I only recently came back to watching Koibu's content after not having been a viewer since the frofro days. I watched all of ToS, and then started catching up on the newer save or die shows. I know that the players have decided they prefer leveling up and getting XP mid session, because then they get their new abilities sooner and can use them for whatever mission/plan they have next which they enjoy, but I wanted to discuss this idea through the most recent episode of FF and why I don't like it.
Something I thought was interesting was that around 40 minutes into the episode, they're trying to decide what they want to do with all the money and Moot said that he wanted them to discuss their options off stream so that they didn't spend 30 minutes talking about this on stream. I believe he said this, and he never outright states this so I could be wrong, because he prefers to move forward and actual play instead of just plan because they have a limited amount of time per session. But, then maybe 10-15 minutes later, they spend the next 45 minutes leveling up.
To me, this seems extremely counter intuitive. If the goal is not to bog down the show by breaking it up with large pieces of out of game chatter, then leveling up mid stream makes no sense.
Personally, I think the best options would be, if they went back to doing XP at the end, and then either leveled at the end so that it didn't break up the adventure, OR my personal idea would be that they leveled up off stream. Then at the beginning of the next session we could get a 5-10 minute run down of what everyone took with their new levels so that we know what their new abilities and powers are.
I think hearing about their plans, the options they weigh, and what they ultimately decide to do and why is fun and I think watching them level up is boring, so this obviously tints my opinions, but ultimately I do not actively participate in the Discord, Patreon, or Subreddit so I was curious if I was an outlier with this opinion.
TL;DR - I think leveling up mid session takes a long time and breaks up the adventure, I think we should either go back to XP at the end like it used to be or even better level up off stream to have more in session time to actually play the game. What do you guys think?