rawb

I had a coworker describe to me how she has to watch YouTube or TV while she falls asleep because if she doesn't, she thinks and that distracts her from sleeping. I feel like.. I dunno, that probably isn't sustainable.

I just lay in bed an hour before I want to go to bed so I can think about things

because its a good time to just lay and think

I don't fault people for needing noise or w/e, but it is strange to me the desire for slop YouTube essays to be that noise

I sleep to yt

yeah I can't get this link to work in firefox or chromium, in Japan or over VPN https://mindcracksmp.com/wordsearch/

I wonder if it's js related, or if your JP locale or something causes it to load weird or smt

if I vpn to the UK it works

ew

I'd say the seasonal break wasn't so much a thing as much as it was the jump (dive head first) into the pool of production quality format over the fun format. I get have a break to write up some campaigns. But he went full on into having to have it all staged out hard post season 2. They did need some spacing, but I think doing breaks in the winter to do so was a miss. Mostly because people stuck indoors around the holidays or rolling early into the year will have more time off to enjoy the shows.

I think doing small recaps would have done a lot. Cannon isn't too huge in so far as just having a better time line of events. Them being fuzzy is workable

Site was about mid 2

for the breaks, I get why some sort of break was needed, but 9 months to reload was kinda silly and a lot of the rationales like you said, we're probably counterproductive in the long run anyway

Rob was also getting worse during this time of being able to convert his time/work into output (I forget how I normally word this)

8 hours of Rob "working" on something would output 1 hour of actual work

so he'd kill himself during the offseason churning away at scripts and software overhauls, and have relatively little to show for it, given 9 months of time

It got longer due to production quality and of course his spiralling issues. I can also see him as a passion worker and overhaul stuff in inefficient ways

and imo the issue with cannon was not even that it mattered, I just think it was the driving issue of why he felt the need to overly script some stuff, and get all flippant about which campaigns were "real" or not

I mean the biggest issue I had was Season 3 turned everything into spectacle. The mechanics made things so low stakes. I think the best balance for show and stakes was when deathroles came in when players went down mid season 2.

Season 1 was awesome because the way the system worked the stakes were always high. Problem Rob was sorta running into was making stories that could survive a TKO of the party. This was mostly because of C5 or 6 of one where they got tko'ed mid a heist and shit sprinted to the end.

Shield and deathrolls being a serious issue if you get downed or ways of just totally fucking your shield in where you have a floor of 25% chance to die made sense. When it became the only way to die it kinda sucked

Buckaroos I think it was did it the best.

But he was trying to make it purely for show after awhile which just wasn't a good game system either. He jusg needed to take advantage of the fact that one shots do allow you to be flexible with the plot.

As for what was 'real' I can totally understand fudging some details. That stuff was fine, but he did get way to into the Meta shit as time went on.

Rob swung back and forth a lot on whether Urealms should stand on its own as a game, or just be a way to facilitate the show and I think universally, everyone wanted the former

I think if he accepted that eventually there may be an unsalvageable campaign in design. Stuck with what season 2 had and maybe nerfed the health stuff a bit to keep it high stakes and balanced around shield utility he could have found a good inbetween for the show to be functional and it be a fun game

People want to be able to set themselves into the game. Living the show through it makes it feel like you could have been in any of those campaigns along side them. Plus seeing what they do is just fun

Season 1 did suffer from some god awful.combat speed though too. A lot of became dependent on donations beefing the guys up so first combats were just horrid for awhile

Plus rolls

Whichever route he picked, it would have been successful, he squandered the chance to be massive, but even as a lot of people were kinda checked out by S3, there was a big enough audience and continued interest

the fact anyone is still talking about it 5+ years after it ended is proof enough of that lol

S3 had some moments. But the inbetween on those was just bleh

It was pretty apparent it wasn't fun

That's what I missed the most. Season 1 was the most fun for awhile

The show didn't need higher production value or bigger budgets Rob was obsessed with this idea the show needed professional VAs (and actual women) which is where Spiff came from

Yes, that neutered it so much

super big spends on animation, custom music, all the set dressings, etc.

when the core of the show was people wanted a fun TTRPG and a bunch of funny player banter

People just like seeing funny guys have fun. That was the draw. Urealms was very unique season 1 wise for being incredibly high stakes with the low health pools, interactivity, and stamina costs for abilities.

It made every choice matted because the costs were all real

90% humor, 10% meta story

and by S3 it was way closer to 50-50

Puppet pals being more basic was funner too because the guys were easy to distinguise, was a fun layer, and seeing janky puppet stuff was more fun than seeing designed stuff

agreed

I still remember the funniest fucking thing in season 1 was Coe trotting out his eye patched paladin in Zarlin

The cheeks shit he did just made it hillarious

Plus Nick Grave's art was just better

And if the show grew, I'm not against the production value growing but Rob forced it at the expense of everything else

It was nice to see them stand out from the actual character backsets

So, I love Nick's art but I think the art girls did a really good job once they found a style

I think so too, but nothing beats Nick'a stylization imo

Everything was unique. Later stuff had a bit too much softness to it

I honestly wanted more interpretation of the character's looks. I prefered seeing fan art over official art. Plus RadioActiveK's OG art for the side characters being sorta what the community accepted was a sort of nice grass roots thing to see

I kinda wished it was left like that to the community imagination

Until it came to have enough cash margin for a sort of "year book" character set up for the pool

But it just being fun. Maybe just adding more depth of generic assets to puppet pals would have been better instead of a bunch of more design. It was always funny hearing the guys in their pre shows season 1 talking about requesting some models occasionally

Just goes back to it being FUN. I am never into shit feeling super staged. Some times or sections I can get for parts of a finale maybe. The way silver mines was a bit staged felt natural as an example. But just having fun in a ttrpg setting is the best. I still miss doing so a lot in my own time and know it was always the most fun I have had

Damn I write a lot. I haven't talked this much about Rawb in forever damn. I am autistic enough to enjoy it though

ok but Coe making a fidget spinner spin in puppet palls was fucking funny

im so surprised i found this that fast

fucking 8 years ago is brutal

the same clip unironically also highlights the cannon issuess discussed above lol

I do think though that season three cards though were the best, the only problem was the deathroll system being gutted. Deadbones in the above campaign did it right by imposing an increasing deathroll on himself

Deathrolls were such a good idea in conjunction with the shield system. Shields needed to have more ways of being punched through, but they did make it so squishy characters could be both tankier and still vulnerable. I really liked the fact that a character going down they still had a good chance of dying, but it gave a safeish buffer, but still made them extremely vulnerable if repeated measures were taken at hitting a downed player. Also kinda made it so very dangerous things could be measured in death ranges. Along with the fact that putting them down, but not out allowed for some flexibility in action for killing vs incapacitating the players.

Had to correct. I meant RadioActiveK

I think the spectacle issue is the biggest thing thay tanked the quality of the show, at the end of the day it all comes down to Rob's ego

Campaigns had to move the plot further because it all had to build up to the scripted climactic animations and set pieces that rob had for (only his) characters

By the end the campaigns were railroaded so hard that sometimes it felt like the characters didn't matter at all and they were just viewers on Rob's campaign he'd play on his own

The best thing about Urealms was how every campaign expanded the world and added characters you'd spent several hours getting attached to

When random character from buttfuck plot irrelevant campaign #15 appeared I was like "yooo that's bubblefuck the wizard"

but by s3 we didn't follow up on any of those character's stories even when 99% of them were more compelling than Rob's OCs, because player characters were 10x more compelling than the super powerfull character played by Rob we'd then spent like 5+ campaigns focusing on

And then when player characters appeared it would be Rob playing them, completely botching their personalities and never doing anything of plot relevance

Even as a kid I remember the last campaign of s3 Coe had by FAR the funniest character of the campaign, and then when the climax came noone got to do anything because it ended on an animation of Rob's character fighting a dragon or some shit

everyone was like "yooo that was so cool" and I thought wtf that sucked mega shit

what is wrong with this mindcrack website that I can no longer access it even over a VPN

after flushing DNS and on multiple devices

This is why imo Den of Devils wound up being the best URealms campaign. It was a season 2 mix. Nisovin was always a Urealms character in the show. It was what these sort of loose campaigns can line up to in terms of game play and feeling more open ended. I think could have been better in ways, but I think that it was spectacle more built up on throwing characters we all had seen before into a new situation. Player mades and not just the plot characters for the most part.

I think there are times for more story, but railroading it as hard as he did was a bit much. I think doing so for mechanics sake is what boned the show the most. I became so that combat meant nothing unless deathrolls killed you as they were the only way to effectively do so. Season 1 was always high stakes. I already elaborated on survivability for a show's sake finding some balance with season 2 mechancis. But I think the fall of dundinwhatever was another good example of player characters or their set ups being interesting. It was an amazing point of chance that Milbee dies and has a bear to essentially be his character the rest of the campaign. You don't really get odd stuff happening like that if it is hard railroaded. But the context it was set in as the characters being guards made the more restrictive set up make more sense. Rather than being a little more creative with settitng the scene it drew mostly off nostalgia and heavy railroading conclusions

Also, found this music on some rando book trailer forever ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uapP24GgKag