The tragedy of Dimension 20 is that half the episodes are really good because it’s just a bunch of funny people playing pretend with the occasional dice roll.
The other half are the combat episodes which are mostly just bad D&D.
Sometimes I ponder about this - how to make an actual play show about a game that has a lot of combat and make that combat interesting? I think it's in the same vein of "how do you make a boardgame session interesting?" and there are a couple solid answers that I have seen deployed(in regards to boardgames at least): a) Make it unique, make it something that the viewer can't experience on their own (a challenge, a unique inaccesable game, a silly premise etc) - Valefisk stuff is pretty good in that regard b) Make it so that hosts are very skilled entertainers, or *are* entertaining - No Rolls Barred for example
I continue to point at the original three podcast seasons of Acquisitions Inc. as the peak of D&D actual play in terms of being people actually playing the game. It's entertaining because they're funny people, but also because combat just is exciting! It doesn't matter that they have to look up rules sometimes or just have to do a bit of math every now and then, the game mechanics carry the stakes of the fight, and sometimes someone ends up in a big pool of acid and it feels like a real tragedy.
Sort of a Captain Obvious opinion, but personally believe that many of these D&D podcasts suffer because they're trying to make combat interesting to people (viewers/listeners) who don't enjoy combat. And the result is kinda "meh" for those who don't like combat, and kinda "meh" for people who do like combat. I don't know what would happen to the money-making metrics if they just committed to combat, but I know the combat would play out much better for those who like combat to begin with if they did.
