Roll for Distraction is a TTRPG actual play show featuring six IRL friends who decided to start documenting their escapades during the covid pandemic, when they were forced to play remotely. While the adventures began with Dungeons & Dragons, the show was completely reformatted after the OGL fiasco. Rather than continuing their D&D games, the show shifted its focus to instead be about discovering what else is out there, with short campaigns of about 10 episodes each.
They started with a Cyberpunk RED campaign titled The Family Jewels, which followed a family planning a heist against their greedy corpo grandfather. Then they played a Lancer campaign titled The Lost Colony, which was a runaway success that got their YouTube channel from under 300 subscribers to over 1000 in about a month. Next, they played a game of Monster of the Week titled The Devil You Know, which followed college students in New Jersey hunting (and being hunted by) the Jersey Devil. Then they played Salvage Union, in a campaign called Starfall, which is the story of post-apocalyptic mech drivers, scouring an irradiated wasteland for a lost city. Most recently, they playied Honor + Intrigue, in a campaign titled The Last Hope, which followed a pirate crew in the twilight of their golden age. Now, they're playing Mothership, in a campaign titled Proxy Error, which uses sci-fi hyperbole to warn about the dangers of generative AI.
Seasons run for around 10 episodes, and each episode is edited to be about 1 hour in length, so the time investment is comparable to a season of a typical streaming show. Episodes come out every other Friday at 10:00 AM EST, on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Podbean. YouTube members can gain access to new episodes 24 hours early. The show’s guiding mantra is “unprofessional gameplay, presented professionally”, meaning that while we keep all the puns, toilet humor, and distractions in the edit, we still make sure to create a pleasant audio-visual experience and tell a good story. The show is produced and edited by one-man-band Alex Vigna, who is also a player or GM on the show depending on the season.
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If you are a TTRPG developer or publisher, and would like your game featured on the show, please reach out via the contact email below.