The Adventure Zone: The The Adventure Zone Zone: Experiments Post-Mortem

April 5, 2018 10:19 AM

Everyone's favorite Talk Show About a Podcast Hosted By The People Who Do the Actual Podcast is back, just in time for the MaxFunDrive! We're answering your questions about the experimental arcs, and discussing our plans for season two with The Adventure Zone: Amnesty!
posted by Tevin (8 comments total)

I’m very proud of us here on fanfare for not saying any of the obnoxious and ignorant feedback that they talked about.
posted by bleep at 12:18 PM on April 5, 2018

The prospect of future one-offs: Yes, please. The Sherlocks episode was one of the funniest TAZ things for me in a long time.
posted by bigendian at 12:36 PM on April 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm really glad that they let us in a little bit into how they decided to go with Amnesty. It's just so reassuring to hear about how they interact as a family -- as a loving, wonderful family.
posted by meese at 6:27 PM on April 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

I saw people in other forums saying "zonecats" and if they really need a cute name for fans it's better than bachelor nation.

Also, I hope they get a hold of some of the Grant Howitt one page RPGs. They'd have a fucking blast with Trashkin or Honey Heist.
posted by fomhar at 11:55 PM on April 5, 2018 [3 favorites]

I've enjoyed these experiments, and I'm looking forward to Amnesty, which had the most intriguing setup and the best music. But I was a little disappointed with the response to the question about whether pure magic like Phantom Steed would be possible using the new, more storytelling-focused game system they're using. Griffin's answer was that Garyl was only possible because they played fast and loose with D&D's rules, and that's true, but it misses the point. The brothers have a real genius for taking games and gradually pushing them past the point of recognition, using the broken game mechanics to inspire the characters and story. The Balance arc (which started as a pre-made module and slowly mutated into something incredible) followed the same pattern as Car Boys or an episode of Monster Factory, on a longer scale. The fewer weird spells and prefab items in the game, the less grist there is for our boys to creatively repurpose.
posted by theodolite at 3:34 PM on April 6, 2018 [7 favorites]

That's actually a pretty good point. I imagine if they do go with "User-submitted items appear in the Cryptonomicon" idea it will take an extremely short amount of time before someone is taking stuff out of display cases to use in some wacky scheme. It's true that for the most part the boys ignored their bounty of magical goods, but every time they remembered a useful item and whipped it out at the perfect moment it was priceless.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:27 PM on April 6, 2018 [4 favorites]

I took Griffin's response to mean that they want to understand the rules before they start breaking them. Even if the Amnesty arc only runs for Griffin's conservative estimate of a year and a half, that's plenty of time for them to find room in the system to play within.
posted by ardgedee at 7:16 AM on April 7, 2018

But yeah... sure it'll only run for a year and a half.
posted by wotsac at 10:33 AM on April 13, 2018