My Imaginary Friends Are Going to Space

Because I have no friends, I spend a significant portion of my free time with Rocket Beans TV—a Hamburg-based gaming and pop culture streaming operation that has, over years of watching, become something uncomfortably close to company. I understand that this is parasocial and probably reveals something about me. I’ve chosen to be fine with it.

The thing I keep coming back to most compulsively is their pen-and-paper RPG series. Eddy, Nils, Simon, and Budi—the core group—sit around a table while Hauke runs the sessions, and what comes out is genuinely more entertaining than most things I seek out with actual intention. They’ve been survivors of a zombie apocalypse, they’ve been Vikings, they’ve investigated murders in a decrepit country estate. The scenarios change. The dynamic doesn’t. That consistency is the whole appeal.

The new campaign is Dysnomia, set in the future, in space, where the party now consists of an aging scientist who seems to have made several large mistakes in his past, a pilot with the opposite problem—too little self-doubt relative to her actual record—something that is functionally a Justin Bieber impression somehow promoted to a character with a full backstory, and an artificial intelligence whose interior life is presumably still being determined by dice rolls. Hauke, who has been building whatever they’re about to walk into, is smiling in a way I’ve learned to treat as a warning.

There’s a quality that tabletop produces when it’s going well—an improvisational commitment, people saying yes to impossible things in real time and meaning it—that nothing else quite replicates. Rocket Beans hits it more reliably than anything else I’ve watched in this format, which is either a testament to how good they are or an honest accounting of how much of my time has gone into finding this out. Probably both.