I am a bit old, and never got why so many people watch “actual play”. I’ve done it once or twice to get the mechanic of a game, but found the experience more technical/boring than fun.
I get having a guest or candidate player watching an in person to see how rpg work, or whether they click with the group, but somehow watching video of strangers playing RPG doesn’t sounds fun to me. But I might miss something considering how popular these actual plays are
The only actual play I’ve ever actually found myself enjoying is oxventure, they’re not the best example of a proper actual play though since they usually don’t follow the rules too closely and are more of a fantasy improv group vaguely using 5e rules, sometimes blades in the dark or SWADE Deadlands.
Although I’ve only started listening fairly recently and haven’t gotten up to the Deadlands stuff yet.
Actual Plays can introduce you to new styles of playing and DMing and improve your skills at the table. For example many people started running planescape campaigns due to Rolling With Difficulty. Before RWD, lots of people had no idea that D&D has spaceships and what is essentially a sci-fi setting. If you’re a GM who wants to get better at running the game, then obviously my first recommendation is Matt Colville’s videos, but try listening to a few different actual plays and learning from the styles of different GMs. Maybe you hate the way Matt Mercer runs the game, but you really like how Brennan Lee Mulligan does it. Maybe you didn’t know it was possible to run the game in a different way than how Matt Mercer does it. If you don’t have three decades of experience playing with diverse tables, then actual plays provide a substitute for that experience.
I’m young and although I understand intellectually what people get out of it, I share your sentiment. I can find people telling stories of their fun campaign online, in text, which is faster for me to consume than listening to people talk. These stories do usually just tell the story and scrub out the “because X happened, we take out Y game mechanic and this is how it works”, so I suppose it makes sense to watch a playthrough to get mechanic exposure.
But I just really… don’t have the patience for audio and video when I can usually get what I want by reading a lot faster. I also do not need to make special accommodations to make others happy to read. No dragging headphones with me to avoid bothering the general public, and I keep more awareness of my surroundings when I can hear what is going on.
I share the philosophy of “why watch others do Fun Thing You Enjoy when you could just do Fun Thing You Enjoy yourself?”
I figure I’ll just leave all these videos up for everyone to enjoy. As long as I do not view myself as some superior human being for the very, very elite trait of simply not sharing this interest, it’s perfectly okay for me to not enjoy watching others play TTRPG. People are allowed to find things boring.
viva la dirt league just has a funny jovial atmosphere if that counts. To bad about the game system they use but thats life.
I enjoyed watching Harmonquest, the episodes of which have parts video of the table and parts animated story. It’s a comedy show, for the most part, which genre appeals to me. Past, that, I enjoy a good actual play podcast, sans video, like BomBARDed or NaDDPod, both of which are also comedic stories.
Just watching a group play a game can indeed be boring. But if that game is just a format for the genre of entertainment you already enjoy, that’s the appeal.