“The Adventure Zone: Graduation” Was Fine

You always remember your first. For me, it was The Adventure Zone. 

The Adventure Zone is an actual play podcast hosted by brothers Justin, Travis and Griffin McElroy of My Brother My Brother and Me fame, along with their father Clint. They’ve played a variety of games, but at most well known for their three year Dungeons And Dragons campaign, The Adventure Zone: Balance. Justin, Travis and Clint played the now iconic Takko, Magnus and Merle, while Griffin ran the game as the dungeon master

I started listening to TAZ some time in 2017 while the series was approaching it’s emotionally effective ending. It was my first actual play podcast, opening the gates to a genre I’ve grown to love over the years (although it did make me the podcasting equivalent of that guy who keeps telling you to read 800 page books that get good 300 pages in.)

Following Balance, after a few trial campaigns to test the waters on different games, the team began their second long term campaign: The Adventure Zone: Amnesty. Using the game Monster of the Week by Michael Sands & Steve Hickey, Amnesty told the story of the supernatural guardians of Kepler, West Virginia, a fictional town in the McElroy family’s home state. It was the first full campaign of TAZ I listened to as it came out. While it was fun and positively received, it didn’t shake the earth the same way Balance had. 

And then came The Adventure Zone: Graduation.

Okay, I’m being dramatic. Graduation was mostly just kinda fine. 

Graduation got off to a rough start, but was able to recover itself as the show went on. A lot of the mistakes it makes are common for shows with first time game masters and actual play shows that emulate The Adventure Zone, which is an issue when you are The Adventure Zone. 

Read more: The 12 Best Actual Play Podcasts

Graduation takes place in Nua, a fantasy world where being a hero or a villain is more of a job then a moral stance (it’s more like a large scale wrestling match then it is a battle between good and evil.) The main setting of the series, Hieronymous Wiggenstaff’s School for Heroism and Villainy, is an academy where students can train to become the next big heroes and villains . . . or become their lackeys, in the connected Sidekick and Henchperson tracks.  

This is where we find our heroes of the season. Griffin McElroy, leaving his game master position to play a player character in a full campaign, plays Sir Fitzroy Maplecourt, a fancy boy half elf barbarian with some unexplained wild magic at his fingertips. Clint McElroy plays Argonaut Keen, a swashbuckling water genasi rogue looking to get close to a well-known sea-fairing hero. Justin McElroy plays a nameless Firbolg druid who joins the school after being banished from his tribe. 

Together, they form Thundermen, LLC, which, you know, isn’t the worst group name to come out of TAZ. Graduation follows the Thundermen as they tackle school life, go on missions, and learn that not everything is as it seems at Wiggenstaff’s.

Graduation’s player characters didn’t have the same emotional complexity as the player characters in Amnesty–the podcast’s second campaign, between Balance and Graduation–but they did achieve something that the Amnesty crew wasn’t able to. The Amnesty characters didn’t have that “dicking around” kind of comradery that was pivotal to The Balance Crew’s dynamic (AKA “Tres Horny Bois,” because a lot of Balance’s creative decisions were made under the assumption that this story wasn’t going to be adapted two times). The Pine Guard of Amnesty didn’t even meet until the third episode of the campaign, and didn’t spend a lot of time developing their dynamic. Amnesty did have a lot of that trademark McElroy banter, but the majority of it was over the table. 

In the first scene of Graduation, Travis has each of the players introduce their characters, puts them all in a dorm, and lets it play out. Even without a specific goal, letting the characters play off of each other helped naturally develop character traits and running jokes. The party dynamic is foundational to any actual play show. Throughout the campaign, he made sure to keep the party together and made sure to take a step back and just let the boys hang out. This is pivotal to forming running jokes, creating a party dynamic, and making the characters genuinely feel like friends. 

A lot of new mechanics were introduced in the beginning of the campaign, such as blame taking, accounting, equipment being leased out from the school, and other new homebrew ways to approach a familiar game. After being introduced, however, they didn’t really come up in the main game. The players had trouble keeping track of these rules and Travis kept forgetting to enforce them. This sounds like a critique, but the campaign would have been a lot worse if Travis forced everyone to stop everything and roll for financial damages or whatever. He recognized that these new mechanics weren’t working and dropped them.

It’s okay not to get caught up in the weeds of the game you are playing so long as the show itself doesn’t suffer. Some shows are known to be rules crunchy (such as Critical Role and Not Another D&D Podcast) while other shows tend to use the rules of the game they’re playing as a loose framework to tell a fun story (Any fan of TAZ needs to listen to Rude Tales of Magic), with plenty of other shows falling somewhere in between. Any approach is fine so long as you make sure everyone on the show is on the same page. TAZ has never hung its hat on being the most rules focused show, so as long as the rules get bent for the benefit of the show, it’s alright. 

There was a moment in the behind-the-scene episode The The Adventure Zone Zone (or TTAZZ for short) following Amnesty where Griffin talked about how he had so much planned for various different NPCs, only to realize that he had over planned things before finding natural ways to introduce these aspects to the players. For example, there was a romantic subplot between Bigfoot and the FBI agent sent to investigate him that was never really developed because the players didn’t really engage with the FBI agent. 

I remember this because, minutes later, when Travis was talking about the prep he was doing for Graduation, he said he had already made 25 NPCs that could be played as full characters at any point. Welp. 

This is a critique that a lot of fans had in regards to the campaign, as well as the huge lore dump at the beginning of the series. If you want to read more about fan reactions to Graduation as well as the McElroy’s current cultural spot, I’d like to direct you to this great article by Vice’s Gita Jackson, Everyone Loves the McElroys, So Why Is Everyone Mad at the McElroys? It’s refreshing (and, after looking at a few other articles written by folks who might be a little too into them, needed) to have someone who isn’t a fan of theirs report on them. 

From my point of view as someone who listens to an irresponsible amount of actual play, it wasn’t actually the lore dump that bothered me or the mob of NPCs. I have stood on this website and screamed to the uncaring void about how great shows like Friends At The Table are, and that show has some 3+ hour episodes about worldbuilding alone. What bothered me about it was that it seemed like Travis didn’t really work with the players to get them invested in this world he had made. Even toward the end of the campaign, there were moments where the player characters were struggling to find reasons to care. 

Balance had a bit of a “putting tracks in front of you as you went” kind of vibe to world building, while Amnesty was literally set in a magical version of the real world, so they avoided these pitfalls. I like Graduation’s setting, I just wish it had been portioned out a little better, or that the rest of the cast had a hand in building it so that they too could get invested. 

On one hand, once the clout of NPCs was acknowledged, Travis did spend time developing specific characters that caught the players interest. For example, to reference Jackson’s article, Rainer the cheerful necromancer in a fantasy wheelchair was introduced in a bit of an “after school special” way, but got far more development as the series went on and wound up being one of the more rounded NPCs. On the other hand, this clout of NPCs does mean that there is one teacher whose only characteristic is “being married to a teacher who is also a man” which just comes off as preformative. 

Read more: How Friends At The Table Spreads Around Authorship

I don’t want to just list out every representation misstep at the risk of this just becoming microaggression CinemaSins, but all of these mistakes are ones that could have been solved with a sensitivity consultant. Even with the best intentions, four white straight cis men from West Virgina won’t be able to pick up on everything on their own. As a white straight cis man myself, there were some things that went over my head until they were pointed out to me (such as the “batter ram” example for Jackson’s piece, which, in hindsight, Yikes.) 

To pull a quote the McElroy team gave Vice, “[Having a diversity consultant] isn’t exactly feasible, because tabletop games are all about improvisation, and don’t necessarily have the time to interrogate story decisions that are made on the fly.” It is actually very feasible, as Quest Friend’s Kyle Decker outlines out a twitter thread responding to this piece:

Graduation fell into a trap of wanting to find a neat way to end a story that was becoming more and more complicated. There were various different plot threads dangling around as the campaign hurtled toward an ending, leaving Travis to make hard calls about how to wrap things up. This was the right call, as Graduation had a good number of pre-established things the players didn’t really explore or get invested in. 

This did get brought up in the Graduation episode of the behind-the-scenes “The The Adventure Zone Zone” episode, where Griffin and Travis discuss how, with Amnesty and Graduation, they both ran their full games like it was the end of Balance. As they mention, the reason the games felt a little weird is that that energy wasn’t necessarily earned. In order to work at an end-of-campaign emotional level, you need to put in the footwork of a full campaign. 

There is this weird dissonance between how the McElroys and their fandom think about TAZ and what it actually is. TAZ is one of the biggest actual play shows out there. They have sold out theaters, written three and counting New York Times best selling graphic novels and have a TV adaptation potentially in the works. However, a lot of these mistakes are ones that first time actual play shows tend to make. 

If The Adventure Zone wants to keep being just a show about a family playing games and telling stories together, they need to be willing to broaden themselves out. Balance was great, but I think it was great in a lightning in a bottle kind of way. Other shows try to do the same things Balance did, and fall directly into the traps they managed to blow through. Griffin and Travis both fell into those same traps with Amnesty and Graduation. If they just keep hitting the beats of Balance again, it’s eventually going to get stale. 

More than this, the McElroys need to recognize that they are no longer the scrappy underdogs they used to be. They’re at the top of the actual play food chain and need to treat their show, themselves, and their audience as such. I’m not making presumptions about the resources they have at their disposal, but they should be able to easily accomplish what other, less successful actual play shows make happen (sensitivity consultants, transcripts, etc.) 

I still like The Adventure Zone. I’m excited to see what the next campaign looks like and I hope they keep trying to do better. I’d even be interested to see Travis take the reins as the GM again somewhere down the line, taking into account any lessons he picked up with Graduation under his belt.  The show just needs to decide what it is. If or when it does, it might not still be the kind of show you like. If you only liked Balance, or Amnesty, or ever Graduation, I encourage you to check out other actual play shows. You could isolate down a specific thing you liked about these campaigns, and I can guarantee that there is a steller actual play show out there that goes all in on that idea. 

In the TTAZZ following the end of Graduation, the cast actually agreed with several of the critiques brought up by the fandom and shined a light on how they made those creative mistakes. Hopefully they will take this experience into account as they move on to their next campaign. 

To set up the setting of their next campaign, they’re taking a page from Friend’s At The Table’s book and playing The Quiet Year, an amazing map building game by Avery Alder. They also forgot to credit Alder, say where to buy the game, and mispronounced the game. They did add a correction in the show notes after releasing the episode, but the mistake is still in the audio. 

So should you listen to The Adventure Zone Graduation? Sure, if you want to. It’s not the best actual play show out there, but it’s far from the worst. 

It’s mostly just fine. 

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