>>1248070What are you smoking? D&D has some really overbearing combat rules that regularly grind sessions to a halt. Recent editions are getting lighter, but it's still no-where near "just talking". Especially with new players it's super slow because everyone has to look up every save, every proficiency, every spell effect. Seasoned players get into rules fights and start looking up stuff because they can't agree.
That's why nobody streams mechanics- and combat-focussed D&D campaigns and all the successful shows keep combat to a minimum. It really sucks the air out of an entertaining video. Imo you can't describe it epicly enough to not make a good chunk of the audience space out or skip ahead once the initiative tracker comes out (myself included). I grew up on AD&D, I have a brain full of nonsensical and needlessly complex mechanics, and my favorite sessions to watch are ones with zero combat. It's like JRPGs - the story and character interactions may be neat, but I don't need to watch the 40 hours of grind inbetween story beats.
Important to realize that you can't make everyone happy. Free-form roleplay is the most creative and interesting, but very aimless and hard to balance. Table-top like Warhammer 40k is the opposite end, where the whole game is just fighting, measuring, rolling, triggering effects. D&D tries to straddle the gap, combining rules with free-ish roleplay. Ideally it should just be a mechanical backdrop to tell a good story, but dude, I *wish* it amounted to "writing stuff on paper and just talking". Btw, I second looking at other systems. D&D certainly isn't the end-all be-all, merely the most popular system.
