Gaming as a Podcast

Lantern Cove is my first attempt at a podcast, and it’s the first time I ever did gaming as entertainment.

It’s interesting to me to think about how different the process of gaming is when you’re doing it not just to share a story with your friends, but to share it to a larger audience. And how not-different it is.

The first thing that jumps to mind is how it affects scheduling. Trying to get seven people together at the same time is really quite difficult, more especially so if it’s a necessity that everyone be there every time. Now combine that with a publishing schedule. I went into the project with the intention that I would get 10 episodes in the can before I started putting the podcast out, and I’m really glad I did that, because the gap between now and when we run out of episodes in the can keeps narrowing. I think we’ll get to the end of the story before we have to put a gap in the publishing schedule, but I’m not 100% on that.

Another way that the podcast influences the game is that we have to try to express everything through audio. Making faces and gestures just doesn’t cut it when you’re wanting to tell the story to others via sound. It sounds like a trivial consideration, but you might be surprised how often we have to adjust for it. For instance, some of us use a Discord bot for dice rolling, and everyone can see the result of those rolls, but we have to say them out loud anyway or listeners won’t know what’s going on.

In other ways, though, it affects things less than I thought it would. I thought that perhaps having an audience would affect the way we play, but nah. We’re already playing for an audience of the other people participating with us, and I think that remains primary in our minds in Lantern Cove, despite the podcasting.

Sera