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Lich Please! Podcast Episode 17 ft Taron Pounds
77 Plays2 years ago
This week the boys are joined by the wonderfully talented Taron Pounds!
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Transcript
Meet the Hosts and Guest
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello friends. You fought last week. Was bad for technical issues. Think again. E1 was away from home. When we recorded. But he is here in spirit. And a series of photos. Hello and welcome back to the Lich Police podcast. As always, I'm here with Alex.
00:00:32
Speaker
And we are joined by a very special guest. This week, Taran Pounds is going to be joining us.
Taran's D&D Beginnings
00:00:39
Speaker
Hello, welcome. Very simple first question. How did you get into D&D? Yeah, thanks for having me. Well, I guess...
00:00:54
Speaker
I want to say I started my first experience rather would probably be around like 2009 when
00:01:03
Speaker
There was a there was a guy my mom was dating at the time who they were like really in the D&D and they had invited me out to go and play. And it just I don't think the group was really great at explaining the game to a newer person. I did just kind of get jumped in or lumped in I guess with a campaign that they had kind of going on and I was like, I have
00:01:28
Speaker
OK, apparently you are on an org with a great sword. That is cool. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing here. And it just isn't really totally click for me at the time. Like this is what's going on.
00:01:42
Speaker
And it wasn't until, I want to say, about 2015, 2016, whenever I saw Harmon Quest, like Dan Harmon's D&D. Well, D&D, I found out the other day they were actually playing Pathfinder during Harmon Quest.
00:02:02
Speaker
And yeah, it was funny. Mark Seifter and Steven Glicker told me that on the Roll for Combat podcast. And I was like, wait, what? And went and saw pictures of it. I was like, they were playing Pathfinder. Wow. So I was like, oh, OK. D&D is like.
00:02:20
Speaker
this right it was like more i guess uh less of a serious affair and more of like this can be a fun funny thing that we're doing and i was like all right that seems more like my alley um yeah it was like as soon as i start like finding out what like dnd really is it was almost just like the matrix of potential and like
00:02:41
Speaker
flash right before my eyes I think everybody's had one of those like oh yeah possible you know so I had my awakening I guess you could say around like 2015 2016
00:02:56
Speaker
Um, after getting a group together and starting to play for a while, uh, I was like, wait, why can't we do some things in the game? Like it was really weird to me that monk, um, used only dexterity for attacks. And I was like, wait, but what if I want to just play like someone that's going to beat the hell out of somebody else? You know, like I.
00:03:17
Speaker
I don't really want to play a monk that's like, you know, precision strikes. I want to just play someone that's going to knock someone since, you know, whatever. And that's when I discovered Benjamin Huffman's pugilist class. And after like seeing that, I was like, wait, you can just make stuff for this game.
D&D Design Journey
00:03:38
Speaker
And it just like exploded out from there.
00:03:44
Speaker
Um, I had previously always been into analyzing video games, analyzing games in general. Um, but I hadn't really thought about myself as a designer because I guess I just learning coding seemed intimidating. And, uh, you know, so I, I, I had always really had that thought about like,
00:04:06
Speaker
growing up with Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest and Pokemon, I was always really into JRPGs, and it was cool getting back to the roots of it, and I had toyed with RPG Maker growing up. I'm sure everybody's familiar with that software.
00:04:26
Speaker
I always thought that that would be really cool to do, but I just never really put the effort into... I guess seeing the code just never really totally clicked for me, right? But then whenever it got into like, I can write all day long. Me coding is a nightmare, but I can write like crazy. So that's whenever I started making... I took my shot at some D&D classes.
00:04:52
Speaker
It seemed like some people were liking the stuff that I was writing and I reached out to Benjamin Huffman and Ross Leiser to do some mechanical consultation. Benjamin and Ross are now both working professionally in the industry. Benjamin's done work for Ghostfire Games. Ross Leiser's now working on the Stormlight RPG.
00:05:15
Speaker
Yeah, so it's, you know, so being here in this position where I'm like working for, I'm doing a thing for Paizo right now, launching my own TTRPG and doing all that. It's been, it's been a wild ride.
00:05:31
Speaker
Yeah. Wow. That's quite a bit. Yeah. Wow. It's impressive. Well done. Yeah. It's, I guess, accidentally stumbling into success. You know, it's been fun, meeting a lot of really, really cool people in the scene through doing the YouTube stuff or, you know, DMs Guild. It's been
00:06:02
Speaker
something I never would have thought five years ago, I was going to be doing that's for sure. Cool. So, um,
00:06:13
Speaker
a bit away from talking about D&D and into segment one, my most enjoyable segment. Oh, are we going straight into this? Okay. Okay.
Monster Stats Game
00:06:24
Speaker
Okay. Okay. Full clarity. The ones that we've had so far just saw on the same playing field, we've had Zombie and Zero Dragon. Yes. Okay. So is it just the moment that we know what it is, we just say it?
00:06:36
Speaker
Yeah, just make it like a buzz sound. Yuango's ding-dong, because that's his famous doorbell sound. Ding-dong. Yeah, like a buzz sound, whatever. Just make a sound. All right. Yeah, to explain the rules one more time, I will read out sections of its stats. I'll tell you what the sections are just before I read them. You guys can buzz in during the sections, after the sections, whenever. And then I will keep on going. And then whoever gets it first wins.
00:07:04
Speaker
Current tally is one one for your wine verse guests. Okay, so please beat him today All right now the pressure is on so Just just for an early hint for this this monster as I've given a few hints It's a it's a very famous and common monster people know this. Okay. It's it's common, but you might not know the stat sheet. I
00:07:28
Speaker
Because I don't know how many people actually use this monster in scenarios. It's just famous. So do without what you will. And no, I don't mean like a Tarasco or Tiamat or anything. Just clear that out of the way.
00:07:48
Speaker
So we will start with armor class hit points, speed, strength, dex, and con. So, yeah. Well, not hit points. I don't care about hit points. We'll get to get that. Armor class 13, speed is 40 feet. Strength is 20, dex is 12, and constitution is 17. Okay. That's pretty high. Yeah.
00:08:15
Speaker
Strength is, you said 20. Strength is 20. Wait, you said, sorry, you said speed is 40. Speed is 40. Is there? Do we see what 12 you said? No, no, no. So he'll read out multiple stats, and then we can get it many times. Oh, OK. I have a guess here, I guess. Cool. Go ahead.
00:08:43
Speaker
Is it an owlbear? Wow. Wow. That was the fastest anyone started, by the way, just to put that out there. That is the quickest. That's impressive. The 20 strength for me was the thing where I was like, if it's really common, then that's my shot. Yeah, I guess. I fought like people wouldn't know the stats because owlbear is like common people. You didn't know owlbears, but I don't think people use them in scenarios much.
00:09:13
Speaker
In fact, I've never encountered one in a scenario in my D&D career. Not once, I don't think. I've only been playing like a year and a half, so. I think I've used them occasionally as like random encounter while they're traveling, when they come up on a roll table, but not much more than that, I don't think.
Homebrewing Tips
00:09:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think the only time I've seen one that was like hard, like written into an adventure was Icewind Dale.
00:09:40
Speaker
because they really wanted to feature that polar Albear or whatever that is. I think that's like the only time I can personally think of one. Yeah. Wow. Yuan, you got a better right edge. You didn't even get a guess. I did. I didn't. I was still thinking, well, the AC is pretty low, so what can it be? Wow. Yuan, you're down too.
00:10:08
Speaker
I am down to one. That brings me great satisfaction. I know it does. I know it does. Yeah, so you bring on the designers and you see what happens. Yeah. Nice. Oh, that's funny. Yeah, wow. That was actually fairly impressive. Everyone else, we did the whole stat sheet before anyone. Yeah, so nice.
00:10:38
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, we've spoken quite a lot on this podcast to think about the amount that we ourselves homebrew and the amount that you well, you especially if you've taken on a challenge of homebrewing everyone doing your campaign a new subclass, which is an undertaking. So if people are listening and they are just starting out a homebrewing, what is your like,
00:11:04
Speaker
top tips for like getting something like balancing and just making sure he's not going to break your game. So the biggest thing that you have to worry about
00:11:17
Speaker
The biggest thing if you worry about, honestly, is just making sure that it works. And what I mean by that is making sure that the action economy is a thing. I see a lot of people that really start out with what's a Spark Notes of idea, that they're like, yeah, this is the cinema of the thing. And then I ask, OK, so what does that actually mean, though, in D&D? And this is mechanical expression. If you just say, well,
00:11:45
Speaker
I can do, I don't know, I'm writing a transformation wizard. Okay, well, I can transform into a creature I've seen. Okay, well, that's a very loose idea, and I think in a rules-like game, maybe something like that is acceptable, but in D&D, we don't really know what action that uses. We don't know how long it lasts, right? It's just, I mean, according to that, it's just you can transform into a creature you've seen. Okay.
00:12:14
Speaker
But you didn't tell me how I make that happen. Right. So there's like kind of loose definition of that we have to really hard code in specifically what this is taking up in the game. Usually once people are.
00:12:27
Speaker
focused in on making sure the core gameplay loop is covered, bonus action, reaction, movement. This is whenever I start looking at worrisome interactions more so. What are the big, big worrisome interactions we can really think of? These are things like vagarats. Vagarats is probably the most famous of any other
00:12:50
Speaker
breakable i guess you could say because everybody really wants to like cool life reaver necromancer or you know like i mean and by the way a lot of amateur guys uh don't worry wizards of the coast has even written some stuff that they've messed this up on um
00:13:09
Speaker
they had the astral self whenever it was first on Earth Arcana was regenerating key whenever it killed a creature. And it was just
Balancing Game Design
00:13:17
Speaker
like, oh, that's just that that's bag of rats. That's literally bag of rats. Yeah. That's terrifying to think about the having thought. Yeah. So in terms of like, I think too many people will focus in on the numbers and making sure that like, numbers have to make sense. Numbers have to make sense. And I'm like,
00:13:38
Speaker
Yes and no. You want to make sure that there's like a curve that's expressed. But honestly, once you know about like the power spike levels, the game does like five in particular does a pretty good job at like if you give this thing an extra attack at this level, it's most likely going to be kind of on curve or like just with other marshals. I.
00:14:04
Speaker
I typically like to see whenever people don't have to give something specific numbers to make the curve work out rather than like
00:14:15
Speaker
Oh, wait, I guess in that sentence, I like to see whenever people are able to make the actions of the game or whatever kind of naturally lead into that power curve rather than a number that just scales up or like an arbitrary like you're doing an extra five damage this turn. It's like, OK, well, that might put me like on curve for like DPR, but is that interesting?
00:14:40
Speaker
I guess not, you know. Yeah, okay. Comparative balance is also a thing that I think I see a lot of newer guys do that feels like they're doing it right, right? Wherein a lot of newer guys will look at this thing and say like, oh, okay, well, that's, they'll go pull up like one of Tramp Monk's videos and they'll be like, well, the DPR is on par. So this means it must be good. And it's like, well,
00:15:08
Speaker
not really like that you know even chris says in so far as like this doesn't tell you the whole picture um vpr is not a number that we can say if it is this much or whatever um this thing is well made for the game we're we're still figuring out the slide of what the 2024 character power budget is gonna be and um
00:15:35
Speaker
you know it's it's odd because a lot of the rules that we established in terms of design after xanthar's guide um immediately got broken with tasha's you know and then like after tasha's now here we are what four years out and um it's like well now we don't really know what the new power level of these next options is going to be and apparently everything's getting a third level subclass not a so it's
00:16:03
Speaker
adjustment adaptation. Yeah, I hope that's helpful. But a lot of it is kind of judgment calls. Like, you know, for me, I've said numerous times, like short resting for an hour is not my favorite thing.
00:16:21
Speaker
Uh, so to me, if I wrote a class that was like, you get back these, if it's like a warlock beat for beat, and I said, you get back your spell slots and whenever you complete a ritual to me, that seems fine because I like 10 minutes short rest. But a lot of people they're like.
00:16:40
Speaker
That's better than warlock and they're gonna do the comparative balance thing without really thinking Mechanically, it's the same thing, you know, yeah So yeah, it's it's a it's kind of a toss-up. Um Balance is subjective, but there is a point that we can say the game does objectively break so that's what I all of us designers are always trying to kind of aim for that like
00:17:04
Speaker
where do we think that line is you know yeah okay yeah that's yeah that's really interesting it's giving me a lot to think about when i'm giving you guys stuff i i wish that there was a way more clear-cut answer um there i feel like it's way more of a gradient than like once you've hit this point
00:17:27
Speaker
it doesn't you know what I mean? I've seen some of the like most hardcore critics on my work send me some of their stuff to consult and I was just like,
00:17:37
Speaker
You're the same guy that wrote that comment? Some of it makes sense. The interesting part, when I'm writing subclasses or doing the subclasses with people or creating my own, I tend to work more. If it's interesting, then do I care about busted damage and metagaming and all that? I do tend to just prefer
00:18:04
Speaker
the interesting aspect, like fun things you can do as opposed to dice, basically, as opposed to things that require dice. Because it's just more fun. I'm making these classes for myself and other people for fun. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, definitely. And there's also an aspect of what you feel is more fun to play with that I think is the other thing that influences the way that the designer is going to feel about anything that they make.
00:18:33
Speaker
You know, no designer is going to write something that they feel passionate about that they don't think is fun. So if there's a difference between, I think, really inspired design and writing it to fill a gap that you need in that moment.
00:18:55
Speaker
it's not always terrible sometimes you do have to like meet those deadlines or whatever to fill those gaps but like I love seeing the passion projects whenever people are like no you don't understand I had this idea it felt really cool I wanted to make sure it was like a thing and whenever I see those like aha moments happen I'm like
Goliath Warrior Subclass
00:19:15
Speaker
That feels way more inspired, you know, like seeing heavy arms gunslinger for the first time, I was like, Oh, wait, I like that better than Ranger. Oh, you know, like, and heavy would have never started unless he had an idea that it was like, I think I figured out why this hasn't clicked yet, you know, and yeah.
00:19:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. I mean, it feels very similar to what you did with Dan subclass. Yeah. Yeah. Based around the shield aspect of the fighter rather than. Yeah, the original the original subclass I had for Dan was for for my my fighter was was going to be like a defensive on because he wanted to be a knight and like realistically like for my character, if he wants to be a knight, it's going to be more about defending people than it is hitting people. So it's like, yeah, let's
00:20:08
Speaker
Let's do something for that. Yeah. And most of it has just been stuff I think is cool. Yeah, there's a lot of I think people will think like, okay, well, I want to make like this fighter that's based around, I guess you could say shields or something, right? Or they'll say like, I want to make sure it's based around pole arms. And then they focus really hard in on the idea of like the pole arm.
00:20:32
Speaker
Rather than thinking like yeah, but what is what in the action economy is fun about that? I think that's where fighter gets so cool is like you get a second action on your turn Everyone's just like oh, okay. I'm gonna use that to attack. What else can you do with that? You know like I Fighter could be such a cool combo class Yeah
00:20:54
Speaker
Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing you try out this subclass when we eventually get to that point. Well, yeah, the final subclass I came for is called the Goliath Warrior. If you're listening, check out D&D Beyond. It's amazing. No, so I was like, oh, Dan's also a Goliath. Let's have a look at this. And this was before
00:21:21
Speaker
Uh, is it Bixby? That whole, uh, the path of the giant, uh, Bering subclass came out. Yeah, I think it was, it was like a few months before that. And then they released that and it was all about getting like enlargements, I think, and giants and stuff and whatever. And I wrote my subclass. I was like, wow.
00:21:46
Speaker
And this is like, this is relatively the same. No, not the exact same. I was like, and they've just released this. I was like, I'm surprised it's not been here for a while. Because my whole subclass now is about like, it's basically like just about being a Goliath person who's learned to fight like a Goliath. And it's all about like size and strength and like just Goliath lore and stuff. And it's fun.
00:22:16
Speaker
Yeah, I'm excited to use it. Are you a baked bean bandit over on? That's me. I was browsing the homebrew category over there on D&D Beyond. Yeah, that's my subclass. I sat down with Yuan to sort it out for the campaign.
00:22:39
Speaker
Yeah, a bunch, most of it is all the names for the features is from like Goliath lore I found online. It's basically just like Goliath stuff as much as I could find online and try to incorporate into a subclass.
00:22:57
Speaker
Are we going to get a live review here? I've always had this policy about like, I never do the reviews unless people are like asking for them or anything like that, because that's been a tricky thing to navigate is like, I didn't think consulting as a form of content creation was going to be like a thing that kind of took off in YouTube. I mean, there's like reviewing and everything, but then there's like,
00:23:26
Speaker
I guess I should have known that, you know, being creative tips or whatever are definitely going to be a thing that will do well. But that's also come with its own rocky roads of thinking like reviewing a thing and not even really thinking about like, oh, does that person want the thing reviewed? You know, like, yeah, that's true. I've done that where I had to figure out what my policy was going to be around.
00:23:51
Speaker
You can't just review everything you spend money on or that you see. So like learning some social photos like that and everything. But yeah, I I only these days it's like like with the Candela review, it was like, no, if I spend money on it and it's like a bigger company.
00:24:11
Speaker
I'm giving it a review. Like, I've covered it, you know? And I'm always like, you know, if it's a newer person, probably like pay what you want, something like that. It's like there's boxing clubs on if I'm even hitting you with pillows. But if it's like,
00:24:30
Speaker
you know, critical role, something I'm taking the boxing gloves off. If it's Wizards of the Coast, I'm putting the brass knuckles on, you know? Yeah. And that's led to some people saying that I'm too mean on Wizards of the Coast or whatever. And it's like, they say they're the world's greatest role playing game on their covers. My guy's like, that's bad. Yeah, they're asking for it. They're asking for it. Yeah, yeah. 100%. You know, bold claims deserve bold reviews. This is how it is.
00:24:59
Speaker
format and everything like that. No, we're just going. Are we good? Oh, okay. Yes, we're good. Sorry, that's my fault. No, it's all good. Yeah, like really, really early on, I guess when I would say really early on, really early on in 5e's.
00:25:19
Speaker
It was like Reddit was kind of the only place that you went to for like design critique or anything like that. And that led to its own form of.
00:25:31
Speaker
I mean, what we found out from some of the subreddits was some of these mods were manipulating the upvotes to make sure that their projects were getting the spotlight.
Feedback and Criticism
00:25:40
Speaker
We found out that there was a little bit of a monetary incentive in the success over there. So it turned into, well, we can't really trust the mods that are covering these communities. And then this is where groups like the Discord of Many Things got started. The Discord of Many Things, by the way, is probably the biggest
00:26:02
Speaker
homebrew like kind of bounce off idea collaborative thing I think in that discord there's probably like what like I'm just gonna pull it up right now how many people are in here yeah there's over oh there's over like 12,000 people in this discord it looks like oh wow that's
00:26:26
Speaker
That's a big server. Yeah, I mean it's massive massive massive and You know, this is where I mean heavy arms is heavy arms got to start over here I think you've been like laser llama and kibbles might have been over here as well but Yeah, the problem was it was a lot of critique but it was all what I call shotgun critique where
00:26:54
Speaker
People don't really know how to temper the critique. They just find them bad and tell you like, this is why this sucks. And yeah, some people can take that, but it's really clear that it's not for everybody. And I don't think that that's always the best place to grow because if someone's just focusing on what sucks, you could just feel like your entire concept is terrible. It's a whole thing that I try to like reinforce is whenever someone sends me something to consult them on, I'm like,
00:27:25
Speaker
We find what the problems are, but the nuggets of good need to also be emphasized, or else it just sounds like you're trashing it. That's the constructive criticism. It's like, how do we develop on this idea right here? What do I think is the cool thing? How do we let that flourish?
00:27:48
Speaker
Yeah, I was actually, I was told something about constructive criticism, which could absolutely apply here is if you go to criticize something and you think it's bad for it to be constructive criticism, you have to think of the reason it's bad. You can't just say it's bad. That's just complaining. Yeah. Like you have to have a reason for it. If you can't figure out a reason, just don't bother because you're not going to, nothing's going to happen if you just say it's bad. Like it won't change. So yeah.
00:28:17
Speaker
Yeah. Uh, I think like there was a, there was a comment on that Candela obscure video I'm trying to remember. Um, but it's basically like, um, if all you have is a feeling about something and you can't give good feedback as to how it should improve, you should probably just not say anything at all. Right. Like, I mean, going up with a Bambi ethos, I guess. Right. But, um,
00:28:42
Speaker
I either is totally it's totally fine to have the opinion of like I'm not a fan of this thing but like if you spend so much time like typing up paragraphs as to why you don't like this thing and you're not giving input as to what maybe you would have preferred or what that's not yeah it's not really feedback or criticism it's a it's tricky I don't want to say bashing a thing because I don't agree with that either I think too much
00:29:11
Speaker
Amateur critique has been attributed to bashing, which has a more malicious connotation to it that I'm not a fan of. I prefer like it's just an experienced feedback, really, and that's the best way I would think to put that.
Unearthed Arcana Critique
00:29:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:32
Speaker
So speaking of putting the brass knuckles on, have you read the Unearthed Arcana for the next iteration or whatever they're calling it currently for fifth?
00:29:45
Speaker
Is there anything that you absolutely would veto that you would remove if you had the opportunity to from what they're putting out currently? I thought you meant they dropped another one like today or something. I was like, what? Sorry, no. Anything they're currently doing? Yes, yeah. So in this current iteration,
00:30:12
Speaker
of what I'm seeing. My biggest my biggest critique is like, I don't think they understand the narrative heart of why certain classes got their sub classes at certain levels. Or if they do, I if they do when they're just dismissing that entirely, then I'm like, I
00:30:28
Speaker
I just completely disagree with the design ethos and I'm just going to have to stick with that. Like, you know, there's part of a reason I'm making my own game. So, yeah, I like the narrative beat of what happens in the story of a class by what you're what, you know, levels you get certain things. That's one of my favorite things to consider whenever I'm making a full class. That that's sad to see go.
00:30:58
Speaker
I think that they're overcomplicating a lot of things by virtue of thinking that everything needs to have the roleplay spelled out for the player rather than giving people a loose palette and saying like D&D is a combat game with a dungeon crawler and we need to keep those two things as the things that we emphasize in a class and everything else should be a little bit more open and
00:31:25
Speaker
you know, free, which I think makes for more interesting character building than hard line setting it, you know, that what is it, the barbarian primal intuition or primal knowledge feature is I think that's where I saw myself in watsy going completely different directions. Barbarian is not a skill monkey, and them trying to make it a skill monkey is
00:31:55
Speaker
So weird. It's so weird. Barbarian does, like, whenever people are like, well, it needs some role play element of it. I'm like, guys, it's like written right there on the page. Just read the class intro. Like, yeah, it's there. That's oh, I don't know why everybody thinks like we need to have every part of the character mechanically expressed in order for it to mean anything.
00:32:20
Speaker
Um, there's a certain feel to it. That is cool. And I agree with that. So like take those skills. I, you know, um, especially with them going with a more flexible level one build, um, you getting the free park or the free, what, what are they five feet? There we go. Jeez. Um, I'm like, I've got vason open up over here and their talents over here, their talents over in, um,
00:32:46
Speaker
uh tales of the valiant yeah so that mechanic um yeah especially with you getting a freebie now i think that that and background should be the places where people especially in five ego that's all the non-combat roleplay stuff for me right there
00:33:05
Speaker
I would honestly prefer to class this focus a lot more on what it meant for the combat and exploration pillars. And everything else was left up to your background. Some other choices you make, you know? Yeah, no, that would make so much sense. And I think that would solve a lot of the issues that some people have with
00:33:28
Speaker
what's coming up. I've only recently heard, I've not been keeping up with it, that they've wanted to move the classes to level three, and I intensely dislike it. I don't like it at all. Yeah. There's also, I mean, I don't know if you guys have heard about this, but the bar that they last showcased, if that's the bar that we're getting, it's actually non-functional in this new edition, because the last bar that they showed off was the one with the split up spell list.
00:33:58
Speaker
where you could choose either Arcane, Primal, or Divine. And since they're reverting all that, we don't know what this bard is doing. They're going back to class spell lists, so we're like, what's happening here? And they were like, no, the bard's done. And it's like, wait, no, you guys didn't let it cook long enough. Wait, we should have seen that re-print. What happened? No telling what they're going to do there.
00:34:27
Speaker
Yeah. It's an odd phase. I guess we'll. It's an odd phase for Watson. Yeah. It most definitely is. I think, especially with what happened recently, they're going to need to do something special to get people fully back on side with people just being like, well, what else is out there? And exploring so many more, well, just tabletop games in general, I think it's
00:34:54
Speaker
They've really shot themselves in the foot with some things that they've done. Yeah, the crowdsource feedback, crowdsource design was not great.
Wizards of the Coast Concerns
00:35:10
Speaker
They've already got it to their layout guy, which means a lot of this is already – well, no, no, no, wait. I'll backcheck on that. It's not that a lot of it's already done. I do know, though, that because they said the release date of the fifth – or sorry, I said fifth month of the – that's what, May, they accidentally leaked the release date.
00:35:31
Speaker
I think it's very easy to say that they might be changing that up. But if their deadline is May, and they're hard set on a May release date, that tells me a lot of things about what their mindset is going into these play tests, that like the feedback on the surveys and everything. For print production, getting this from like, I think that their printers in China
00:35:58
Speaker
If they're going to aim for a May release, this better be already at their printer. Like, yeah, for the kind of volume that they should be expecting for this based off of their last edition sales, this better already be with their printer or else. I don't know what this this needs to get pushed back to a Q3 Q4 release. Releasing this in May, this is not going to have time to cook. Yeah.
00:36:26
Speaker
Oh, that's terrifying. Yeah, I don't know. I don't really know what to tell Watsy like at this point there. I mean seeing the other news has come out in the last day where they're laying Hasbro is laying off over a thousand of its employees. It's like I don't know.
00:36:52
Speaker
Sinking ship rising tide. I I don't know what's gonna happen here. Yeah Yeah It's all a bit up in the air I think as well recently because the Indies had Like the just the game has had like borders gay and a bunch of media making it popular It's they they want to make it
Digital vs Physical D&D
00:37:17
Speaker
kind of expand on like media and stuff and they aren't working towards like they're just working for money and stuff to make it like bigger for newer players like more like a game game like a video game type thing as opposed to dnd basically because a bunch of new players are coming in straight from borders gay and it is different to borders gay obviously yeah
00:37:44
Speaker
Yeah, the the experience there like if they want to go with the digital medium, I guess that's okay. But like I think the thing that has a lot of people worried is the idea that they won't be supporting physical anymore.
00:37:57
Speaker
Yeah, and that's the only times I see people like I've seen a lot of videos of people critiquing the idea that they're doing the AI DM thing. I have a community of nearly 1000 people where I hear opinions all this stuff about D&D news all the time. The overwhelming thing to me if I could summarize why this seems to be a contentious part of this move is the worry
00:38:27
Speaker
seeing what's these current actions about whether or not they're going to support people that want the traditional experience in the future. And to people that are like, well, you can always get the original five books or whatever. No, they're pulling the prints like as far as I've been able to see like you. I think they officially said like Amazon's current print run that they have on like their current stock is the last stock that they're going to get for five stuff.
00:38:57
Speaker
Oh wow. Yeah. Okay. Uh, let me see. Cause poor rule book, uh, five E. Um, there was a, there was a warning or something that was up about how like they only had a certain amount left in stock and that was going to be it. Damn.
00:39:18
Speaker
Okay, that's it. Yeah, it keeps coming up and it's, I don't know. It's getting to the point where it's kind of like, it's a difficult one. I'm not particularly worried about AI taking over the DM space because
00:39:37
Speaker
It's never, I don't think it's ever going to replace us as DMs because you are just playing with your friends and nothing can replace that experience ever. Nothing will top that. So it's not that, but yeah, removing it from, I mean, we play online, so digital isn't particularly a problem for us really, I guess.
00:39:58
Speaker
ideally though we would I mean no you know no one wants to play online if anyone if everyone could play in person they would so in that not regard it's it's a terrifying prospect that they're taking it completely digital um yeah this isn't like a book as well a book's great covid and lockdown had a bit a big impact on making things digital digital because people still wanted to play and then you know it's online it's just how it is but yeah um definitely it's a
00:40:28
Speaker
It's a very big thing if they just want to go digital. Yeah. It's true. And honestly, for me, I mean, for my money, I've really liked what Alchemy is doing. I like their VCT a whole lot.
00:40:43
Speaker
It's not doing everything as in like the 3D space and all that good stuff or whatever, but I don't need it to. I like that is such a luxury that I just feel ultimately makes the game more confusing, which if people want that, they're like, you know, people have fun the way that they have their fun.
Virtual Tabletop Tools
00:41:07
Speaker
not here to yuck anybody's yums, but to me, practically 2D battle mat has been fine. I'm usually always playing online with my friends anyways, so yeah. The 3D space things, I think, seems very short-sighted. I think a lot of people got very excited about seeing the potential of that working, and then we saw other people capitalize on that and make it work, and it was like,
00:41:38
Speaker
Well, this is more to set up so the DM's experience is already a little bit more clunky. It's taxing on your computer. Whenever I say that, I just mean the rig of like 80% of people out there. And I just don't know that it's the thing that most people actually really want, especially whenever Alchemy serves the purpose and does
00:42:08
Speaker
Everything really nice and clean. Yeah. Yeah. I just have you know. Sorry. I don't know. Have you seen the one that was it about the D&D Beyond? Yeah. It's it's it's it's rough around the edges. It's it's we used it briefly the other day and it's. Yeah.
00:42:33
Speaker
It's not good. It's really not good. Yeah. Watch these little ethos right now is to bring everything in house. They don't want to collab with people. This is like their big problem is it's a very – whenever we say like Corpo mindset, they don't want to collaborate with the community. They ideally just want the content to make itself.
00:42:57
Speaker
and have everything as proprietary systems within the company, rather than like, hey, we want to reach out to this creator over here. We want to work with Roll20 and make this happen, or Tailsfire, or HeroForge, whatever. The rare exceptions that we've seen to this are only for multi-million dollar companies and organizations.
00:43:24
Speaker
This has been Critical Role, Dungeon Dudes and Ghostfire. So, well, OK, you could say Critical Role and Ghostfire Gaming because they produce Drakenheim. So, you know, like people that have had multi-million dollar kickstarters are getting the stuff over on D&D Beyond. And even those of us that have had our work, like me, Benjamin Huffman, Ross Leiser are like the three top selling class designers on the DMs Guild.
00:43:53
Speaker
Benjamin got reached out to by the DMs Guild, or sorry, by D&D Beyond. Right before the pandemic, I want to say, uh, to add the Pugilist over there and then the talks died. So like we would love to work with them. We would a hundred percent, but it's the, the talks aren't. Yeah. Someone's throwing a Hail Mary, but no one's catching it. Yeah. Pre pandemic was before the purchase, right?
00:44:22
Speaker
I think if I got my timeline right. The idea that we had was something about the acquisition of it from Wizards of the coast probably bungled up those talks. So yeah. Yeah.
00:44:33
Speaker
But to quickly jump back to the one that they have on D&D Beyond, if you're looking, if you play through D&D Beyond and you're looking for a good VTT, there's the, above VTT is a Chrome extension, free, we use it for months. It's genuinely amazing. It plugs directly into D&D Beyond. So if you are looking for a free one and you don't want to use the one that they've got on there, that's perfect. It's so good. I think you can attest to that.
00:44:59
Speaker
Yeah, I do love above VTC and I've caught I've used quite a few VTTs I'll bear radio. Yeah roll 20. Yeah, just the standard ones. Yeah, they do the job. Have you guys tried alchemy yet?
00:45:14
Speaker
We, so now that you've said that we, he said 3D, we use Tailspire. And I think we did, the first, we, the first combat that we did with it took six hours and it, we looked at the time and we normally finished playing at like 10. I think all at the time, oh my God, it's half 11. And none of us had noticed we had the, like it genuinely, I think took our combat to a different level. It worked brilliantly for us. We love it.
00:45:42
Speaker
But yeah, I can see the appeal of us today. Yeah, like it's very I just I'm a UI UX guy. I care way more. I don't really care so much about how it looks. I care more about how it functions and how easy is it for me to use. So like with alchemy not only doesn't look pretty but the UI is just.
00:46:05
Speaker
It's so simple. I think Foundry is super powerful. The problem for me with Foundry was always like, in order for you to do anything, you basically need to know, is it JavaScript, if I remember right? I think so. Yeah, I think it is JavaScript. And I'm like, to some people, that's great, because they know Java. And they're like, cool, it's more for me to like, express that with it. That's fine. But to me, it's like,
00:46:32
Speaker
I like just dragging something into the program and it working like, you know. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah, I actually I've seen videos on alchemy. I was I was looking at why was I watching the videos? I was looking at stuff like to use for when I start my campaign that maybe we don't use at the moment. I saw alchemy. It is really cool. It doesn't agree. Really good. Yes, it was definitely a consideration.
00:47:02
Speaker
Yeah. They just need a lot more content. Like alchemy is really, they're, they're killing it with the free league stuff. Um, I'm going to run vason for a couple of D and D YouTubers at some point, and I'm going to be using it all in alchemy because it looks so good. You know, um, and the video chat in alchemy is infinitely better. It, so.
00:47:29
Speaker
Oh, and the community aspect of Alchemy is also quite cool. I mean I'm not super familiar with this. I don't think Foundry has this, but the ability to…
00:47:39
Speaker
openly spectate public games is really cool. Like if if you make that fun, yeah, if you make your you can make your game public and people can like just watch in the community and see what you guys are playing and check out the system. I don't believe that there's a chat or like a messaging function, but I thought it could be kind of cool. You know what? Let me backtrack on that. That would be an interruption more than anything else.
00:48:06
Speaker
you know, I just think that like, they're they have an idea for what they want to do with a community over there. And people can watch on Twitch. But it's also cool to see that alchemy is like, supporting the idea of here's a game you might want to check out. It's a self self advertising platform. Yeah, that's really clever. That's Yeah.
Homebrew Rules and Mechanics
00:48:30
Speaker
So we've had quite a long chat about sort of home brewing and all that in general. We haven't really got into the homebrew rules. So our second segment is common homebrew rules. And before we get into that, are there any that you run in your games that you have run for so long so regularly that just become base rules to you that you've adapted?
00:48:49
Speaker
If it's 5e that we're talking about here, there's a couple things that I feel like I have to do in order to make 5e playable. And part of it's like the ethos I'm taking in the vagabond as well. Short rest are 10 minutes. We went with this rule change, I think like two years ago, and I've never looked back.
00:49:10
Speaker
Crit and vulnerability mechanics are completely flopped Crit doubles the damage vulnerability adds an extra die of damage and I just homebrew whether or not something is like Vulnerable to a damage type on the fly That thought right there made it to where I can throw out Vulnerability and people can like look at these weaknesses or whatever and it just feels cool to have that interaction making trolls weak to fire and like acid and
00:49:38
Speaker
felt like, oh, we're playing Pokemon, you know, paper scissors rocking away, right? Those two, I don't agree with the Matt Mercer bonus action potion rule because that feels like that makes a lot of other stuff. It's funny you mentioned that. That's the one I picked for today. It's the one that, to me, there's so many other character options that like Thief Rogue with fast hands, they use as a bonus action, becomes basically pointless.
00:50:07
Speaker
whenever like that much of it's getting taken away you all right yeah a whole her battery broke and she was like Alex come help me push my car up the driveway oh okay oh that's fun
00:50:23
Speaker
Yeah, we briefly pause there. I've ran away to push a car. So we're back now. You'll probably notice the cut. So we'll just acknowledge it and we'll jump right back into talking about potions. Yeah, so yeah, how do you I mean, clean off fan of the
00:50:48
Speaker
So my thing is I think that like thief rogue has a lot of cool stuff going for it that if you were to redesign thief rogue maybe and give them something
00:51:00
Speaker
as in addition to the bonus action fast hands thing or something like that. I think that that is a really cool space. I thought it was so cool that that's what I use it on my alchemist with. Use bonus action, make a potion, use action, that's how you throw it. I thought that was so cool. And I even thought the use action was so cool that not enough classes got used as an extra use action.
00:51:30
Speaker
So on my merchant and my alchemist, they both get extra use and action instead of extra attack because I thought that felt like crazy MacGyvery, you know, whatever.
00:51:42
Speaker
So I think that there's space to design space to work around in that. But I think making it a universal rule to fix the one item of a potion of healing is kind of odd because people don't make this change to fix potions of gigantism or whatever. That's true. Yeah. Right. That's kind of where I'm at with that now.
00:52:05
Speaker
But does it break your game? No. But it's one of those things that I think kind of undervalues other aspects of the game by virtue of existing. But if people want to use it, I'm not like, oh, yeah, that's not. No, it's like, yeah, sure, totally. But there's now.
00:52:24
Speaker
In our quick pause there, we spoke about the boldest gay system for health persons, which you mentioned, Alex, but we both agreed immediately that throwing the person is absolutely never going to take off in D&D.
00:52:40
Speaker
oh god no oh definitely not i thought it was cute but it's so hard to code into the game and make it like yeah objectively it's weird like you're throwing a bottle of glass
00:52:55
Speaker
Yes, it's because you're throwing a bottle of glass at someone like it's just weird like yeah It's got a healing potion in but you're still throwing a bottle of glass and shattering it To heal someone like it's just a weird thing. I think before like think about that. It's just
00:53:12
Speaker
It's odd. It's very odd. It is. My narrative massaging on that would basically be like, we know it's a magical substance. So it was like, it would almost be like getting a shot where it was like, yeah, you got hit by glass, but basically anything that was there like regenerates almost instantaneously. And I would be like, I could see the narrative through line for it because, I mean, literally consuming a potion
00:53:38
Speaker
If we're talking about what D&D means for hit points is an astonishing regeneration of your life like we're talking about mending wounds like instantaneously the kind of healing that would normally only be reserved for like acts of God, you know, yeah, but
00:53:59
Speaker
I think that there's like, you could probably massage the narrative of it out, but I, this is also like one of the funny things to me with 5e is like, well, would that be an improvised weapon attack in order to do that? Or are they like, do you have to hit their AC to do that? Can you throw it at a point? And then do they have to make a saving throw against the thing? And then, um, how like,
00:54:24
Speaker
It's a lot. It's a lot. When you start thinking about determining questions to run through. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of questions there. Yeah. Definitely it will not make. I'd be thoroughly impressed if someone thought out everything and made it a thing. That'd be very impressive.
00:54:40
Speaker
Yes, the one thing I always think is really fun to ask people though is like, okay You guys have both played a lot of D&D. It's it's really clear I'm now I want to ask you about this. What's the interaction that happens? What number one? What type of attack am I making whenever I throw an alchemist fire? Throne attack Because it's it's it's What kind of throne attack?
00:55:10
Speaker
I don't it's not improvised weapon I don't think it is it is it I would have said projectile so but because it's an improvised weapon attack does it do the d4 damage from being an improvised weapon on top of the damage in the item yeah yeah yes yeah I guess that makes like
00:55:38
Speaker
And then does it add your dexterity modifier to the fire damage it deals? Oh, I'm never giving you alchemist fire. Jeremy Crawford has said contradictory rulings on this on more than one occasion.
00:56:01
Speaker
Yeah, it's a it's because the rules for alchemist fire and the interaction of like Improvised weapon being used for idol. It hasn't been very clear This is something that I would hope I was honestly hoping that they were going to address in the like unearthed arcana rounds and I didn't see anything specifically on it So I was like well
00:56:25
Speaker
That's going to continue to be confusing for years. So yes, no, it will. I always love asking people that thing because I'll ask it and then I see someone that's incredibly confident they have the right answer. And then I'll see a completely different answer from someone who's also like, I know what this is, you know. So yeah, I wouldn't be confident the most I'd say is like.
00:56:52
Speaker
adding decks to fire like fire seems weird it is um yeah it's just it's it's really odd i can i can i can get behind adding the d4 as a thrown weapon yes like improvised weapon because as i said for the healing potion it's a glass bottle like it makes sense right but
00:57:12
Speaker
adding decks to fire is not correct. That's not a thing. That should be there. It doesn't make sense.
Pirate Theme and Naval Combat
00:57:21
Speaker
Oh, God. Yeah, that's really bugs. I've never thought about that. It's really bugged me out. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, God. One question that I have. How do you feel about a Rehear-Thai?
00:57:39
Speaker
It's so core to the expectation of having a priest character in your game that just needs to be given to clerics at 5th level. I'm doing that in Vagabond where it's like, this is an expectation. I don't think that a game should ever hide the expectation of play in Spell Choice.
00:58:01
Speaker
So I that's like part of my design ethos is I'm always like, if this is what's to be expected, it doesn't need to be an option. It needs to be a given. Right. Now, like in terms of what it means for a game, like.
00:58:19
Speaker
There's other games that do a bit more grim or like, quote unquote, realistic or grounded fantasy than the fantasy of five. I mean, if I be is fantasy superheroes, the game, you know, so like, yeah. But if you go over and you play something like Shadow Dark or Mark Borg or Nave, these are a lot more grounded, Tolkien esque fantasy heroes.
00:58:44
Speaker
So it always depends. And I'm less likely to recommend that people remove Revivify from 5E than I am to say, check out Shadow Dark. Shadow Dark is a really happy, like, we're gonna reel in the power of the expectations and reinforce dungeon crawl is the fun, rather than like,
00:59:09
Speaker
try and tell an epic level crazy campaign over the course of years, like D&D tries to do. Yeah. I can see that. My main gripe with it is I really don't like that for three. It's a story reason. It's an in-world issue that I have with it. Oh, for the price of 300 gold diamond, I can bring my friend back to life. And the inflation on that diamond would be insane.
00:59:38
Speaker
then no one's selling it for 300 gold of its life. It's silly. Although I will say, I like the narrative behind the idea of costly material components themselves being magic. I like that so much that I made the merchant class, where I was like, that's why it gets magic, is because like... Oh no. You said that to the wrong person.
01:00:04
Speaker
alex loves a merchant it sounds amazing like just straight up sounds amazing i i just i love the idea from like uh i i i loved octopath traveler and uh tress um the merchant that's over in there i was like there is such a fun narrative beat here for what this could mean as a character um but how do we make it like jrpgs are very
01:00:33
Speaker
high, high magic games, like incredibly high magic games. So it was like, I like the idea of how do we justify in a slightly more real back pulpy fantasy game like D&D that this merchant would get spell casting. That seems really weird to say that just because you opened up a shop suddenly, oh, here's Fireball. Like, you know, so that was always a weird thing to me in trying to figure out. And then I read that there was a book
01:01:03
Speaker
They made for second edition. There was a discussion from Elminster and Volo as to, and it was an interesting kind of out of character moment for a lot of the D&D books, but it was Elminster and Volo talking about the philosophy of value in material components and why it was that material components were themselves magical. And whether or not that meant that value
01:01:32
Speaker
The inherent value we put on a thing is itself as magical as the idea of beauty or, um, the study of the arcane or the divine or whatever. And that to me was so cool. I was like, yup, I'm making that a class now. And yeah.
01:01:51
Speaker
That's really cool. Well, I think you've definitely sold that class to Alex. And I think I've had like kind of similar thought processes for my part campaign. And I've talked about this before is I'm trying to implement
01:02:08
Speaker
kind of like a second class it's it's it's not a subclass or a class i i would call it like a role fit like a role class or whatever and what it is is like positions because it's going to be a pirate campaign and it's positions on the ship oh right right like i'm it's basically like a separate like sheet of things you can do based on your position on the ship just for like role playing and stuff um
01:02:33
Speaker
and some actions because like I would rather not make someone have to write a whole subclass to be the captain of a ship and just waste their stuff. So it's like a role playing thing that they like action. And it's all for, they can do stuff for ship combat as well. That's the thing. It adds to ship combat, but it's only like on the ship. It will have no relevance in the middle of nowhere like on land. It's just solely for the ship. And I've been trying to work.
01:03:03
Speaker
All of that like the similar to figuring out how you, uh, the merchant spell cast and stuff like that. I, this is super random. I just saw this come up on my feed. Uh, Dan Dillon just got fired at wizards of the coast. They're firing people from the D and D design team right now. Oh, yeah. I just did Dan Dillon just posted. Well, today was my last day at wizards. Not sure what's next.
01:03:36
Speaker
Wow. I just, not to totally detract from this whole conversation. It was just like, I just saw that come up and seeing as what we're talking about. I was like, that is absolutely very, that's crazy irrelevant. Um, that's probably not great swinging back to our old conversation about, uh,
01:04:02
Speaker
Yeah, I guess the thing I would say to kind of, I guess try and tie it back is that I think we're seeing D&D take a very odd direction right now. I think that a lot of the decisions that are getting made are reinforced by a lot of corporate decisions.
01:04:30
Speaker
This feels very corporate mindset because I don't really know why someone like Dan Dillon would have been fired over them, forcing their C suites to take a one month pay cut to pay the yearly salary of several employees. Um, so my, I, I guess personally here, I mean, I'll say something on Twitter too, but like to anybody that's getting laid off from the wizards design team, uh, my condolences. I am incredibly sorry about this. And, uh,
01:04:58
Speaker
Absolutely. Well, I guess to kind of pull it back in on what the conversation was originally, we were, remind me real quick, I need a refresh. Oh, I was talking about, I'm trying to incorporate like role classes kind of like as the thing to my pirate campaign for like ships and stuff. Because I think it's a cool like concept to add to D&D is like,
01:05:28
Speaker
for role playing and stuff for purpose. It's a part of some combat and shit combat. And it's like your role as a separate thing as opposed to just imposing it on their subclass and be like, yeah, you are this now and you are only this. I think it should be something like that should be explored. I don't know if it has. It probably has been before.
01:05:51
Speaker
but like having roles and stuff, yeah. In a small way, it kind of did, but I actually like the idea that you're going with there where I think you can make these a series of feats or not even feats, but just like you say, like you've adopted this position on a ship. Here is that mechanic, right? If you wanted that mechanically expressed, you could say like, well, here's a minor thing.
01:06:17
Speaker
You know, so if you look at, what is it, Ghost of Saltmarsh? Is that the right book? Ghost of Saltmarsh. So the way that they do naval combat over there is like everyone's on a different era. Every ship has different positions that you could occupy. So like if you wanted to be a helmsman, you could go and steer the ship or whatever.
01:06:45
Speaker
And you can say like I pretty easily like whenever you Man this portion of the ship you get this kind of bonus or something like that I think that you could actually do some fun stuff in that realm but yeah, I would definitely say that's probably the kind of thing of like I
01:07:05
Speaker
This is where I think freebie feet makes a lot of sense, where there's a fun thing that the characters get as a reward for the story. And you've been doing this. This is your position on the ship now. Here's your crewmate feet or something. Your crewmate perk or, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a fun space to occupy there. Definitely. That's definitely a need. Yeah. Because I want it to be like a
01:07:34
Speaker
uh kind of like basically like another character sheet but you don't get like the the hit point bonus and ac bonus and all that it's just like because obviously if they start out as a pirate crew they're not going to be as good as an experienced one yeah so they gain more experience they get more fun things like stuff like that um is is yeah it's kind of why i'm i'm going for for them yeah because otherwise ship combat would be a bit a bit boring like
01:08:01
Speaker
traveling at sea be a bit boring if they didn't have all like extra stuff like you know yeah yeah it's the navel combat stuff that they currently like included in the game is fine i know like i've seen it work but i can't help but think the fact that there's still people that are like yeah but i i still want to write something else makes me think that they didn't really hit the mark 100 you know yeah
01:08:29
Speaker
Yeah,
D&D Horror Stories
01:08:30
Speaker
I mean, I've tried to find just like more interesting ones, really. Yeah, it's fine. Like it works, but I'd want something more interesting. I'll make a recommendation to you right now. Pirate board.
01:08:49
Speaker
So, the Merc Borg system, very very elegant and everything but there are like ship crewmate rules stuff like that in here that I think it works out a little bit better because of Merc Borg initiative system.
01:09:06
Speaker
This I think is a really good place to start for some quick reference ideas that aren't just exclusive to Merc board. But yeah, no, I will absolutely check that out. Because I have been trying to find material to just steal from.
01:09:21
Speaker
People have really tried to take a shot at like, it goes beyond just naval combat and turns into like, well, what if the dwarf creates a runic golem that we can get in all Power Ranger style and like pilot this thing? Well, what does that mean, right? And it's like, the problem is like the naval combat rules feel like they work, but it still feels like it's not quite click, right? It doesn't feel like it quite,
01:09:51
Speaker
It feels super intuitive for some reason, which is odd because it's just 5e combat, but you're on a position on a ship and it. Yeah. Can we. Story.
01:10:08
Speaker
I'm looking forward to the story. I love it every week. It's a highlight. Would you would you guys mind if we took a fiver so I could go to the bathroom real quick? No, no, that's fine. So just while Alex tries to find the horror story for this week, we have a story we started last week of a tier list of like the worst story we've had and the tamest. The worst was someone attending to microtransactions, which was horrendous. The worst this genuinely
01:10:38
Speaker
we've read a lot of horror stories at this point this is episode 18 we've read 18 this will be 18 horror stories and i don't think we're ever going to read a horror story on that level ever again that was so to put it in perspective uh
01:10:55
Speaker
a DM basically uh got one of the players extorted paying about 700 dollars worth of just cash to them to like revive their player to uh give their player cool items uh they were taking just real money 700 dollars worth and the player was paying it i know it's insane yes genuinely
01:11:19
Speaker
And the craziest part is when the player said they wanted to stop, they got threatened to be like jumped in real life. It was the craziest story we've ever read. I know it was wild. It was crazy.
01:11:37
Speaker
I've heard. Okay, so there was a situation similar to that going on. If I say like, that sounds like a very, when you say microtransaction, that sounds very fair.
01:11:52
Speaker
There was a situation that was kind of like that where I'm aware of... This person's no longer making D&D content, but this person has essentially left the internet entirely. But the reason that they left was because it was a big D&D YouTuber who was charging like $250 a month for their fans to come play a game with them.
01:12:18
Speaker
And yeah, sometimes they were just flaking entirely on scheduled meetings. Sometimes this was if people were paying more, they were getting more perks out of the campaign. And I was like, well, this just sounds completely, I'll just, not too big, but it was a Dawn Forge cast. The guys completely left the internet at this point and it's like all over Reddit. But yeah, like this, I've heard of this happening and I'm just like,
01:12:48
Speaker
Guys, I like D&D. I mean, I like playing TTRPGs, but I'm not paying anybody $200 a month to play a game. Exactly. Especially not once a week. Yeah. And the tamest one was just a guy that showed up and claimed he knew D&D pretty much and then didn't ask what a D6 was multiple time to session. So not an issue, really. Annoying, but like...
01:13:17
Speaker
Um, yeah. Uh, what else did he do? He, um, it was a one shot and he turned up with a character, like of character levels nine to 20 for his character for a one shot, which is really odd thing to do. Great. Normally no abilities goes in there though. Yeah. Haven't picked ability scores. Yeah. Yes.
01:13:46
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that works in a thing like Mark board where your characters are going to be sent through a wood chipper, you know, but like. Yeah. It was very, very interesting. Yeah. Yeah, the.
Podcast Wrap-Up and Reflections
01:14:12
Speaker
The one that I heard, well, okay, the one that I heard. I have this as a video on my channel of a situation I went through. This is Halloween, like, 2008. No, 2017, I wanna say. Maybe 2018. So I'm a musician in the scene. And I play guitar for a lot of musicals and stuff like that. It's like my day job, quote unquote.
01:14:39
Speaker
Um, and I, I was talking about, I wanted to start off a, uh, horror, uh, like, you know, over the course of a month, like a short horror campaign. And, uh, I needed one more player and I just kind of put it out. So like, you know, theater peeps, Hey, come check out this game called D and D. Uh, we're going to be playing it here, whatever. And, uh, I got recommended this person and.
01:15:01
Speaker
They show up. First off, I live in Oklahoma. They show up to the place that we were going to play this. It is like 94, 95 degrees outside. And this person is wearing a full on three piece suit. And yeah, bow tie everything. And I was like, ah, OK, it's hot. Whatever. We're going to we're going to work with this. And I was like, they said that they had played D&D before.
01:15:28
Speaker
and they were really ready to play a bard that to anybody okay the fact that your your eyebrows went up it was like yeah that's the person that they were going to go for right um
01:15:42
Speaker
So the night was chaos, but I will say the moment that we'll tell everybody just how chaotic this was going to get was whenever I asked him, all right, did you bring dice? He went, yep. And he pulled out Yahtzee dice. And the reason why I know they were Yahtzee dice is because he had them in the red cup that comes with the Yahtzee game.
01:16:04
Speaker
So we had a bunch of these sixes to play D&D with that were in the Yahtzee dice. Right. And yeah. So Q like I mean, this guy plays like he it's really clear like he he saw all the jokes online about Horny Bard players being like the funny way to play Bard. And like that's just everything he wanted to do was play Horny Bard.
01:16:33
Speaker
um so all the nightmare situations you could think of for horny bard yeah that was this one i mean the guy was gone after that first session but it was like they i'll never forget the yachtsi cup that was one of the funniest oh my god i wish he i wish it had been ironic
01:16:50
Speaker
I wish it had been a like, oh yeah, I've got dice. And then he would have had like an actual polyhedral set. I would have been like, this guy's awesome. He'll be at every one of my tables from here on out. But yeah, no, he really thought he needed a bunch of d6s. And I was like, so you told me you played D&D, and yet, no. Yeah. Oh, boy. That's him. That's quite good. That's quite funny.
01:17:17
Speaker
Yeah, I've thought about getting a Yahtzee dice just to have it like up in my background somewhere. That'd be great. That'd be really good. That's a nice callback. Yeah, just that little red cup somewhere back there.
01:17:34
Speaker
So I have found the story. The story we will be talking about today. The title is DM Unfairly, TPK's Party. Always interesting. So this story takes place in a mini campaign run by one of the players in my main online D&D group. I'll keep things vague for the sake of anonymity,
01:18:04
Speaker
close enough, but it took place in a homebrew world made by the DM, we'll call him C. C has started this campaign pretty well and in the beginning, one little railroadie, the campaign was fun and going on smoothly until the last session. To give some more context, I'll introduce the party. Me, Oath of the Watch Paladin, H, Plasmoid Barbarian, T, Cobold Warlock, I might be wrong about that one, F, Human Rogue.
01:18:34
Speaker
So, the last session was going pretty well. The party had just arrived at a masquerade ball, me and H's characters were pretending to be a married couple, attending while T and F snuck in the back. Bear in mind me and H didn't have our equipment. We snuck through the party pretending to be party goers while looking for clues, and solving the puzzle to get down to the vault holding the item we were looking for. They'd be looking for it for two sessions.
01:18:59
Speaker
We get to the main puzzle room, touch a spooky key and play the notes or all the notes on the piano to open the vault door. All of which we are guided to by his plot hooks. We get down into the vault and find the item we were looking for.
01:19:12
Speaker
As we were leaving, we were stopped by the big bad of the campaign. This is where the unfair TPK happens. As we exit the vault, all our characters get frozen, no saves, and forced to listen to the BBG's evil monologue as he takes the item from us. After he finished his monologue, he kills all of our characters.
01:19:35
Speaker
yeah but that abruptly no saves no nothing he said we had made poor decisions and when we asked what those decisions were he listed vague examples that some were dumb not dumb enough to warrant that and some of the examples were things he made seem necessary for the plot to progress he almost refused to explain why no saves were involved
01:19:57
Speaker
and how my moon being spelled was completely unaffected, asking if he was immune to radiant damage, to which I got no reply. He tried to continue with a weird afterlife feeling like we just weren't into it anymore and the campaign fell off.
01:20:13
Speaker
If he'd started the campaign by saying he was going to kill off our characters, or at least let us fight the PBEG, even if we were going to lose, then I probably wouldn't have been as frustrated with it. But to just have a character you developed and grew to really like, being killed in an unfair way, for little to no reason just frustrated me to no end, I think communicating could have made this situation much less irritating.
01:20:40
Speaker
After note, we had one other player who left as soon as he saw the red flags and seized the enemy. Kind of wishing I had followed his lead. Nice. That's rough.
01:20:55
Speaker
Like, this is a, I mean, it's, I have never played, really heard any advice from any DM that was ever in so far good as recommending forced death of any kind. Don't like, even if you're doing those like, you know, whatever, like you make the, so this is a clear communication of risk.
01:21:26
Speaker
players should always be aware that there's some kind of risk going on and like these sudden like aha moments it's like well yeah you you're given an amount of power as a DM to you know arbitrate and force your hand in certain situations but that there's an amount of trust that comes with that
01:21:46
Speaker
And what's going to wind up happening is those players that went through that aren't going to trust you after that. So why would they continue playing your game if you prove that they should have no reason to trust you? Yeah. Not that I'm advocating for this, but the freezing with no roll, the dying with no roll,
01:22:08
Speaker
If you want to do that, make them roll. The roll at the end of the day could be irrelevant, but they've rolled and they've said, I felt like they've done something to at least do it. Not that I'm recommending it because it's a horrendous way to do it, but like at least you're using a mechanic of the game. I don't know. I'm trying to somehow better manage it, but it's all around horrendous. Yeah.
01:22:34
Speaker
I mean, to me, it sounds like somebody who, how do you put it? I always kind of question what the point is to the, what is the intention? What is the point to this being a story beat rather than, I don't know, just write this stuff out. You're gonna get a better reception to stuff like that if you understand the media better.
01:22:59
Speaker
And you can do that in a story, but whenever you're subjecting people to that as a part of your game, we just know that this is not really good for the media of a game. We have to tailor that experience. That's why certain things work better as a book than they do as a movie, or better as a movie than they do as a book.
01:23:23
Speaker
Yeah, it's odd. It's like they have a story in mind and they just wanted to play it out. They didn't have the ability to write it to be like, oh, I'll just get people to play it out. And then I'll have my ending that I want regardless of what they want. Yeah. Which is a very satisfying way to play.
01:23:42
Speaker
i mean the thing is with this as well is by the sounds of it they were enjoying the campaign up until this point so if you had like if if the dm had let them know that at some point they were going to die for an afterlife thing it could have been really cool yeah like this whole that's what i was just thinking yeah like it wouldn't be a horror story it wouldn't be here and we wouldn't be talking about it if all he did was just gone
01:24:08
Speaker
One of the plot hooks is that you are going to die at some point, and we're going to have an afterlife thing. So yeah. Yeah. You know what it is? It comes back to one thing we say after every one of these stories. It's just communication. If this had been communicated in Sessions and Arrow, it wouldn't be this issue. He wants to be playing this game right here.
01:24:27
Speaker
dungeon classics has a literal death funnel. Like that's part of the character creation. It's like this isn't really my preferred thing to play. But I will say that like the death funnel is funny, where like you're supposed to roll up like four different characters and put them through like a level zero style thing. And then whoever makes it out of that situation alive is your character.
01:24:52
Speaker
And it's goofy, but a lot of this game is very goofy. I like that. That's fun. Yeah. A lot of the game is very goofy. A lot of the classes are just random table rolls. So to people that like Wild Magic Sorcerer the game, this is a very goofy kind of an experience like that. So yeah.
01:25:18
Speaker
Yeah, wow. I do love a wild magic surge table. They are very fun.
01:25:27
Speaker
The reason it works over there in Dutch occult classics is because that's like people know going into that what they're getting out of it. Um, yeah, so and it also like the reason why Merc board gets away with like quick death is because it takes you 30 seconds to make a character and you're not supposed to like your character. It's supposed to you're playing a you're playing scum you're you're playing a, you know, total cartoonized
01:25:52
Speaker
If someone shoots your jaw off, you're probably still going to be playing that character. But it's like, you know, like that's part of the intention of it, you know. Yeah. So, yeah, that's great. But I guess.
01:26:14
Speaker
I don't know where that ranks on our table. It's like middling. The ending's bad, but at the end of the day, they all just left the campaign. In terms of our horror stories, honestly, it's one of the lesser horror stories we've had before. Because I feel like that's just a thing.
01:26:37
Speaker
that just could it could have been good it could have been bad and it was bad is the outcome basically it's just a thing I don't even like yeah I guess it's a horror story but like objective like objectively is it's not as horrific as some of the things we've had no
01:26:59
Speaker
But then again, if our opinion just warped from that microtransaction $700 one way, we'd just be like, that's a bad one. Yeah. Honestly, it's very possible. There's, I don't know if you guys have heard about this one, but have you heard about the, it was a LARP session. I think this is like the most highly upvoted RPG horror story, or it was for a while. It might've been taken down.
01:27:30
Speaker
but it was a LARP session where I guess the person running it didn't tell them that they spiked the potions that they were all drinking with LSD. Oh my god.
01:27:54
Speaker
Yeah, there's a there's a crit crab video out there about this one Yeah, this was like big on reddit whenever this first dropped. Oh Yeah, they were large session this guy went to he found like a barn or something like that like a farm
01:28:10
Speaker
like an abandoned farm and they all thought that they were like LARPing that they were drinking these potions or whatever for the session and He went on this monologue or something and subjected them all to this spell. Oh Okay, I'm actually tripping right now
01:28:35
Speaker
Yeah. Just committed a crime. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, he poisoned them is what happened. Yeah. Poison them. Yeah. I need to find that link. God, the story is horrifying. But yeah. Yeah. The moment like there's there's fun RPGs. People that do that kind of stuff are like.
01:28:57
Speaker
That's a whole other level. And not a good level. That is horrific. The experience must have been so trippy for the people who were there, who didn't just... Some of them knew they must have thought actual things were happening. They must have tripped out insanely. Yeah, I mean...
01:29:20
Speaker
having like having had the experience okay having had the experiences I have had I can't imagine a worse I already did not have a good time whenever I tried the stuff I tried I cannot imagine that being in an unfamiliar territory while this person is describing to me this thing that this evil wizard or whatever warlock
01:29:39
Speaker
that's so true no i would just be like uh the best i could do is like i wanted to be in a warm bath and just hanging out and that was already a rough time don't put me in an abandoned silo with some guy telling me wizards casting magic at no there's a bunch of fantasy nerds too yeah honestly
01:30:03
Speaker
At that same, all of their fight-a-flights must have just kicked in and either a riot started or people just lagged it like, oh, fuck, you know, that is insane. Yeah. Well, thank you very much for joining us today. We've genuinely had the best time. It's been an incredible, it's been a very useful conversation for me personally, just getting some ideas about what I can do.
01:30:33
Speaker
I'm sure you feel the same, Alex. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, thank you guys for having me. Absolutely. Anytime. That's wonderful. So thank you very much for watching. As always, we are on everywhere you can get a podcast. We're on YouTube as well, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. So yeah, thank you very much for watching. And we'll see you next week. Oh, before I forget.
01:31:03
Speaker
one final thing if our timelines are correct this will go out on the 30th of december so this is our new year's podcast so happy new year before we forget oh happy new year everyone yeah well see you guys hopefully next year thank you very much for watching
01:31:54
Speaker
you