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Kids on Bikes Reviewed
238 Plays5 years ago
The whole gang sits down to discuss the Kids on Bikes one-shot, and talk about what’s next for Eberron Renewed!
This episode is brought to you by the generous donations of our amazing Show Sponsors: Laura Pickrahn, Darrin Katzska, Irene Viorritto, Ryan Royce, Darrell DeLaney, Jessica Smith, Charles Compton, Richard Cree, Nastasia Raulerson, The Kamm Family, David Scrams, Elizabeth Clark, Rebekah Miller, deviouspoptart, Eðvarð Arnór Sigurðsson, Michael Clark, and Dustin Troupe.
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Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgments
00:00:00
Speaker
The following episode is brought to you by the generous donations of Elizabeth Clark, Darryl Delaney, Ryan Royce, Darren Katska, Irene Villarito, Laura Pickron, Devious Poptart, Natasha Rallerson, Richard Cree, The Cam Family, Charles Compton, Dustin Troop, Rebecca Miller, Edvard Arnoff, Michael Clark, and David Scrams, along with all of our generous patrons.
00:00:32
Speaker
D20 radio, your game is roll.
00:00:53
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Eberron Renewed, an actual play tabletop role-playing game podcast. And this is Eberron Reviewed for our Kids on Bikes One-Shot.
Hosts Introduction and Banter
00:01:05
Speaker
I am Eric. I'm Philip. I'm Trevor. I'm Randy.
00:01:10
Speaker
I'm Jeff. Didn't won. Good job, guys. Even though we did not rehearse that. You can cut those pauses out, make it seem natural, right? Yeah. But leave in this. Well, duh. Yes, welcome to the review for our first interim one shot for the role playing game system, Kids on Bikes, that was GMed by Jeff. Woo! Yeah.
00:01:38
Speaker
Jeff did such a great job that I'm announcing here that I'm passing on full time DM duties to Jeff forever and ever. Amen. And I'm announcing the end of Eberron Renewed because I don't want to. Yeah, it was a nice little short one shot adventure featuring a cast of characters.
Character Introductions and Story Setup
00:02:03
Speaker
I guess we can go around and just my character's name was Duncan.
00:02:07
Speaker
I was Rick, says Phillip. I was Stephanie Stevenson. I don't remember what my kid's name was. Alex. Geez. Randy just, you know, once we're done, he's done. Alex Dozier.
00:02:23
Speaker
Yeah, Alex does. Yep, that sure was five minutes. But yeah, so we have some questions to get into for the episode. And short recap of what happened is
00:02:44
Speaker
Motley crew cast of characters at school one day. Rick the night before hadn't really slept that well due to some weird supernatural. Teenage angst.
00:03:00
Speaker
No, monsters. Yeah. Then our history teacher gave us a project and a camera to go out and shoot a documentary style video. And Rick being the nerd in our group decided it should be about the the rune in the on the hill outside of town. You know, we never finished that project.
00:03:27
Speaker
We didn't. That's true. We're going to need such a bad grade. You did. You had weeks. Got a lot of b-roll.
00:03:39
Speaker
So dumb. So, yeah, we were out shooting for it. Alex came along being Duncan's younger brother and Stephanie being his babysitter. So both people in charge of him after school had to be there.
Supernatural School Adventure
00:03:53
Speaker
And we saw a creepy looking woman standing on a hill staring at Rick and Alex looking at the rune. Rick puked. True.
00:04:05
Speaker
And then later on that night, Stephanie saw Brick, her the target of her affections being led into the woods by this creepy looking woman that was seen on the hill. In between that point, we learned from Rick's granddad that the name of the creature was the holder. Holdra. Holdra.
00:04:32
Speaker
Um, Jeff wasn't on headset to hear me not remember the name of his cool monster that he gave us. So yeah, the whole draw. Um,
00:04:41
Speaker
was leading brick into the woods, we gathered to go fight it, which Jeff masterfully prevented us from doing because we all would have died via the town sheriff and Stephanie's dad. Carl? Yeah, it was Carl. Yeah, I'm gonna jump in. Yes, you absolutely would have. The whole conceit of kids on bikes, and I'm gonna jump in and just talk a little bit about the system.
00:05:09
Speaker
The way the game works the thing that makes it unique is the whole conceit of it is You guys cannot Do this on your own you need that powered character for whatever reason
00:05:24
Speaker
So the reason that I did the brick thing, and I don't want to get too into the answer to the question, I can't remember. The reason I did the brick thing was because I realized Stephanie had no buy-in. Yeah. You know, Dustin saw her. Rick has. Duncan. Duncan, whoever the hell. Duncan saw her. Rick felt her. Alex is going to go because he's a kid and he's interested in it and Duncan's doing it and that's all that matters.
00:05:50
Speaker
So I threw this brick thing in just to give Stephanie some buy-in to want to, like, why else would she want to keep going down this path right now? Because I did not expect it to turn into, we ride at midnight. And I was like, oh, well, you don't though, guys. And that's, I tried not to exert too much of my will on you guys, but that was when I was like, okay, we've got to stop this because they've got to meet.
00:06:16
Speaker
At that point, I did not know what the power character was going to be. So I was like, they've got to meet this power character. Where can I get him? And that's how that all played
Narrative Challenges and Resolutions
00:06:23
Speaker
out. So, yes, you would have absolutely I mean, you might not have died. The holder doesn't necessarily kill everybody. But one of you would have been enslaved, one of the older two boys. And who knows what collateral damage there could have been to make that happen. So, yeah.
00:06:39
Speaker
I don't know. I felt Alex was pretty stout with that slingshot. Yeah, I think I can dunk a basketball one day, but it's just not going to happen. In fact, I'm getting further away every day at this point.
00:06:54
Speaker
So yeah, then we go back to the lodge to figure out that the Youth League are town's equivalent of the Boy Scouts. It has a secret society component to it as you get older. And we meet Franklin, our powered character with a wonderful voice that's not at all grating to listen to.
00:07:15
Speaker
I thought it was fine. Yeah. And then we go out to the woods. We concoct a plan involving iron based on Rick Phillips knowledge of nature spirits. And we we rescue brick and we send the Holdra into the ground. And we end up forming a D&D group.
00:07:43
Speaker
So yeah, just high level, that's what happened. So if- End of episode, I guess. We'll see you guys next week for our next one shot.
GMing Insights and Collaborative World-Building
00:07:52
Speaker
If that sounds interesting to you and you didn't listen to the arc up to this point, well, boy, do I have six episodes for you. I haven't watched the new Disney Pixar movie, Onward, but I feel like ours is pretty close. Yeah, I mean- Onward's kind of a kids on bikes thing.
00:08:11
Speaker
Onward has big kids on bikes energy. Yeah. For sure. Yeah, it's definitely big kids on bikes.
00:08:19
Speaker
Um, so yeah, we, uh, we have some questions from our wonderful patrons dropped in our discord. Uh, first question is for Jeff from Darren. Uh, and Darren asks, I think what we're all wondering, uh, how did you like GM and Jeff tempted to do it again? Or have you learned that it's not to your liking or not your thing? No, I had a blast. Here's what I think. I think that this lends itself.
00:08:42
Speaker
This type of game lends itself more to the kind of GMing that I think I'm capable of. I could not do what Eric did in the last campaign. I know Philip does regularly at his table and Randy has at his. I'm not gonna build a world by myself. I'm not gonna work out all this stuff beforehand and put people in it. That's not my skill set. It's not what I can do. I could never write a book.
00:09:09
Speaker
You know, I could never write a screenplay. But what I can do is sit with a bunch of people, let let a bunch of ideas spill out and build something from it. And I know there's there's Savage, I know even D&D, you can do the world building collaboratively.
00:09:28
Speaker
So I think it has to be this sort of system where I could say, OK, guys, tell me about this town. And then I get to make it work. Yeah, that's much more within my skill set. So I had a good time doing that. There was some like furious search engine action going on to try to stay as.
Improvisation and Game Mechanics
00:09:50
Speaker
The last thing I wanted to do was just make up crap about Norse mythology. Uh, I really didn't want to just be like, oh, sure. And there's a, there's a big, big, big wet dog. Like I didn't want to. So it got to a point where I was like, okay, um, Google let's, let's go. And it was while we were recording that all that happened. And that was a fun, that was a fun challenge for me. Um,
00:10:16
Speaker
The other thing that really helped was that I had three weeks between the first and second session to figure out how the hell I was going to let you guys win because I did not know how it was going to end. You know, certain things, the iron thing that Philip brought to the table went a long way towards, OK, we can actually avoid combat, which is the goal of of this whole
00:10:42
Speaker
this whole system. Like honestly, I actually, I grabbed this to show you, this is literally every rule for combat. I'm showing the guys, it's two pages, and by and large, all it is is what the difference in roles is. So one character roles, the attacker roles, the defender roles. If the defender gets plus one to plus four, they don't succeed. If the attacker gets plus one to plus four, they do.
00:11:10
Speaker
and how much control they have over the narrative. That's the whole fighting system, which is why, I mean, there was that one time when Eric decided to clock brick over the head and he rolled, he rolled ten or better. It literally says, and I think I said this in the thing, the defender is dead or quite literally dead. The bullet hits them between the eyes and nothing can save them. Or they're beaten so badly. Basically they're saying, but if you can't let them die, if you need them to live, or they're beaten so badly that only immediate medical attention can help. And I was like, oh,
00:11:39
Speaker
That's why you don't do a lot of combat in this game. Because some chucklehead put his brawn at 20 and was like, I'm gonna hit him, and then you're done. So yes, I enjoy GMing. I will be doing more of GMing in this system. Probably in some one shots for some patrons, definitely at GamerNationCon, when that happens down the road.
00:12:07
Speaker
Will I ever do a long campaign? No, no, no. Please, no. What? No. At least not for public consumption because I need a lot of freedom to screw up. Yeah. Okay. Well, question for Philip. How did Rick come to live with his granddad? Asks Laura.
00:12:29
Speaker
You know, I mean, I it's obviously it's been quite a long time since we recorded the first one at this point and quite a while since the first one recorded, which I think is the only one where that came up. But I think we sort of casually reference Rick's parents as working for the Forestry Service as Rangers. And I had it in my head that they had
00:12:52
Speaker
They had just sort of disappeared under some sort of mysterious circumstances. And that was part of Rick's Lord of the Rings fascination was the idea of Rangers is a big part of Lord of the Rings as well. And
00:13:08
Speaker
it just never became relevant to the narrative. And so it just didn't come up. That was what was in the back of my head as to why Rick lived with his grandfather and what had become of his parents. Because obviously something needed to happen to both of them for him to be living with his grandfather.
00:13:23
Speaker
Sure, I'll be honest, it didn't even click with me to examine that because I think and the other three school teachers can probably attest to
Storytelling Choices and Lapses
00:13:32
Speaker
this. I've heard a myriad number of reasons that one might come to live with their grandparents and not all of them are necessarily tragic. Yeah, absolutely.
00:13:45
Speaker
Um, and it didn't, it didn't need to come up. It didn't, it wouldn't have added anything to the narrative as far as it went. And I thought, but that was what was in the back of my head as far as why. It's a good story.
00:13:56
Speaker
OK, so this was asked by devious Pop Tart over the course of the arc. I'm going to turn it into a question phrased for after the fact. Why did nobody get in touch with Bricks parents? Like none of the adults say, I think I'll phone Bricks dad. It just goes on from that. I mean, I.
00:14:20
Speaker
I have kind of an answer for this, but Jeff, if you want to touch on your reasoning for it, it's the GM you can. I mean, the real reason is because we had to advance the story. I can explain it away by saying the only adults who knew that brick had been abducted also are the adults that would be like, well, what the hell is the dad going to do?
00:14:46
Speaker
Yeah. We can worry them unnecessarily right now, or we can do the thing we think might fix it, and he can explain to them afterwards if he wants to. Yeah.
00:14:58
Speaker
And I've always, both on the DM side and the player's side of the table, subscribed to the line of thinking of like, when you're watching a horror movie, obviously the smart thing to do at the beginning for every character is call the police. That's the smart thing to do. It's the least interesting. Get in your car and go back to your home. Yeah, you're not right. So, I mean, that's like.
00:15:23
Speaker
I love playing my characters, not stupid, just, you know, in the moment, like they're not they're not going to do the smartest thing when stuff's going on around them. Liz asks, What is the music used in the Kids on Bikes episodes? I love it and how evocative it is at the time. Reminds me of both Airwolf and Lady Hawk at the same time. It is from Kevin MacLeod, who does a lot of the music that we use. I almost said does a lot of our music. He does not.
00:15:54
Speaker
He does it for everyone. And so in a sense, yes, he does it for us. He is a very generous composer that makes the vast majority of his work under the Creative Commons license. So he is a very generous individual. If you want the full track, it's called I Can Feel It Coming on on his website in Competech.com. In the air tonight.
00:16:17
Speaker
Yes, I almost started singing it. Looking at me through the webcam saying don't do it. Don't do it. Well, it would have been acceptable if all you just go.
00:16:34
Speaker
Which may sound like trash over the microphone. I did, I asked Eric if he would play something foreboding and synthy over my, the way we ended the first episode with that little bit of scene setting, stage setting that I did. He had the good thought and wherewithal to know that jumping right from that to boop,
00:17:00
Speaker
been a big shift. So he it was his it was his decision and smart one to put it in a lot more often than just there. So thank you. And he also found it. All I said was, I don't know, something like Cynthia and scary. And he did a great that guitar lake in it that is so good.
00:17:20
Speaker
Um, Darren has a question, uh, for all of us. Um, do any of you think, uh, you will port any of the kids on bikes mechanics, uh, to your D and D or Genesis games? Uh, I, I have a tendency to allow
00:17:40
Speaker
players in a lot of my home games to declare things to be true about the world. And I'm a big fan of group lore creation, when especially, I mean, obviously it's not as viable when you're playing in a previously created setting like Eberron, but in general, I'm a big fan of that. But I kind of already do that, so I'm not sure if that's porting, but that's the thing I like about this system. Yeah.
World-Building Systems and Character Creation
00:18:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think I already said I don't think I'll ever run a game that is not collaboratively built world. But that's not unique to kids on bikes by any means. I love the the skill attribution system of pick what you're best at. That's what you roll the 20. And I think did you tell me Savage World does some does that as well or something similar? Similar although not not nearly so much of a spread. You don't use the 20 for anything. OK.
00:18:41
Speaker
I love that you just, you could not do that in a system that it wasn't designed to do that with. Like you can't do that in D&D. You certainly couldn't do it in Genesis because they're not even numbers. So, but. Just a, oh, go ahead. I kind of do a little bit of that where like I've let players basically create a town where they're from.
00:19:07
Speaker
and name it and populate it and put stores in. That's about the extent that I've done something like that. And it's going to be up to you all as my DMs, or GMs, DMs, slide into my DMs, my GMs, because Lord knows nobody wants me running a game. Oh, that's not true. That's definitely not true. That would probably be absolutely hilarious.
00:19:35
Speaker
I mean, I'll watch it from afar. Several weeks afterwards, when I've been assured everyone survived and it's okay with what happened, I would love to listen to it. Well, a resource for specifically Jeff, but anybody listening. Jeff, you could learn a thing or two. D20 Radio former podcast, the Dice Pool podcast,
00:20:04
Speaker
has an episode called Setting Roulette that they basically created a fun session zero system where the table collaboratively collaboratively builds the setting together in a very fun kind of random way. And the design like every time that I've played in a game that utilizes setting roulette, it's always been a one shot like it's designed to be kind of a
00:20:30
Speaker
fast and furious, throw this setting together, then the GM goes away for like 10 minutes, makes a rough outline of an adventure, and then you just go. One of them, I think it was Hooli, I'm not sure, has run that Game of Nation comp before, right? Yes, yes.
00:20:46
Speaker
Yeah, hooli ran it quite a bit at one of the game relation cons and I ended up playing in a dystopian futuristic earth ruled by Amazon with anthropomorphic animal people with heavy cybernetics and nanotechnology. So you guys just threw it all in the stew, huh? Right. So.
00:21:10
Speaker
That's also kind of the conceit of the Fate system. You build the plot or the problem of the world as well as the world itself together and then you play in that. And I've done that for a couple of one shots, both one at my home game and one at Gaming Nation Con. And it works fine for a one shot. I don't know that I would want to
00:21:33
Speaker
throw something together quite so haphazardly for something that I expected to run for more than a couple of sessions, just to be perfectly honest. Like what Eric just described sounds absolutely hilarious for a one shot. But I think I would be hard pressed to run a campaign by that description. Sure. But someone else might think that sounds like a fabulous campaign role. And I think you could borrow the idea of
00:22:00
Speaker
one powered character and you could make that last a campaign in the same way that Krast or Paolo or Orianna was regularly traveling NPC with our party. They would just be a member of the party controlled by, not controlled by, performed by the GM as long as they're still controlled by the players. I think that you could do that without
00:22:42
Speaker
You could basically put the agency in the party's hands of like them defining the abilities of their mentor and getting to decide when they're used and it might be fun to not even like designate a class for
00:22:48
Speaker
it becoming a weird how the GM's character does all the cool stuff.
Player Freedoms and Narrative Cohesion
00:22:57
Speaker
the mentor. It's just this is your mentor and allow
00:22:59
Speaker
the needs of the party popping up, like with Trevor as Stephanie saying, uh, he heals brick and it's like, Oh, well now we know the mentor is some class that has healing abilities. Boy, that was a move to Trevor.
00:23:14
Speaker
He was like, OK, that's what we're doing. That might be I. It reminds me of a I think it was a Twitter post of somebody running a one shot with a bunch of characters that had amnesia and no mirrors. And so the idea being that they had no idea what they looked like, what class they were or what race they were. So like halfway through, it was like, well, you can use your dragon breath here. And the person was like, I'm a dragon born. And so that's cool. What did you guys think? I know Philip didn't love it.
00:23:41
Speaker
uh the the conceit of i'm going to ask you a question about this person and what you say is true philip definitely had trouble uh i i don't think philip would have any trouble coming up with an answer it's philip had such a hard time and i think he was the only one but he was having played with philip for a full campaign now i could tell
00:24:22
Speaker
I think I didn't like it at all. I think it's important with the system for anybody that's listened to the one shot and listening to this now, considering running a game in the system, it is vital to get your players buy in for the mechanics because a lot of players are going to be like Philip and they're not going to be comfortable like they're going to be less comfortable than Philip was assigning absolute truths because Philip at least did it. Some players would be like, oh, I don't want to do that.
00:24:30
Speaker
him being allowed to assign an absolute truth to another character was
00:24:47
Speaker
Philip, did you know that was coming or did I really blindside you? I had no idea that was coming. That's on me. I really thought that I explained that to everybody. Oops. And then also, I know personally many tabletop role-playing game players out there, their skin would crawl at the idea of playing in a game where they have an NPC that's more powerful than them.
00:25:07
Speaker
and they would hate every second of that as soon as the powered character is introduced. That's not a fault of the system. It's not a fault of them. It's just two things not being compatible with one another. If you're considering running this for your table, explain all of this ahead of time. Don't let the powered character be a fun twist because you might lose some of your players real quick.
00:25:29
Speaker
I'd also like to say and going back to what Philip was talking about that, which I was fine with it because I seem to recall Jeff saying something because you're an agent of chaos, Randy. Let me tell you about the time brick lost his legs.
00:25:48
Speaker
I had decided for my character for Alex that his dad was dead and that his fear was that his mom would die, his brother would die. He was just going to be afraid of his family leaving him. And then when it was Eric's turn to say a truth,
00:26:10
Speaker
Dad hadn't died. Dad had just left. Yeah. So that totally changed Alex's viewpoint. So now instead of he was scared, somebody was going to die. I just switched it. He was scared. Someone was going to leave.
00:26:25
Speaker
Yeah. Maybe mom's going to leave next. Maybe she's going to disappear. Maybe brother's going to disappear. So I thought it was just kind of neat, except I could see if someone had been spent a lot of time on a backstory and wasn't aware that this was going to happen, they might have trouble with it. Yeah. You can't build a backstory for this system. No, you can't. And that's, you know,
00:26:52
Speaker
But I like that it was that he was able to throw that in. Well, and I hadn't I hadn't designed anything about Rick. I had decided in talking with the patrons that I was going to build as near as I could. 14 year old me. Yeah. But I'm more probably a more adventurous 14 year old me. But so I hadn't developed. I mean, obviously, if I was building my backstory, then Rick's life was way more tragic than what.
00:27:25
Speaker
Honestly, not so much having someone declare things for me because the people who declare things for me are people I know aren't going to just... Like Eric said, I have played with players who would use this as an opportunity to sow chaos and madness and declare ridiculous things about your character.
00:27:47
Speaker
I didn't know I was gonna do that. So I was okay with that. I knew that the people, the five of us care about each other and so we're not going to try to ruin, we care about each other, we care about playing a game we're all gonna have fun in, and we care about our listeners. So we weren't gonna try to ruin each other's day. Now if I do run this at Gamer Nation Con, that absolute truth rule is going to come with the caveat of, unless I think it sucks,
00:28:14
Speaker
Yeah, or I think it's gonna suck for the person you just assigned that to in which case I'm gonna say oh Wait, I meant to say that doesn't exist in this world whatever you just said there's no such thing as that or you know, whatever I have to do and I have no problem doing that because If it really seems like he's gonna ruin one person's time. I'd rather ruin I'd rather counter actively ruin the time of the bad guy I
00:28:40
Speaker
Trevor what did you think about the whole defining each other's characters thing? I liked it because it was very much like the improv rule of yes
Critiques of Kids on Bikes System
00:28:50
Speaker
and it's just kind of like you gotta roll with it whatever they say keep going keep it up it's not a like I don't like that you just that's it it's canon now mm-hmm
00:29:02
Speaker
Okay, well we kind of touched on it, but in case anybody wants to define further, Irene asked, what was your favorite and least favorite mechanical aspects of the game from a GM and player perspective? I felt like I wanted to roll the dice more. Yeah. That's just me loving to roll dice. Yeah.
00:29:23
Speaker
Well, and that's a mistake that I made. I didn't introduce enough other characters or put you guys in enough other situations where there needed to be dice rolling. A lot of those episode, the second episode entirely, I think, well, wait.
00:29:41
Speaker
basically from when school ended until you saw the cop in the last episode it was basically just you guys talking to each other and I didn't want to make you guys roll against each other I wanted you to figure it out the way your kid group would and that's that's on me I should have been shoving other adverse adversarial characters or at least
00:30:02
Speaker
adults maybe that you had to convince of this sort of stuff. I should have been throwing those in for more rolling. And I know that question is asked later too. So, but you're right. There was a lack of that. I should have asked like, I know there was a couple of times when Alex's brother was asking him about his comics and Alex was lying. Alex totally jacked those comics.
00:30:24
Speaker
And I should have said, do I need to, you know, I should have asked, do I need to roll like charm or something? But, you know, I just didn't think about it at the time.
00:30:37
Speaker
Um, I mean, I really like, uh, I really liked the, for, for one shots, I really enjoy a loose rules light system like this. I think it's way better for one shots than a really complicated system like D and D. Uh, and so I really liked how, for, for the kind of story we were trying to do, I really liked just the,
00:30:58
Speaker
the focus on narrative, the general lack of need for a whole lot of crunchy mechanical bits to it. I thought that was really great. Other than the declaring things by other people's characters, which makes me very uncomfortable doing it, I would say, I guess, I don't know, this is kind of nitpicky just from playing a lot of systems. I feel like the spread of D4 to D20
00:31:26
Speaker
is more extreme than I like. Just the fact that you've got a thing that's a D4 and you are never going to succeed at that. You're just never going to succeed unless it is the most piddly thing that you could possibly need to do. That spread feels more extreme than I like, but again, it's kind of nitpicky. It's just the way the system is built.
00:31:54
Speaker
I do think it adds to a bit of realism, though. That you have something that you know your character can't do and you've got to figure out another way to do it. And I think, for instance, I know I can't outrun most people who would like to hurt me, I assume, in my real actual life. I'm not slow, but I'm not fast.
00:32:15
Speaker
I'll say this, I might outrun them for a minute, but if they're tenacious, I'm gassing out quick. And so I think that's cool. I agree, I understand not liking it as much. I totally do, but that's one of actually the things that I did dig about it was, oh, I can just decide that my character is undeterred by anything, but also is really, on the flip side, really bad at communicating.
00:32:44
Speaker
and really terse, and so I should not be trying to charm people at any point. You know, and I just know that. I don't know. But again, I totally get, it is extreme, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, and it's like going to Stephanie's character of having the D4 and brains of like, when you're asking to roll about like, knowledge of the runes outside of town, like,
00:33:12
Speaker
realistically there is no way Stephanie would know any information and so I guess it's just what do you want out of the game do you want a realistic depiction where it's like sorry no matter how well you roll unless you explode like three times or do you want the kind of
00:33:27
Speaker
chaos of D&D of, oh, you rolled a natural 20, so you know everything about it. And now you need to slumdog millionaire your way into justifying why your character knows the super obscure stuff that they have no business knowing. I mean, that's not really what I mean. What I mean is the spread between a D4 and a D20 is like, I mean, there were things that I was really bad at and really good at at.
00:33:48
Speaker
at 14 but there was honestly nothing that I should have a d20 in at 14. I think that's fair. I think that's it's fair to say that there's no way that Duncan was capable of killing brick
00:34:04
Speaker
with a punch to the head. Like, I think that's... Now, I disagree on that one.
Game System Suitability and Adaptations
00:34:09
Speaker
I think that any, like, you know, average-sized teenager, if they hit someone in the head with a chunk of cast iron, it could kill him. Wait, did you hit him? I forgot to hit him with a piece of cast iron. Yeah, I did hit him with a piece of cast iron. Oh, what a bad idea, that was. Yeah, in real life, his skull looks like a used Easter egg now. I don't... But, I mean, by that token,
00:34:34
Speaker
if alex hit someone with a cast iron bar in the head alex would have a good chance of killing them yeah um i i don't know if i have a least favorite mechanic honestly i mean once again
00:34:51
Speaker
thinking about in the context of a one shot, it's a perfect one shot system. I think long form campaign, there's a lot of things that just wouldn't wouldn't work. But probably my favorite mechanic is the adversary tokens. I like the idea of gaining a resource when you fail a check. Yeah, that was very neat. I think that's a good balance to keep your players happy in the face of defeat. And you might honestly have moments where like
00:35:20
Speaker
when Alex is rolling to see if he can get a sandwich from Stephanie's mom where half the table is really hoping he fails because it's a silly check and we need the adversary token down the road. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that's one of the cool thing about the adversary tokens is, and we get into this in the last episode, I think,
00:35:41
Speaker
You it's not just using them to bump your role. There are skills that we didn't get into much Where you need to have X notary adversary tokens to activate this skill like yeah, like like yeah
00:35:56
Speaker
Oh yeah, that time you had the flashlight because one of your skills was if it makes sense and you have a token, it's in your bag. Yeah, which is a great one. Yeah, I will say the the creators of Kids on Bikes in the book say this is not designed for campaigns.
00:36:17
Speaker
They say, if you really want to run a campaign, here are some tweaks that we think would make it easier to do that. But it's very clear that this is designed to sit down for a couple hours, play a game. And if you want to do it again, you can do it again. But you're going to do different characters, different world, different monster. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think I think part of that is that there doesn't seem to be. I mean, I haven't read through the whole book, but there doesn't seem to be any room for character progression.
00:36:44
Speaker
There's really not. Now I did listen to a podcast. It was called Kids on Bikes, but they had to change it when they started a Patreon, because obviously that's a trademark name. I believe they changed it to the Bike Brigade. It's really good.
00:36:59
Speaker
They did four arcs before extenuating circumstances caused them to kibosh the show and what they did was they they powered up the powered character between each arc and they did little things like
00:37:17
Speaker
They granted an extra skill. In this case, it was a girl who had like, I think her 20 was flight and her brains was four. And it was like, well, here's the thing. You now know about this issue in the town. If you're rolling on something that would have something to do with this haunting or whatever it was,
00:37:38
Speaker
your brains can be a six now. You don't have a four anymore. You can do stuff like that. They even souped up their bikes between them. I put a basket on my bike or I put a banana seat on my bike and it makes my flight better if I'm on my bike or whatever. They did some stuff like that. Okay, Irene was wondering what we all thought about jointly creating one magic user for the party.
00:38:09
Speaker
I said it was fine. Honestly, in our story, that didn't feel like a really big thing for our story. It was necessary. It was a part of the story we had to find. But honestly, in the process of really enjoying the story we were telling, I spent very little time thinking about that character. Yeah.
00:38:37
Speaker
I think it lends itself to be really funny. Yeah. I don't know if ours went super humorous, but I know that while we were playing and just hearing about what was happening and the dynamics of, or the, what's the word, mechanics of a magical NPC, I was like, oh, this could go so many ways.
00:39:09
Speaker
And then I just made him heal the boy I loved, so. Let him get up and run away. Yeah, and they have like six different ways you can do the powered character. The way that we did it was just if you know of a magical or supernatural ability you need for him to be able to do at the time, you can claim that he can do it. That's fine. They even sell a deck.
00:39:33
Speaker
That half the deck now a third of the deck is just different magical abilities and
Character Quirks and Humorous Elements
00:39:40
Speaker
you can Array them out and let them pick one you can draw and now they have to figure out a way to make that ability work in the situation So there's a bunch of different ways you can do it. I didn't want to stick you guys with that I wanted it to be looking you guys come up with like the thing I think I may have shown the card on this one, but the ability to project himself without having to move so he can safely scout and
00:40:00
Speaker
is really good for a nighttime forest mission. Yeah, I mean. You know, honestly, when you were describing it to me and like seeing the mechanics of it, it doesn't remind me of Goonies or Stranger Things. The thing that it reminded me of the most was Strider in Fellowship of the Ring of like this figure showing up and then like Frodo gets stabbed. Oh, he can take care of that.
00:40:26
Speaker
We're getting attacked. Oh, he's a really good horse rider. And so that's just what it made me think of. And so I think it could translate to a fantasy game really well for low level characters. Yeah, it's just fun. Like, oh, go ahead. It's definitely more stranger things than Goonies with that part of it, because 11 is obviously the analog, but yeah.
00:40:47
Speaker
What are you going to say? No, I thought it was fun. Like we've kind of alluded to, I think it works really well for a one shot. And I think beyond that, it could start to get a little. Challenging from a DM perspective of striking that balance.
00:41:11
Speaker
And there's like Trevor was saying, so many ways that you can do that of like how that character presents themselves. Obviously, we had a doofy kid from school be a wizard in training. You mean a charming young caster? Is that what you said? Yeah, sure.
00:41:32
Speaker
You mean a golden-throated god of magic? Is that what you said? Irene also asks, how many sandwiches does Alex eat in a day? Well, he likes lunch and he likes them for dinner. Those are his mainstays. How many sandwiches you got?
00:41:57
Speaker
Um, if you have a sandwich, I have an appetite. Maybe his Joe too. If, if he thinks things are getting a little stressful for him, he'll try to, that's kind of his go-to to kind of get a sandwich, switch the situation, you know, take the kind of change things up. Like this is uncomfortable. Can I have a sandwich? Um,
00:42:26
Speaker
Jodi asks, which episode of Alf is Alex's favorite? I have no idea. I wasn't sure if you were a big Alf fan, Randy, and you had one in your back pocket that you really liked. They're trying to think what show would have been on back then. Oh, why not? Or maybe it seemed all of four or five episodes of it ever. OK.
00:42:51
Speaker
I mean, and I'll say to anyone who's not in the Discord, but pays attention to the names that we say, you're not surprised at all that Laura took the time to do a really, I mean. Impressive, like. Concerning deep dive to track down probably what episode it wasn't. You know, it doesn't know disservice to her that I don't remember what she came up with, but she's. Season three, episode 26, having my baby.
00:43:19
Speaker
It was the finale of the season, it was the right time of year, all of this stuff. And one of the most highly rated episodes of Alf ever or something like that. I don't think that anybody has a favorite episode of Alf. I don't think fans of Alf have favorite episodes of Alf. I think it's been enough time. They're like, I don't know the one. Did he ever finally eat the cat?
00:43:44
Speaker
Um, Laura, speaking of Laura, Laura asked what D&D class slash race to each of the characters play. Of course. I mean, I mean, no, I mean, plays a ranger. Mm hmm. It's obviously a ranger. Duncan is edgelord enough to where it's probably some like fallen paladin be so dark and edgy.
00:44:14
Speaker
I don't know enough about them. Chris, if we're talking, if we're talking what do each of the care, what are they playing in that last scene where they're going to play D&D? Stephanie definitely plays whatever character Franklin made for her. Yeah, because she did not take the time. Yep. She's reading the sheet as she goes. She's she's playing the cleric then because none of us were going to play a healer. Yeah. So I figure Alex would want to be like a big bad barbarian type. Yeah. And green stuff.
00:44:46
Speaker
Um, Laura did ask, did they get their school project done and what grade did they get? I think we established a B is what we ended up getting on it. Solid B. That's fine. Thanks to all the B roll. B for the B roll. Man, that was such a dumb joke that I'm glad you ran with a little bit. It didn't, it didn't take off.
00:45:04
Speaker
Like, I thought it might, but it was stupid. It was in the back of my head the whole second session that we were playing, and I couldn't find a place that it would be appropriate to start shooting B-roll. No, you're absolutely... No, this thing, we used it for as long as it was justifiable in the story, but I don't think as long as it could have been efficacious for humor. Fair. Jeff, how did you... This is from Laura as well. How much did you have planned beforehand and how much was improvised?
Improvisation and Narrative Fluidity
00:45:32
Speaker
The only thing I planned beforehand was trying to learn the system. The day of about an hour, hour and a half before we sat down to record that idea of the ley lines thing came into my head. Here's something that I can give them during the world building.
00:45:49
Speaker
if they haven't started introducing something weird in town or spooky in town, I can throw this magical essence on top of it for them. And other than that, I mean, nothing.
00:46:04
Speaker
I knew that Randy was planning on playing a child, so I basically told the group, you guys get to decide which of you are in charge of him, why he's there with these three other teenagers. Basically, I said one of you has either got to be a babysitter or an older sibling. So you guys took that and ran with it. But other than that, I don't...
00:46:25
Speaker
I didn't plan anything, which is partially why there were some interesting threads that went nowhere and some really mundane craft that became important. So like the GM Jeff. That is every campaign end game ever. And then between the two recording sessions, I didn't plan much except for I told Trevor, I said, hey,
00:46:53
Speaker
I'm gonna come up with something to give Stephanie some buy-in. If you have an idea, you can let me know. We need to get her invested. I don't want to go too far with it between the two of us right now kind of thing, but if you have an idea, tell me. And then... And then I didn't. Fair.
00:47:15
Speaker
and realizing that I needed to introduce something from the town lore and that presented itself with
00:47:27
Speaker
Oh good, then you're going past founder's cabin. Oh well good, then this ties in. And the Youth League too, why not? And I think I got most of that crap from our world building in there. I never mentioned the serial killer again. But I know I was immensely impressed with how much of the random stuff we came up with that you managed to work into the story. You guys gave such good tidbits though that it would have been a disservice to try and flesh the town out to not put as much of that in.
00:47:54
Speaker
Nothing felt like oh, I don't know There's a bowling alley that only uses eight pins in every lane like there was nothing silly. It was all like good stuff It's why there was like a solid hour of silence to cut out of that session zero episode cuz we all just sat there and thought like Mm-hmm. Can't just do something random. It has to be good. Yeah fair enough One of the ones I listened to they said what's the town landmark goes? Ah, it's gotta be the world's biggest something
00:48:20
Speaker
And Patrick Rothfuss, he goes, that's what it is. It's the world biggest something. We never took the sheet off. It's big. We don't know what it is. Jeff, this is from Devious Pop Tart. Jeff, if you ran again, you tote should. That's from Devious Pop Tart. Oh, don't get it twisted. Eric doesn't think I should.
00:48:43
Speaker
Which would you run the same setting in characters? And Second it sounded like you weren't happy in the last episode or two about how you didn't have the players roll often or fail often to get adversary tokens How do you think you'd address that? Um, if if you guys wanted to play these characters again and have some other weird thing happen I would be happy to do this setting this town and these characters again. I would try to move it away from
00:49:11
Speaker
magic. Sure. Obviously it'd have to be something supernatural but like this mythological all-powerful thing to like a coven or something to make just for some variety's sake. I'd be happy to run this again but I don't I would never use this setting again with other people. It's tied to you guys. Obviously I wouldn't ask anybody else to play a character anything like what you guys did.
00:49:34
Speaker
I feel like the next one we need to revolve around the Sawmill. The Sawmill didn't get enough play. No, absolutely not. The Sawmill didn't get any. The Serial Killer didn't get any. We really didn't mention the Eagle Lodge.
00:49:49
Speaker
That's true. In my head, the founder's cabin thing was not the Eagle Lodge. That was the society of... So the serial killer started a coven at the sawmill. Go. You ready? They're all members of Eagle Lodge. Oh man, the Eagle Lodge. I think you could absolutely... And it's Stephanie's dad.
00:50:09
Speaker
You could do a short campaign, a three or four arc campaign that ends mundanely. And then nothing happened in town again. And then they graduated and went to college or something. You can't level this up because they don't level up like that to where eventually they're fighting.
00:50:32
Speaker
I don't know. Satan. I don't know a big movie guy. So, does Ara fail or whatever? I just want to point out, mentioning the Eagles Lodge again. For real, it was probably like 10 plus minutes of dead air cut from that episode of us coming up with Eagles Lodge.
00:50:56
Speaker
Well, we were saying things and saying things and saying things, and then I think it was Randy said Badger, like, oh, Badger's really good. And then, oh, right. The Wisconsin Badgers. Nope. Can't do that. OK, what else have we got? Then we tried to look up the state bird and it's like a robin or something. I forget.
00:51:16
Speaker
Anyway. Irene asks, Randy, what made you decide to play a quote unquote little brother character? We did address the fact that you did not sign up to play a specifically little brother character.
Character Dynamics and Future Challenges
00:51:29
Speaker
But why did you want to play a child character?
00:51:32
Speaker
I thought it would be neat. I mean usually when you know you play D&D you don't typically get to play a kid. I can think of one instance where I've ever been in a D&D campaign where somebody played a kid and that was the one we did for what three years? And I thought man I don't want to play a teenager. I want to go the kid route and see how that goes and
00:52:02
Speaker
And then I was concerned because I thought, well, if what if they all play teenagers, then somebody's got to be responsible. And then I didn't necessarily want to, you know, tie somebody into having to do that, but you guys stepped up to the point. So I got to play a kid. You had two of us stepping up to that point, something fun, something different.
00:52:27
Speaker
I do want to address, I forgot part of Devious Poptart's question. He asked, he mentioned my frustration with not having you guys roll enough and how would I address that. And I mentioned how I would address, because I was, I felt like I had done, I had done you guys short shrift by not having, letting you have enough adversity tokens when.
00:52:43
Speaker
things got tight. It wasn't intentional, but it wasn't fair on my part. And I think the quickest way that I could do that in the future of one of these is introduce a character early on that's a principal or a cop or a teacher or somebody that for some reason suspects one of you or several of you of something from the jump. Start with not necessarily an interrogation thing,
00:53:10
Speaker
But if I started you with an adversary that was unavoidable to you, that first hour of actual play time, we probably could have racked up a half dozen adversity tokens each, just trying to get out of situations, talk your way out of stuff, run away, sneak away. I could have made one of your parents more adversarial, not in a bad way, just in a, you know, for instance, if we had met Duncan's mom,
00:53:37
Speaker
She trusts Duncan to take care of Alex. She trusts Duncan to go to work. I don't know that she necessarily knows she can trust Duncan to be a pillar of the community when he's by himself in town right now, kind of thing. Well, I will. This is just a tip for both Jeff and anybody listening. And this is actually something that Philip mentioned, like it's kind of taking an idea and running with it.
00:54:03
Speaker
But, Phillip, I think you were telling me that your wife had a note written really big near her character sheet that was like, use your spell slots. Use your resources. Use your resources. I did something similar on my DM screen for a long time because I had gotten some feedback from a fellow
00:54:25
Speaker
GM who listens to everyone renewed that I was not making you all roll in social scenarios nearly enough. And so I just put a note that says, if they're talking, make them roll. And we were never not talking. Yeah. And I think that's a really easy solution as a reminder is just to put a note at like the top of your binder or on your screen.
00:54:48
Speaker
that just says make them roll. And so when you're looking at your notes and you see they're like, oh, right, I need to make them roll for something. And just having that visual reminder, it's very simple, but very effective. I, for one, did not feel underserved by the amount of rolling. Yeah. Just to I know none of us did. I'm just saying to just to to reassure it did not feel like that way when we were playing that you weren't having this roll enough.
00:55:16
Speaker
It felt like you had us roll when the stakes were there. And it did work out because you guys came up with a pretty elegant way of handling the problem that didn't require a lot of...
00:55:28
Speaker
rolling or hiding or needing those adversity tokens at the end. Um, yeah, which, which, which saved my, but honestly on it. So, um, honestly think that the game maybe doesn't lend itself to having to roll a lot. I mean, it's, it's a lot of just story driven. Yeah.
00:55:54
Speaker
Well, Kelly has the last question for us.
Post-Adventure Speculations
00:55:58
Speaker
Are they all friends now or do they just do subtle nods to each other when they see each other around town slash school? Well, we've all agreed to play D&D together. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, you don't have to be friends to do that. I don't know. I don't know how to I don't know how to break this to you guys, but Randy doesn't like any of us. I try to play that as much as possible.
00:56:21
Speaker
Well bud, I gotta tell ya, I cracked your code. You might get to be friends to play D&D in Rick's roof fort though.
00:56:30
Speaker
I tried to put some character development at the end of being like, hey, I'll play D&D with you. Like, yeah, maybe she learned something from this situation. It was real rushed, but. Yeah, I think that a lot of things were left unsaid at the end, which I kind of like. It had a very like breakfast club type. It's been this experience.
00:56:56
Speaker
And now the experience is over. So the story ends and it's just kind of left up to you as to how this truly affected all these people. It lends itself to another little one shot with these people.
00:57:10
Speaker
Yeah, but I'm not saying I won't. Well, and I think I'm saying I won't. We kind of established that outside of Stephanie and Rick, everybody else at least had a a relationship of some substance, good or bad. And I feel like Duncan and Stephanie's relationship came out the other side of this being more positive than it was starting out.
00:57:38
Speaker
I feel that way about Alex and Duncan also. Yeah. Of course, Alex still thinks, you know, Stephanie is just it, but, you know, that was always. Yeah. Well, that is all the questions that we got from the patrons. So any final thoughts that we would like to share, gentlemen, about this experience? It was fun and I thought Jeff did a great job.
00:58:10
Speaker
yeah i would i would totally be down to do it again uh i will say i appreciate the encouragement from the listeners uh there were a lot of people that were very kind as we were going through it i will i will admit like i don't get nervous i've been performing at various things my entire life and i don't know that i've been more nervous than when
00:58:35
Speaker
We sat down after the world building episode and I had to actually start GMing a game and because like I had to pay attention the whole time. No, it was it was it was genuinely terrifying. And when the first session was done, I was like, at least it's over and we'll find out if anybody gave a crap or if they like it and if we're going to do the next ones. And so.
00:58:58
Speaker
So thanks to everybody who gave positive feedback. And again, thanks to not that I was surprised at all that this group of players was both encouraging and forgiving. And I couldn't have picked a better group of people to be my... My second official time GMing. My first with more than two people who were very kind and forgiving also. So three people, pardon me.
00:59:21
Speaker
Um, okay. Well, uh, you all are probably asking yourselves, what are these guys?
Teaser for Next One-Shot
00:59:29
Speaker
How did I get here? This is not my beautiful house. Uh, wonderful.
00:59:38
Speaker
Yeah, what's next? What's coming up? We are actually going to be doing another one shot. We are still recording everything remotely. And I personally would love to at least have some sort of light at the end of the tunnel before we start the second campaign to actually be around a table together to play it.
00:59:59
Speaker
So we're going to do one more one shot and then assess at that point, but more than likely the next campaign will be coming after this next one shot. Do you want to give them a little preview of what we're doing? Yes. So the next one shot that we're going to be doing is going to be in the Genesis system. So this will be an opportunity for all of us to start warming up the Genesis muscles and for some of you learning how to play Genesis. Lord knows I need it.
01:00:27
Speaker
But it's actually going to be GMed by none of us. GM Chris of the Forge slash Order 66 is going to come run us through a setting that he has created called Dusters and Dragons.
01:00:45
Speaker
Yes. A Western fantasy setting, which sounds super cool. You got to find us some great Kevin MacLeod music for the. Yes. For the intro. I think I've used some Western style music before in the train heist episode. Yes, there was some in the train episode. I remember that. It was way too loud. I remember that. That's true.
01:01:10
Speaker
I recall that as well, actually. But there's not going to be a session zero or a prologue or anything like we had for this one because Chris is doing pre-generated characters for all of us. And I think he he's been in communication with me about what characters you all are going to be playing. And I think he's trying to create some pre-gens to allow you all to get familiar with some of the mechanics you might be using in our campaign.
01:01:34
Speaker
So like I think that Randy is going to be playing a magic user. So have fun with that, Randy. So, yeah, but we are excited. Once again, we thank you all for your patience and grace in the craziness that's currently going on with us recording remotely.
01:01:52
Speaker
And the potential audio was that come with that and adding yet another individual to that mix, I'm sure, is not going to result in any technical issues or woes in any way whatsoever. So but we hope that this this whole.
01:02:09
Speaker
one shot arc in this episode has been a welcomed diversion and distraction in what's currently going on. And yeah, we're excited to keep on trucking and keep playing games and putting them on the Internet. So where anything else, gentlemen? Yeah, I mean, just saying, I echo that. God, I hope that we've been able to give you guys a break.
01:02:37
Speaker
Uh, for an hour a week. And I know that, uh, just based on. If you listened to one podcast, you probably listened to five podcasts. So I don't want the only ones doing it for you, but I hope that we were able to contribute to that. Um, and thanks for sticking with us. All right. Well, um, once again, I am Eric. Trevor. I'm Randy. Oh, is it me? I'm Jeff.
01:03:05
Speaker
And we will see you next time. Um, but yeah, it was, uh, a fun one shart. What?
01:03:36
Speaker
Get in! Take two. Wow. You messed up so big. Yep, yep. I gotta give it an extra long pause so people aren't still chuckling and people wonder what happened. I'm gonna tell them what happened.
01:04:06
Speaker
That's gotta be the post-credit thing.