Main Topic: Why You Shouldn’t Learn to Roleplay From Actual Plays
Actual play podcasts and streams have grown in popularity massively over the past 20 years, redefining and dominating the hobby. They play a huge role in bringing people into roleplaying games, and possibly an even larger one in teaching new players how they work. But is this always a good thing? What are the advantages and possible pitfalls of learning from APs? And what other approaches might we recommend?
This episode was recorded live at A Weekend With Good Friends 2026. While it mostly follows the usual format, we do spend a bit of time towards the end answering questions from people who were watching live. You can see the video for this and all the other seminars on the AWWGF YouTube Channel.
Our Guest Host
We are delighted to welcome Zach Reeves back to The Good Friends of Jackson Elias! Zach is the game master, producer, and editor of Pretending to be People, a horror/comedy actual play podcast. Zach enjoys karaoke with his wife, dancing with friends, and creating elaborate scavenger hunts. He is afraid of losing his mind and Styrofoam.
Pretending to be People will be appearing live at Gen Con 2026, at 4 PM on Friday the 31st. Tickets are still available. There will also be meetups throughout the con, so keep an eye out for those.
Zach has previously joined us to discuss:
Links
Things we mention in this episode include:
- Harmontown
- Nerd Poker
- The Adventure Zone
- The Glass Cannon Network
- Delta Green
- Call of Cthulhu subreddit
- Delta Green subreddit
- D&D subreddit
- RPG subreddit
- How We Roll
- Into the Darkness
- Vampire: the Masquerade
- RPG.net
- The Forge
- Carmen Sandiego’s click-and-point adventure
- D&D
- Traveller
- Writing a Novel by John Braine
- “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell
- The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien
- Matt Mercer Effect
- Critical Role
- “Side Effects May Include” on Push the Roll With Ross Bryant
- The Two-Headed Serpent on How We Roll
- The Two-Headed Serpent
- Dungeons and Daddies
- “The Burning Stars” on Into the Darkness
- “The Burning Stars” from Terrors From Beyond
- “Amidst the Ancient Trees” on How We Roll
- Dimension 20
- “PX Poker Night”
- “Hell is Other People” from KULT: Screams and Whispers
- The Good Friends of Jackson Elias Discord server
- The Magic School Bus
- Fantastic Voyage (1966)
- Pretending to be People Discord server
- Blade Runner on Ain’t Slayed Nobody
- Blade Runner RPG
- Audacity
- Reaper
- “Operation STOP REPO” shotgun scenario
- “Operation STOP REPO” with Jared Logan on Pretending to be People
- Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying
- Miskatonic University Podcast
- Seth Skorkowsky
News
2HS on HWR
After 9 1/2 years, How We Roll have recorded the final episodes of The Two-Headed Serpent. This has been an epic journey, and Scott would like to thank everyone who took part, specifically Joe, Dave, Kuran, Camille, Liisa, Aron, Eoghan, and Mav. Oh, and Greg, of course.
These last episodes will come out over the course of the next few months. Expect death, destruction, and sheer bloody chaos.
Now for a short rest before the inevitable sequel.
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On the online dice rollers, I remember a thing a while back about one of the D&D VTTs–I think it was D&DBeyond, but I’m not 100% sure–where it had a thumb on the scale, if you hadn’t rolled a critical/nat20 in X amount of rolls, you were guaranteed one. Really soured me on both that particular VTT and on soured me a little bit on D&D itself, though my group had already moved on from the game by that point.
To me, the best reason to not learn roleplaying from an actual play podcast is that none of them seem to know the rules. Sometimes it’s just a massive heap of house rules, but more often than not, particularly with Call of Cthulhu, they just plain don’t know the rules.