I don’t mention it much, but other streaming platforms are going to be offering a lot of big opportunities for tabletop streams. Right now, Twitch rules the roost, but the co-streaming capabilities and Microsoft Money (TM) makes Mixer a very real possibility for future tabletop streams. This is especially true as Microsoft is in process of sponsoring smaller genres to come to their platform. Having a single stream view of the players, GM screen/notes, map, and maybe monster stat blocks would be so insanely awesome.

It’s funny, a few years ago I would have said that I couldn’t really grasp the appeal of a radio play. Now I listen to them on the regular – they just happen to be mostly improvised, with a side order of game mechanics, and with a LOT more speaking characters in any one encounter than you’d see in most radio plays.

Another big development, that I’ve seen “in the wild” in How We Roll and In the Birdcage, is NPC/co-GM guest stars. One of the classic problems of single-GM/many-players is that it’s incredibly hard for the PCs, collectively, to talk to more than one NPC at a time, and basically impossible for two NPCs to talk to each other. HWR often has the players pick up low-impact NPC roles in scenes, so that the Keeper can continue narration and primary NPC contact while the supporting NPC provides color. What I think we’ll see is something closer to one mechanics GM and one character GM. (The mechanics GM also plays characters; the character GM just mostly doesn’t have to handle mechanics.) This supports a wider variety of situations, and you might see the character GM pick up some producer-like tasks – especially responding to fans in the chat channel – that keep things moving.