Since returning from my friend’s wedding, I’ve been streaming mostly Wildermyth (and a little bit of Valheim) when I’ve had the time to actually do a stream on my twitch account. It has been a lot of fun, even if I did spend most of my first two streams using OBS at a horrendous 360p, because I’ve been treating it like I’m reading a story to my audience rather than like I’m playing a game. Sure, there’s some combat stuff that occasionally interrupts the story I’m reading, but that’s usually over fairly quickly. The same is true of the overland movement and map unveiling portion of the game (even if I’ve coincidentally spent way more time managing things than I usually do on account of character hook quests pulling my characters to incredibly inconvenient locations). I spent probably forty-five minutes of every hour trying to keep the character’s voices consistent as I read through storytime and the other fifteen minutes managing mechanics. I’m really enjoying myself, even if it’s pretty difficult to manage audience comments and interactions at the same time.

I don’t know how long I’ll keep this up, because it is pretty draining, but I’d like to eventually make this a regular event on my channel. Maybe with a few other people, of course, so I’m not playing all the characters. Plus, the game is more fun to play with other people since then all the decisions aren’t mine to make. If they’re all on me, I tend to lean toward creating optimized characters with powerful abilities, rather than trying to make decisions in-character. I’ll frequently go with something that sounds interesting, of course, but not always. Sometimes, it sucks to lose your main tank because they were having prophetic dreams and wandered off into the woods in order to become the new local seer even if it leaves their companions in a bind because now there’s no one to absord damage. Sometimes, when that otherwise really cool option shows up, you ignore it and pick the one that isn’t going to make the mechanical portions of the game incredibly unpleasant. If there’s other people around, though, either weighing in or with votes they can cast, then it’s a lot less tempting to focus on defeating the game’s mechanics and a lot more fun to stay focused on an interesting story. After all, if it’s storytime rather than game time, I don’t need to worry about loss conditions.

I haven’t really had a lot of audience traction with this series, though. I’m sure part of it is my irregular schedule as I’ve been preparing to move and then moving, and at least some of the remainder can be chalked up to no longer streaming almost every night, but I think the small audience I was attracting with my Naked and Afraid play-through of Breath of the Wild isn’t necessarily the type of audience that will enjoy a much more relaxed storytime experience. I could be wrong, of course. It could just be the schedule stuff since I’ve only streamed three times since Tears of the Kingdom came out, but I’m pretty certain that losing the specific, concrete goal of beating BotW before TotK came out has left at least a couple of my old “usual” audience members less invested in showing up to watch.

Maybe that’ll change as I keep this up and (hopefully) start to attract a more varied audience whose interests match my more varied plans for my channel’s future. Or maybe I’ll get bored of this in the next couple months now that my challenge is gone and my channel will once more fade into obscurity. It’s not like I’ve done much with it in all the years I’ve had the channel, at least not until recently. Plus, streaming filled the hole in my life that Tabletop Roleplaying Games left when they faded away, so now there’s less room for streaming as I slowly work on getting more and more TTRPGs in my weekly life.

My sort of end-goal for my creative work is to have a varied, multi-media empire. Blogs, books, TTRPG campaigns, maybe some movies, some audio stuff, and streaming. Do a little bit of everything, since I love storytelling, not just one particular type of it. It would be a lot of fun to keep the streaming up as a part of my efforts to slowly build that life for myself. I just have to find a way to make it fun and sustainable for myself during weeks when I’m too tired or burned out to want to do anything super social and energy-consuming like streaming. If I can get that figured out, I’ll be unstopable.