Have You Seen? – Standard Action

Sometimes, as I wander around the internet, I find things that are amusing or interesting or funny. Occasionally those things are related to gaming and gamers. This is one of those things. Standard Action, like The Guild before it, is about gamers and the games they play. But, unlike The Guild, this is about Table Top Role Playing Games. It stars a cast of Canadian actors all bringing to life the characters they’ve played and sets them on one more epic quest.

Shot in and around Vancouver, Standard Action features your not so typical roster of adventurers. There’s the Barbarian Elf with relationship issues. A Bard who makes epic speeches with the option to run away. A Wizard who is more concerned with how things look than he is with actual wizarding, and a Druid with a penchant for fire spells to name just a few. If we were introduced to these characters all at once we’d probably be overwhelmed and switch off. Instead, though, we get introduced to them by ones and twos and it isn’t until around episode 4 that they all join up to go adventuring together.

The writing and acting are just as they should be for a good web series. Dialog is tight and doesn’t wander into the usual over explanations that some web series get into. The acting is a cut above the usual and so far no one seems to have read their lines a mere ten minutes ago or, worse yet, be reading them right now. These guys are into their characters and seem to understand them from the inside out. As such, it allows for a subtlety of humor that might otherwise be lost with people just playing a part.

It travels, initially, at a leisurely pace, giving you time to sort of get used to the characters as they are introduced. This is no bad thing. Often a new web series is so intent on making an impression that they dive right in and you never quite get used to the characters and story that are being presented. Fortunately, Joanna Gaskell, the series writer/actor/producer, decided to do things differently and let us grow with the characters so that, by the time they meet up in the Tavern, you feel as if you know how they are going to react and interact with one another.

Standard Action’s 13 episodes are available on YouTube as well as their blog and should keep you entertained and laughing for quite a while.

Our thanks to Topless Robot for bringing it to our attention.