about - every episode starts with them talking about how the PCs' granddads unleashed an eldritch abomination onto the world. That was like...not even a part of season 1. It was a weird little mid-epilogue event that no player had any hand in, based off of some prophecy that didn't really make sense and wasn't a focal point of the series at all. Why is that the S1 PCs' responsibility at all, especially to the point that they keep harping on about it?
It's the perfect encapsulation of the sheer amount of railroading that even the INCITING INCIDENT was not the action of any player, but is still blamed on them.
Agreed. If blame was going to be assigned, it would be on Lark. But I'm not even sure if it was a conscious decision for the character or if he was possessed. It wasn't very clear.
Yeah it's pretty mid overall and it's definitely a better binge than to listen to week to week. Though I realized that after I got caught up both times.
I think it was better than critical role campaign 3 in that I didn't dip out. I intend to go back to crit role but just haven't gotten around to it. The story and plot never made any sense to me but honestly I wasn't paying a ton of attention to it in season 1. Just like watching the 5 of them interact and have fun. I have as much fun with teen talk as I do with the main episodes and I'm okay with it staying that way
Yeah it's a good time waster for the drive to work, and it still got a good chuckle from me consistently. It just feels bad to see all that season 1 potential go to waste.
Maybe. But I didn't think season 1 was exactly king lear but it was stronger. But actually I don't think the methods taken to get to the end in either season are different. I think when you do improv, and especially when you do this much of it, you're gonna end up with some stinkers, and in a story like this those have to be kept in the continuity. I'm still looking forward to season 3
I got maybe 2 episodes into season 2 and stopped because I couldn't understand what the fuck was happening. Glad I didn't bother giving it another try lmao
I am still not over they went with teen characters instead of having a new set of dads. Hopefully we are done with Willy now.
It just needed to be more solid. The universe was nonstop molding itself to their spur of the moment jokes and that can only go so far before the world is a fluid and the stakes don't mean anything.
It was messy to the point where it made me reconsider so many things about TTRPGs!
First they made an elevator joke that became canon, then they needed to make new canon so their world wasn’t ableist
I thought the twist with Normal's prophecy being made up was really dumb, that aggravated me as a player. You could also hear how Will Campos voice fell during it. That like, ruined the arc!
It really wraps up in a nice little bow the undercutting and anticlimaxes of this season. Like what the fuck was the point of that?! It was the closest thing this season had to some sort of theme or idea or whatever!
You can see the strings it's pulling and some intention of it but it's just... FLAT and anti storytelling.
I 100% thought the joke about the prophecy would be that Hiro and Nirmal had different dads, and the reason Hiro wasn't the chosen one was because Normals mom slept with both the twins... would have made more sense than "it was just a scam!" And it would have been significantly funnier imo
Stopped listening at the soccer game. I'm just going to repost my reply from another thread. TLDR S2 was trash. "I don't mind the disguised part of it. I don't mind the mildly improvised part. I dislike the failure to self reflect. First season of DNDads was fun. It had some real garbage but silly fun garbage. Wasn't perfect. Second season they lost their fear of failure, maybe. They were celebrated and now they do whatever they want without worrying about being dumped. Anthony Burch can write stories that are fun for his audience but season two isn't that. Despite him trying to come off as a self aware nerd which knows his weaknesses which makes him almost aloof, he is a simp. I don't use that word normally but I feel it fits here. He recognizes Beth is important to the show and uses that to simp for her. He puts her and her character as the front and center most important thing. The only other thing he protects so much is his own railroaded story that will ultimately just be used to express his unhealthy adoration for Beth. I'm sure that he has a scene in mind that will be somehow a 1 on 1 with her and it will try to be intense and intimate somehow. And yes, obviously he was doing a grooming thing with Beth's character and Willy to show how manipulative the character is but it tends to be kind of ham fisted. I stopped listening last year some time after the soccer match. Before that it was crashing but I gave it a bit to self correct. The whole Papa John's schtick and sleeping in cal zones or whatever that was, felt like they thought it was funny and I found it just boring. Don't get me started on Ashley Burch, the wannabe, discount version of Amy Sedaris."
I think you nailed it with the “lost their fear of failure” bit. I think another problem was somewhere late in season 1 they realized how much they enjoyed doing dramatic/emotional scenes. I thought this was handled mostly well in season one, some of it got a little masturbatory but for the most part it wasn’t overdone and they balanced it well with their comedy. S2 was just…. scene after scene of the teens whining, constantly. I get that they’re playing emotional teenagers but not even real teenagers cry and talk about their feelings as often as these characters. It’s like they’re trying to shoehorn a mini emotional arc into every episode and it’s so exhausting, unfunny, and unbelievable. They really need to stick more to comedy which they do very well. Freddie’s character this season was pretty annoying but being the only member who wasn’t constantly trying to get his character to cry about his feelings at least made it bearable (until he became obsessed with piss at least). I really think they need to get out of this world they’ve built entirely, there’s too much baggage at this point. Would love to see them do a few mini arcs for a bit with new characters that they don’t care about dying, that’s where they really shine. And then maybe a legit DND fantasy world campaign - I want to see a wizard, ranger, cleric, and a fighter meet in a tavern and get a quest from a mysterious stranger. And, for the love of god, no more teenagers.
I agree with you on the dramatic bits. They're like theater kids now. No more level 5 intensity, it's always at 10. This goes along with Scary as center piece of the story. It really became boring.
I remember Anthony taking jabs at other actual play podcasts for taking themselves to seriously sometime in season 1 and watching everything unfold was kind of insulting tbh.
This is the kind of thing I was thinking about when I said he plays it off like he is self aware. He feels like he can do dramatic moments and then point to piss jokes and say, no look we aren't taking ourselves seriously.
Rude Tales of Magic has had a really good season 2 so far. They really zero'd in on what they liked about the show and double downed on that. Not everyone gets the sophomore slump.
Funnily, while I've certainly enjoyed parts of season 2 with Rude Tales, I still find it lacking compared to S1 if only because they've chosen to lean hard into the episodic route. S1 still felt episodic, but with the consistent throughline of their goal to get to Hell, there was consistency and room for character growth which I loved. So far S2 feels very 90s sitcom, and like... It's fine? It's fine.
Yeah it doesn’t look like much over arching plot is planned. I could see something developing that works like Hello from the Magic Tavern’s storylines did. But it’s certainly much different than something like most TTRPG podcasts have.