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Interview with Tad Leckman
34 Plays4 months ago
In this special episode of Tabletop Tune Up, Mark and Ben sit down with Tad Leckman, a seasoned learning professional with experience at Industrial Light and Magic, Activision-Blizzard, and as a game design instructor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Tad shares his insights on leading creative teams in both games and movies and how those skills overlap with the role of a gamemaster. We discuss the art of crafting compelling tutorial plays, explore the nuances of different RPG genres and gameplay styles, and dive into the time and creativity demands of various genres. Tad also recommends books and modules that showcase brilliant game design. Tune in for an inspiring conversation that will inspire you to put some new books on your shelf and try some new ideas with your players.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Swanson Pyramid of Greatness
00:00:00
Speaker
Under my tutelage, you will grow from boys into men. From men into gladiators. And from gladiators into swansons! Behold! The Swanson Pyramid of Greatness.
00:00:14
Speaker
Capitalism, God's way of determining who is smart and who is poor. Crying, acceptable at funerals and the Grand Canyon. Rage, poise, property rights. Fish for sport only, not for meat. Fish meat is practically a vegetable. Haircuts, there are three acceptable haircuts. High and tight, crew cut, buzz cut. Are the scissors perfect?
00:00:50
Speaker
I'll show you how it's done.
00:00:59
Speaker
Oh, boy, are we excited for what's coming up today, friends? Class is in session.
Meet Ted Lechman: From Industrial Light & Magic to Activision Blizzard
00:01:04
Speaker
Today, we are interviewing a friend of our show, Ted Lechman. He is a learning professional whose career includes stints at amazing places like Industrial Light and Magic. These are the special effects house that George Lucas made for Star Wars. He's also worked at Activision Blizzard and has done some fascinating stuff over there in their cinematics department.
00:01:26
Speaker
And in general, he's just been a lovely guy. So lovely, in fact, at the University of California in Santa Cruz has him teaching classes on game design, friends classes in session. Welcome, Ted. Thank you for having me. It's exciting to be here.
00:01:41
Speaker
Hey, Tad. ah Question, do you have a pyramid? Does Tad have his own pyramid of greatness? you i I don't. ah but By the way, I appreciate being led in by Ron Swanson. That's a huge honor, which I hope to be able to live up to. We we believe in you. I think I do have some cones of Dunshire somewhere here if I don't have a pyramid. When talking about game design, howy how can you leave out the cones of Dunshire?
00:02:09
Speaker
it's ah It's a clip I always play for my students. I think it's great. I actually just watched that yesterday. so The look of just sudden nerd confidence on his face when Ben Wyatt discovers, oh yes, yes, I have won this game.
00:02:28
Speaker
Definitely a topic adjacent to tabletop role-playing games for sure. Of course. Yes. Tad, we are so delighted to have you here and I gotta say when I was looking at your resume, i ah you and I have connected before, I was looking at all the things we could possibly touch on in our conversation. It felt like such a grab bag of really cool stuff because You've interacted with folks sort of deep in the kind of the nerd realms of places like game companies and special effects houses. At the same time, you're also like a GM. You're somebody who runs games and teaches game design. But I wanted to start here. You are somebody who, in these different roles, has led teams of
Creative Leadership in Workplaces and Games
00:03:08
Speaker
creatives. And I wanted to ask you, first of all, do you see any overlap between leading creatives in those places and then leading a creative group of players in the game?
00:03:17
Speaker
So that could be a subject for its own whole episode or series of episodes because the answer is yes. And I would not be the first person to note those similarities. um And I think the adjacent topic is being a game master and how that relates to being a manager of teams and a leader of teams. But as far as like specifically like creative teams, um there really is an analog, a direct analog when I'm so I'm a sometimes we call ourselves last gamers, sometimes we call ourselves Riff and Winkles where okay,
00:03:52
Speaker
I played D and&D and Gamma World and Top Secret in junior high and high school and then stopped playing through college and for many, many years. um Still was buying books, just not playing. um And then when I was working at Riot Games, I got pulled back in.
00:04:12
Speaker
by some folks on the narrative team there, some of the artists there.
Ted's Return to Tabletop Gaming
00:04:16
Speaker
So my like reentry into the hobby about a decade ago um was at a table full of like not just like creatives, but like amazing creatives. Oh, that's fantastic. So fantasticssy a bunch of folks folks from the TV animation realm, storyboard artists, directors, writers, they were bringing even an another level of kind of like treating the way that we played the game like they would work kind of in a writer's room or in a story department. That must have been some incredible whiplash, not just coming back to the hobby after that kind of break and all of the systems have changed and everything's kind of updated in that way, but also playing with those kind of folks is very little, I expect, like playing with the guys you played with in grade school and high school.
00:04:59
Speaker
um Yes and no, because they were nerds and are, I'm still game with them, they are nerds at the core and everything is kind of informed by when we learn to play or try to play D and&D you know as kids with probably the worst version of the rules as far as being comprehensible to young people.
00:05:24
Speaker
So most of us, we realized we're kind of making things up. And it ah and the more people I talked to who started playing D and&D in the earliest days, we all realized, like we all made it up. Like we enjoyed the artwork and we used some of the tables and some of the numbers, but basically we were just using it as the roughest framework for just playing pretend. Yeah, we were homebrewing like for sure everything we didn't know what that was but we were doing it you had to there were so many gaps in the rules and questions that would come out that weren't in the books and or they were in the books but you couldn't find them because they weren't organized well yes
00:06:00
Speaker
So that spirit, Ben, was very much in evidence, even though these were all like story creatives. And what we all came to realize was, again, not a novel observation that a lot of folks who were in kind of leadership roles in the entertainment industry and create, like we all started with D and&D, like as a common thread through all of us. And It informed how we kind of work as creative people, like you said, on creative teams with folks who are collaborating. So it it is kind of like a circular thing that kind of eats itself, but it only works because they're so related.
00:06:37
Speaker
yeah Right. So in one sense, you've got kind of a common language where you guys all have some of those expectations that were said early. um In another sense, though, you're meeting new people, you're sitting down in ah in a very different kind of context. So um are creatives different in some sense, people that are doing writing and directing and those kinds of things from what we're what the rest of us are doing in some ways? um I don't think so, because it gets down to like,
00:07:06
Speaker
finding out both as a player because I was a player in those early games before I had gotten back into being a GM as a player and as a GM like How do each of these people like to play? What are they getting out of this? What are the things they like doing? What are the things they don't like? Who are the people who will happily take notes and map? Like that's me. I am a compulsive note taker. So I was the person writing down all the NPC names and remembering things for everybody. Some people love to deal with inventory. Some people only like to do combat stuff and kind of check out for the rest of the game.
00:07:38
Speaker
So it's it's the same thing that happens at every table. You've got to figure out like who's who's into what part of this game. And then the challenge for the GM, just like it is for like a creative director and art director, is how do I use all those folks together, um use those different talents and different ways of approaching a problem um to kind of work together to make something that none of us could have made kind of on our own?
00:08:03
Speaker
Ted, you've shared some of your your syllabus on game design, and I want to talk a little bit about some of the things we kind of saw in there.
Teaching Game Design with Tutorials and Intro Modules
00:08:10
Speaker
Tell us a little bit about tutorial play and those intro modules you get. How do you make them kind of compelling, fun, and how do you integrate those into, let's say you had an overall campaign you want to run, how do you seamlessly kind of integrate that into a game?
00:08:25
Speaker
Yeah, first of all, I still can't believe anyone pays me to teach tabletop role-playing game classes. That's insane. Like, I want that job. It is. Correct. i'm That's living the dream. I'm very lucky to be able to do that. But once that, you realize like, oh, I get to actually do this. I was like, oh, wait, how do I do this? Like, what? So I think directly to your um to your question mark, though,
00:08:50
Speaker
Part of that class, you know so I would usually sometimes have upwards of like 40 students in that class. And the first thing I would do is put out a survey like, what's your experience with tabletop role-playing games? And it would be all over the map. So I've been homebrew GMing my own world campaign since I was in third grade yeah to like, I have never played anything before.
00:09:12
Speaker
So there was usually a pretty decent chunk of the class who had never played tabletop role-play games at all. yeah um So part of the class had to be that tutorial, had to be that kind of like, okay, let me help you get on board with even just what this is so we can work together.
00:09:30
Speaker
and utilize your um unique vision as someone new to the hobby to kind of help us, like help inform what we're gonna make together in this class. But yeah, like we had to just mechanically run through some tutorials. So the first couple of times I taught the class, you know the the goal of the class very quickly at a high level was,
00:09:52
Speaker
We're going to work together to write some adventures for tabletop role-playing games. We're going to break into groups. Each group is going to write some adventure material for an adjacent part of the same world. And you're going to have to talk to each other to make sure that players like feel like these are connected, coherent, like different locations in the same place. so The first few times I taught it, we used D and&D because it was easy. 5E is very, very popular, as we all know. yeah Again, mechanically, I knew that I would have X number of students who had been a DM before and could help us DM and play test in class, sure which is another hurdle. if we could If we could go back for a moment, this thing where people hadn't played when they came into the class, I find fascinating. Ben, if you've always wanted to play it, there are people who have wanted to play this game for so long.
00:10:42
Speaker
how How can this not be a good way to kind of engage that? Is that what it is? is that Are these people that had always wanted to learn? Mark's absolutely right. There were folks who like had watched their housemates or their roommates in the dorm play. They had siblings or other family members to play, but they never really taken the dive. So I think there were definitely some people who were like, oh, here's a way with kind of a gentle on ramp.
00:11:03
Speaker
to do this, it is a weird way to look at like, oh, and by the way, you're going to be writing adventures. That's cool. But I think the other yeah the other piece of it, too, was it's a tabletop role playing game adventure design class in the middle of what is largely a video game curriculum. So that was attracting and a certain number of students who are like, you know what, I'd like to like hone in on some of the skills that aren't technical, that are kind of the more kind of like baseline skills for um putting together a compelling game that aren't Reliant on me knowing how to use unity ted you know it's funny you bring up that video game i actually think there's a lot of overlap in some of that a lot of times when i was running isa run like a weekly. Meetup group kind of to learn and teach players how to play dnd.
00:11:49
Speaker
And i I kind of always took it as the approach of the video game designer. I would think about the video games where they try to teach you how to use the controls, you know, like I'm trying to teach you the W, you know, ASD and here's how to crouch. I kind of treated it a lot like that where, you know, here's how to use the aid function, you know, here's how to assist your teammates. Here's how to roll a skill check. I kind of felt like video game design and that had a lot of commonality.
00:12:16
Speaker
They do and that's another thing that I learned very quickly was almost every game designer I've ever worked with also all started playing tabletop role-playing games and it's part of their life and it's a way that they kind of learn to love games to see those, all the mechanics exposed to us because it's just a book like you, there's no computer to run the program like you have to do it all manually. So I think a small tangent just back to kind of the tutorial question though Mark was There are, I found, and it's taken me a while to kind of figure this out. ive I play a lot of different systems. I like to investigate a lot of different game systems. So my even my home game, my my family game, we change games all the time. We'll go for a long stretch and then we'll switch. But there's almost always, on a regular basis, like, OK, we've got to learn this new system together.
00:13:06
Speaker
And I have kind of learned to embrace sort of the tutorial mentality of a video game in a couple of ways, including If I find a game has a a fairly like
Learning Through Game Tutorials
00:13:20
Speaker
crunchy, complicated combat system, by the way, my re-entry point to playing tabletop role-playing games with those friends from Riot was Pathfinder 1E. Oh, crunchy. ah Yeah, so. It stays crunchy in milk too. it
00:13:36
Speaker
It does. um Also, it was a it it was jumping into the deep end, for sure. Yeah. Running that game too is, wow. ah um if you did you Did you run it? or I didn't. so Well, I didn't at that point. I've since run a two-way game for my for my family, and even the more streamlined second edition of Pathfinder is still a very crunchy game. and we Actually, we were playing that one E game. And we've been playing for I think almost a year when 5E came out. And we switched our campaign in the middle of the campaign from Pathfinder to 5E. And that was its own challenge. Yes, exactly. Trying to figure out analogues to classes.
00:14:22
Speaker
But with those systems that have you know complicated or even just very different than like D&D-style combat, I'm kind of OK with, like hey, we're going to do session zero to make our characters and into our normal session zero stuff. But let's do like a session 0.5. Oh, I like that. And we're just going to run some combat.
00:14:44
Speaker
yeah Like out of narrative, out of context, let's just, I will throw some monsters at you and we will learn together how to run combat. And it is 100% tutorial. It is not connected to our game in any way. We'll basically road test these characters. yeah and And sometimes it's like, ooh, yeah. I thought this was a class I wanted to play. I do not like playing this. So you give a chance to like yeah test it out before you get, you know,
00:15:13
Speaker
In the middle of the United States, on your cross-country drive, you realize maybe a Fiero is not the car that you wanted to be driving. That happens. And you're right. That can happen. Players can all of a sudden realize, hey, I don't really like playing a warlock. Or what do I do now? Yeah. Or I don't even just like this build. These are bad spells. I should not have chosen these spells. These are bad spells.
00:15:39
Speaker
I'm fascinated by the sort of jumping around that you're
Diverse Game Genres: Sci-Fi, Mystery, and Horror
00:15:42
Speaker
describing too. And one of the things we noticed in your syllabus is that one of the topics you cover is just different genres of games. And so one of the things Mark and I were talking about in the prep for this episode is we're we're starting to kind of carve out like, okay, let's talk about genres. Let's ask him, let's ask Ted about different genres. And then we kind of realized that like, Even within genres, you have sub-genres, which kind of cross-cut you know across these genre boundaries. like With ah science fiction, for example, you've got Star Wars, which is very fantasy-esque, but then you've also got like ah there's like the Expanse role-playing game, or Traveler, these ones that are a lot more hard sci-fi.
00:16:17
Speaker
So can you talk a little bit about what are some genres or styles that you find are really demanding in terms of time or creativity? Part of the thing we're curious about is how we fit these things together with our players preferences and our own tastes.
00:16:31
Speaker
it's It's an interesting thought. And science fiction is a really good example, Ben, because like you said, it is it is kind of like the ice cream base that you can add lots of different toppings to. And it's usually going to be satisfying, but it can receive lots of things really well. so And you'll notice in my syllabus, like we did survival horror one year. And then this past summer when I taught it, we did kind of post-apocalyptic uh sci-fi and they're similar but very different this is a probably ah another topic that we can think about too is
00:17:07
Speaker
those genres and some of those genres have their own system. You mentioned Traveler. There's an Expanse RPG of its own rule set. There's a ah Serenity Firefly rule set that are, you know, you would hope the mechanics are well suited to that type of gameplay and that kind of storytelling for that genre. There are some limitations too. Like for class, for survival horror, we use the Mothership RPG, which is a nice indie, very rules light, easy to pick up game.
00:17:37
Speaker
That's great, writing that down. We'll have to go check that out. It's very good, but it has a lot of white space in the rules for you to fill in as a game master. After that, I started playing the Alien RPG, which is same genre, like it's survival horror, but it's a very different system. It's a dice pool system. It uses the year zero engine that Free League uses for a lot of their games, but survival horror is really hard to sustain for a really long campaign. It is much well suited better better suited to like a one or two session where are you don't really expect that the characters are really gonna survive, or if they do, they're gonna be horribly broken. It's different than the kind of heroic fantasy that we're used to from from D and&D in particular. Yeah, the thrill's gonna be shorter and maybe a little bit more visceral, but it's it's not meant to last, really. It's supposed to be a good, fun, yeah thrilling game.
00:18:28
Speaker
Another kind of bolt-on genre is mystery, like solving mysteries. um And that's another one where I was like, oh, yeah, but but we my family played Vaison, which is another free league game that is it's definitely fantasy. It is definitely kind of specifically Scandinavian 18th century fantasy, but it's mystery-based, but the system isn't necessarily like designed for solving mysteries, and I found it really hard. like Of all the genres that that I might GM or even, I think it'd be easier as a player, mystery's really hard. There were so many things for me to keep track of as the GM. like Wait, did they get that clue? Okay, there's another way they can get that clue.
00:19:14
Speaker
That's funny, Ted, because when Ben and I were kind of talking about it, Mystery was the one I said, is you have to have a real good map of what happened. And you got that's got to be incredibly solid, because the entire game is built around that. And if, yeah like for me, that's not a strength I have, is writing that solid structure. That scaffolding is, in my building, that scaffolding is not very good.
00:19:38
Speaker
even and beyond that, like you need to have that scaffolding, you need to know all the details of what happened. It also means that those are games that have to be a little bit more prescriptive and a little bit more structured and don't have as much wiggle room for as much um kind of deviation from the central story. So they're a little more constricted as well. If you're playing Clue, you got to stay in the house. Yeah, they're yeah they're all bottle episodes. Essentially, a mystery is there There are a few systems that I think that I haven't investigated, but I think do it well. um Gumshoe is a system that was specifically built for mysteries. And there's a teenage version called Bubble Gumshoe, which I love.
00:20:18
Speaker
What makes them well suited for that? Is it is it maybe a skill system or what what is it about it? Again, having not played a gumshoe system yet, but the basic premise is that you you have a vague idea of what the mystery is and what all the clues are, but you really do let it emerge through gameplay as well. so you're not It does actually give more like space for that. The other one that's similar is Brindlewood Bay.
00:20:44
Speaker
which is kind of a murder-she-wrote RPG about little old ladies solving mysteries in New England. Oh, by the way, sounds there might be some eldritch horror happening in town because we are in New England. um we yeah so it's Here's the thing though, we all know in murder, she wrote that she was actually the murderer and and she just travels around pinning the blames for her crimes on hapless people.
00:21:11
Speaker
That's her skill. Her skill is building is framing people. That's right. um But it's it leans into, I think there's a system like Monster of the Week as well, leans into that like encapsulated, non-serialized storytelling that's like, this week we're fighting this monster on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And yes, there may be some threads running through that go through all the seasons. But this see This episode is about this. This episode is about this. So they they're not trying to make that genre into something that it's not and leaning into it even just structurally for gameplay.
Playing in Established IP Universes
00:21:48
Speaker
So I think mystery and horror are probably the two that are the kind of most constrained just by the kind of conventions of those genres.
00:21:57
Speaker
Maybe I haven't really run mystery games, but particularly with horror, the players want to be there. So that constrainment does not feel awkward at all. Yes. Because no if they're buying into a horror game, they want to be there. And I think that's even doubly so of like, if you sign up to play an alien role-playing game, yeah like you know what you're in for. it's ah It's another problem though, because pretty much everybody understands the mystery the central mystery of the alien game, which is like, oh, you see a leathery object that opens up at the top like a flower. like The players have so much more knowledge than the characters do. And it's real it's a real test of like what't you go take a look mark managing those the knowledge base difference, the delta between you and your character. Yeah.
00:22:45
Speaker
um It's it it's but I think that's true for all like you know, we can go one step beyond genre, which is specific like IP is in specific already imagined worlds that you're dipping into like the Expans and Star Wars and Tolkien and there are benefits of that because you've got a shorthand you can use with your players and it's true of any genre, but especially once you get into license genres like okay,
00:23:12
Speaker
you can just say the word Shire and everybody has an image, presumably, of what comes to mind. So you can you can shortcut it, but it's also, they have some expectations that you have to make a decision. Am I going to roll with these expectations or are we gonna try and subvert these expectations somehow, which is. Do you accept that job at the Weyland Yatani Corporation? Do you? Right. Maybe. By the way,
00:23:40
Speaker
Speaking of which, I just have to do a mini plug here. There's a product called Breach of Contract yeah that's written for mothership, as we described. But speaking of, do you take that job with Weyland Yutani? This is literally a pad of contracts, science fiction contracts,
00:23:58
Speaker
that was written by a contract lawyer who played mothership and loves that kind of anti-corporate sci-fi survival horror. So they're literally contracts that you can hand to your players that are kind of written in world. I love props. They're amazing. They're such good props. Sucker for props. so i am I am too. And a contract is a kind of ah the perfect the perfect prop for that genre.
00:24:27
Speaker
Finally, those those ah games lawyers are put to use. Correct. That's great. Oh my gosh. Really fascinating discussion about genres. I think what I'm hearing from you is that in addition to sort of genre, for example, science fiction, sub-genre, which could be survival horror, fantasy, or other things,
00:24:48
Speaker
the The real thing that seems to be making it easier or harder for you in that case is how well the system accommodates the tropes of that genre or sub-genre. It sounds like there's a ah lot to explore when it comes to what kind of systems you want. It sounds like systems that are really built for purpose yes are going to be really helpful in that respect.
Genre-Specific Systems and Their Impact
00:25:09
Speaker
ah Could you comment maybe just briefly on other systems that sort of aspire to being universal systems? Old examples would be like Genesis, sort of the version of FFG Star Wars system that does that. um Do you have thoughts about whether some of those attempts are more successful or less?
00:25:24
Speaker
Well, so speaking of FFG Star Wars, like it was interesting to me that they tried to make that into a universal system because it's the example I usually go to as far as like a system that's really well suited for the fantasy that you're trying to get at the table.
00:25:43
Speaker
because of that narrative dice pool system because of a non binary resolution mechanic where it's often fail but with some measure of success or succeed with a setback like that's Star Wars like Star Wars is all about failing forward Star Wars is all about like the ship won't go into hyperspace but there's an asteroid field nearby let's do that yeah so that system really is built for that it's not like oh you hit him or you didn't hit him and that was another game that i played with that same group from riot and
00:26:18
Speaker
my GM was great at on the fly being able to help us like interpret. like I tried to hit a stormtrooper and I miss a stormtrooper, but I shot the tarp over his head and it caught fire and fell on him. I was like, oh, this is that feels like a Star Wars thing to have happen. 100%. I think in general, gradiated resolution systems are more satisfying for it players and GMs who are ready to do that kind of improv to kind of interpret and adjudicate on the fly.
00:26:47
Speaker
But I don't know if it would work with every genre like i that specific system. ah Yeah, I think there's different types of game systems appeal to a certain type of maybe even style of play. You know, yo you can go right now on drive through RPG or troll through um Kickstarter and find tons of like five E variants doing sci-fi, five E variants doing cyberpunk, five E variants trying to basically make a system that everyone knows well, do something else, and I don't see the appeal of that.
00:27:23
Speaker
Maybe make success in those cases. Yeah, I will say one thing like for those gems out there um Sometimes the genre, you know the sub genre what do we call it the the style of play fantasy versus like you could have a Sci-fi game but if people like to play a fantasy game and you could maybe find a middle ground for the people who want to play sci-fi and fantasy Well Star Wars is a great middle ground. So if within those genres that people want to play a really crunchy, you know politically driven science fiction epic but some people want to play fans hey game of thrones kind of fits right in between there so yeah maybe find those subgenres within and styles of play they can exist and they're out there for sure and but i think also that you're pointing out something else mark that's super important which is making sure that you know what everyone's expecting like what everyone wants out of this game
00:28:16
Speaker
I think it's a heroic level move as a GM. If you've got someone who wants sci-fi and someone who wants fantasy, if you can come up with something that satisfies everything, like that is amazing. But usually you're trying to get some folks who are mostly aligned on like, okay, we want to play sci-fi.
00:28:33
Speaker
Do we want to play hard sci-fi? There's a spectrum. and One of the first things that we do in that class when I announce to the students at the beginning of the quarter, like, hey, this year we're going to be doing teenage mystery supernatural mystery solving in the 80s in Santa Cruz.
00:28:54
Speaker
then the first thing we gotta do is like, okay, let's work together to figure out what are the tropes? Like, what are the things that we need to see? Like, by the way, I don't know how many of you have seen Lost Boys, but we're gonna start by watching Lost Boys. And I'll literally just ride the whiteboard in front of the class and we'll make lists of like, what are the things you would expect to see out of survival horror? What are they what are the things we would see? And we'll make literally make myths of like, let's make a list of every post-apocalyptic movie we can think of and then we'll go through and we'll get all those and we're like, what do they have in common? What are some some common threads that then you can like start figuring out like, okay, is there a system that already exists to work on this? Is there a way we can adapt this? What are the things we like? Like what are those lists of tropes? Like we're we're all about Mad Max style automotive combat and traversing the the wasteland. Great.
00:29:50
Speaker
That's one style of play. Are we examining Ruin's ah kind of Last of Us style? like Even like the sub-genres have sub-genres. Exactly. Right, right, right.
00:30:09
Speaker
Well, that sound means we're on to our tune up segment. And as we always do with our interview guests, we flip the script and we ask you to help us tune up our game a bit. ah Mark, what do we have this time?
00:30:21
Speaker
I think this might be actually little maybe a little less of a tune up and more of a suggestion because um both for myself, for Ben and our audience, can you recommend for us any books or maybe some game modules that you think showcase fantastic design so that we can look at and glean knowledge from it and maybe run it and have a good time, but also learn from it.
00:30:47
Speaker
Yeah, as you probably have noted, I'm a big fan of ingesting lots of different things. okay And my classes force me to think more structurally about that. The thing I gravitated towards when we talked about this topic were I was thinking about those tutorial So those are like entry points into a game, and you can do them well, just like with video games, and you can do them poorly. I think D and&D in particular has had moments of doing it really, really well, and then moments of doing it poorly. And I had a group of folks I worked with at Activision Blizzard who wanted to play D and&D for the first time, and the Stormwreck Island box set had just come out. I was like, great, a new starter set,
00:31:29
Speaker
I can move away from Lost Mine in Phandelver and we'll try something new. I was going over it with the volunteer DMs and I was looking at the opening and the opening was interacting with a colony of kobolds that had about six or seven different NPCs who were kobolds. It was all about like relationships up. There was like the ah tiniest little taste of combat, but they went right right into like super heavy role playing. I was like, oh, that's tough. This is this is hard. Like that's hard mode. First time GMing. Were they yeah were the players supposed to settle like disputes with the Kobold Trade Federation and almost that level, almost Star Wars prequel level of
00:32:11
Speaker
I can just imagine somebody get frustrated and bored and and going to attack the cobalt now just cause they're bored. Exactly. So I do keep going back to, and I still keep recommending for folks, Lost Mine and Fandelver because that was the first kind of first starter set module that Wizards of the Coast made to introduce people to a new version of 5E. It is very well structured to start with a little bit of combat, yeah have a little mini dungeon to explore, do a little rescue mission,
00:32:43
Speaker
It's not super easy, but it's not super hard. There's a nice town. So it's it's one I keep going back to. Yeah, you're rolling dice right out the gate, and and which is always good.
00:32:54
Speaker
for sure. But there's also a few other ones that I like to recommend too. Let me see if I can make sure that I give it the right title. There's a an adventure that I kick started a few years back called the Hidden Halls of Hazacore. And it was written by Scott Fitzgerald Gray, who had written a lot a lot of adventures for D and&D over the years. And his intent was, I want to make a module to teach young people how to play D and&D. oh cool But it's great for anybody who's learning, especially if you're learning how to be a DM. And because he is a game designer who's worked within like professionally on D and&D, it's just structured incredibly well. It's got amazing hints throughout. It's got great like sidebars like, hey, this is why this is in the module right here. This is what your players are learning to do by being by me putting this here. It's a fantastic.
00:33:45
Speaker
So, and there are a few of those that are out there, but there's often they're they're not the one that's in the starter set for a certain game. So you kind of have to go and, you know, I talked about Vaison earlier. Vaison is another game that is, I think it's about to launch a starter set, but it didn't launch with one. So it just was the core rule book.
00:34:05
Speaker
with no starter adventure for a mystery game that was already challenging for most people to play. It was rough going. One thing that we haven't talked about is even just on the um just talking about like fantasy RPGs is the kind of rules light versus very crunchy.
Exploring OSR Games and Simplified Mechanics
00:34:22
Speaker
We talked about it kind of in passing with like Pathfinder on one end of like super crunch.
00:34:27
Speaker
5e a little bit further into the like easier to play but there is a whole nother realm on the far end of that um which is some of the old school renaissance old school revival osr games um the best example i have lately is shadow dark okay which uh kick started last year and made a lot of money the goal of this game was to make something that is a simplified version of 5e that feels like old school dnd so it's not super heroic fantasy it is somewhat dangerous fantasy don't get too attached to your character but it's really straightforward and has some really good introductory adventures but
00:35:11
Speaker
It is very non-prescriptive, like it is lots of random tables, it is lots of like let's find out what this adventure is by playing it together as opposed to read this box text out loud to your players.
00:35:24
Speaker
It sounds kind of fun for that the Game Master, to be honest with with me. When I look at it, it sounds appealing. It really is. And Mark, that's probably the thing that I've like grown the most as a GM in the past, I would say in the past like six years or so, is coming to that realization that it's actually more fun for me as a Game Master to be surprised by the players and be surprised by the direction the game's going than to present the novel that should have been a novel and should not be at the table with us playing. That was one of the early points we brought up in this podcast was that you know if you really have a problem with the player agency, you need to be writing a book. It's it's a really like straightforward way to explain it to people too. So Shadow Dark is, I've seen a couple of people online and I think this is probably true. A lot of people are touting Shadow Dark as actually
00:36:18
Speaker
the best introduction to D and&D for people and it's not D and&D. But it feels like D&D, and it's it's very easy to kind of get into as well. That's fantastic. I was going to say, the last thing I'll mention is we talked about Mothership, and Mothership recently kickstarted their first edition. The GM in Mothership is called the the Warden. Well, that sets a tone. It does. There's a Warden's Guide. It's called the Warden's Operation Manual, and it's just a little zine, ah easy to find PDF, not expensive.
00:36:49
Speaker
and This is real quick. This is the mothership. This is the sci-fi horror game. Is that right? Yes. It's got probably the best kind of general GM advice I've ever read in a game. It's so far beyond like the what's an RPG that's usually in the beginning of most core rule books.
00:37:07
Speaker
It's like, it's definitely leaning towards survival horror, science fiction, but a lot of it is just really great GM advice. I recommend it for people like, even if you don't want to play mothership, you may want to pick up the, the warden's operation manual just as a resource.
00:37:25
Speaker
Oh, yeah. It's not the last time I've picked up books just for GM resources. I mean, I think I used to populate like my library with Gerps. Never played it, but it had a lot of good little box text stuff that I remember. I've got Gerps back there. I've got Fate. I'll never play those. But there's stuff to learn in all of them. 100%. And we've learned a lot from you, though, Ted. So we super appreciate you being here with us.
00:37:49
Speaker
Ben, what are your thoughts? My thoughts are that if he's willing, we definitely have to have this guy back sometime. I'd love to. Because we're running at about 43 minutes of recording time right now. I don't know what the final edits are going to come out to be, but my goodness, I feel like we haven't even gotten halfway through. As you're ruminating on the things we've talked about, things that stick with you, I'll come back and we'll talk about in particular. I love that. Lovely.
00:38:15
Speaker
Tad, thank you so much. And for all of you out there, thanks for joining us for this episode. We will look forward to seeing you again next week. And until then, keep those dice rolling.