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Our 50th Episode Review
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Join us for our 50th episode! In this episode, Mark and Ben reflect on the lessons and highlights of the Tabletop Tune Up podcast, and look ahead to new topics and games to be covered in upcoming episodes. If you're a new listener, you'll get a sense of what our GMing podcast is about, and if you're a longtime listener, we hope you'll enjoy our reflections on some of the episodes we've created for you. Here's to another 50!
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Transcript
Anniversary Mishap and Celebrations
00:00:00
Speaker
Happy anniversary, honey. Now, listen, before you do whatever crazy stunt you've got planned, I want you to open mine first. Zina. I found it at an outlet store.
00:00:11
Speaker
Look, I know it's a knockoff, but I think it's going to look great on you I hadn't really planned on giving you your anniversary gift until tonight. You know, anniversary's good all day.
00:00:23
Speaker
What are you talking about? You can never wait all day. You can't even wait till light out. Come on. know. I know, that's me. It's true. forgot. You actually forgot our anniversary.
00:00:36
Speaker
I'll fix it. I'll go out right now and I'll get you something. I'll make it right.
Celebrating 50 Episodes
00:01:21
Speaker
Well, for episode 50, that is a very appropriate intro mark because I got you nothing. No, that's okay. I just got you that intro. That was it. Just a lot of work that went into that.
00:01:33
Speaker
Then I spent a lot time and more time and its and yeah you know, just making sure the sound was good. But if you didn't get me anything, that's okay.
00:01:44
Speaker
it's okay You know, ah there's still time. Look, I will i will go and I'll find you a juicy GIF somewhere. Look, I hate it when you're like this.
00:01:57
Speaker
Hey,
Podcasting Reflections and Insights
00:01:58
Speaker
everybody. oh are we live? Yeah, that's ah this is Tabletop Tune-Up, you guys. and Welcome. Welcome. I'm your host. Ben Dyer here with my co-host and a partner in crime, Mark Lehman. It's been 50 episodes.
00:02:11
Speaker
50 episodes. Yep. We did it. I'm really happy with it. So today friends, what we're going to do is we're going to actually do kind of retrospective. We're going to do a review episode and we're not necessarily going to like go back and talk about all that stuff in detail, but I thought it would be neat to kind of just kind of hit the highlights. What are some of the episodes that we did that were our favorites?
00:02:29
Speaker
What were some of the topics we've covered? ah Where did we have a lot of fun or think there was something really interesting? maybe for you to go back and check out on your own some other time. So just at the top, Mark, 50 episodes in, are you feeling about podcasting? Like, are you enjoying this outlet as a way to sort of talk about the craft and the art of GMing?
00:02:49
Speaker
Well, I'm of kind of two minds. I enjoy, of course, I enjoy chatting with you. You're of my friends, all-time friends here. So like, we love just engaging and talking about games. So I love that aspect of it.
00:03:03
Speaker
As far as do I like podcasting, it's fun. There's a little bit to it as far as k craft. And I don't know. It's it's not easy. Yeah.
00:03:15
Speaker
I mean, there's some effort going to put into this. We're kind of doing this podcast for ourselves. It's a fun way for us to kind of talk about role-playing games. Because let's face it, we don't have a massive audience. And I don't think we're like expecting to get one.
00:03:27
Speaker
But it is fun. But we're having fun. I think that's right. I think that the reward is in the thing itself.
Evolution of Podcasting Style
00:03:33
Speaker
um I do know that we have interesting download statistics and analytics and things like that. um For those that are curious, ah there are actually folks. Or lack thereof.
00:03:42
Speaker
Well, that's true. Listen, there are there are folks listening from the UK, from Germany, from Canada, mostly from the United States. So I think there's there's great stuff out there. People are interested. I don't know how long they listen or stay on with it, but.
00:03:58
Speaker
You know, one thing that I thought was kind of fun is that we both want to learn how to do this. yeah So i feel like that was rewarding and of itself to learn the craft and kind of what goes into it.
00:04:11
Speaker
And I would encourage others, like if that's something that they're interested in just jump in and do it. You know, there are going to be some rough episodes, but it's rewarding and fun to learn the craft.
00:04:24
Speaker
And kind of on that note, Ben, I got a question for you. Sure. Yeah. We're episode 50 What has been the biggest change that you've, you've made since the first episode? Cause the way we do our episodes now at 50, quite a bit different than episode one.
00:04:43
Speaker
I would say you're kind of the behind the for people who don't know, Ben's kind of the guy who goes in and does the edits if there's edits to be done. Yeah, I'll say, I'm hoping it's not laziness. I suspect it's not, ah but I am a little more permissive with little verbal fumbles, ums, and all of the sort of fillers that we use.
00:05:06
Speaker
Because I think it also helps people understand when we're thinking about something versus when we're not. There are some times when, of course, we'll edit out, you know, extra... renditions of a given phrase or something like that. But um for the most part, I'm trying to find that naturalistic feel of conversation going back and forth. So um I'm trying to keep my editorial hand light and I'm learning to do that more than I. Our first episodes, guys, we were, um, um, um um um um um we were, I mean, a lot.
00:05:39
Speaker
And the edits Ben had to do to cut those out were extraordinary. But we have limited our ums to a dozen, no more. I think it's kind of like swear words for the FCC.
00:05:53
Speaker
That's kind of what I'm going with. We'll see. There's a lot we've learned, I think, over the course of this
Podcasting Styles and Successes
00:05:58
Speaker
thing. I also think we've grown a little bit in terms of like how close to the notes we're trying to stay. you know we've We started with a lot of notes at first, and I think we've kind of ranged that in. I think these days we're a little bit looser about that kind of stuff.
00:06:10
Speaker
kind of abandoned the notes in some episodes altogether, um which is fine if we really know a subject. For instance, we we love our review episodes that we've been doing lately because we just love talking about games.
00:06:25
Speaker
So like if we've played a game, we don't need to write down a whole bunch of notes about our thoughts about a game because we can just share them to each other. Yeah, I think what's interesting too is we're I think we're still kind of finding our way a little bit because parts of what we do are really trying to help people kind of the way a teacher will help you with the subject, right? And so I think a lot of our notes were were written, at least for me, I was writing them a lot the way that I would write notes for a class when I was teaching.
00:06:54
Speaker
Yeah, we want to be instructional and it helps to have a little bit of a format, right? Right. Other times though, I think it's very much just a little bit of stream of consciousness. I don't think we've covered anything so definitively that it couldn't be revisited.
00:07:08
Speaker
I would agree with you in some bit. I'd have to go back and listen to a few of them. I do know that we can tend to beat a dead horse here and there, but you know, those horses keep getting reanimated and coming back to life.
00:07:20
Speaker
Right, right. No, I mean, I'm sure there's more we could say about house rules. I'm sure there's more we could say about world building. I'm sure there's more we could say about all these different topics.
Encouraging Unique Gaming Styles
00:07:30
Speaker
My hope though, is that what people are hearing on the other end of the podcast tubes is that this can be an approachable thing to do that. You don't have to stress about it too much that there are, you know, really easy ways to kind of get started and maybe people are, are getting some insights to help them take that leap into the GM seat.
00:07:51
Speaker
Yeah. Fair point. What are your, some of your favorite topics, Ben? Do you have any that you really stick out that you enjoyed? Yeah. You know, I think it was really fun when we did the series on world building, because I think that was a neat structure and those things were connected to each other. And it was like a kind of an ongoing conversation in a lot of ways.
00:08:10
Speaker
That's a challenge one for me. I'll be honest. yeah you're You're a very kind of structured world builder. You really have a thoughtful approach, organizing your thoughts on the paper. And I'm kind of like the opposite.
00:08:23
Speaker
I have a scatterbrained approach where I'm You know, got just notes in my head. i got maybe a few things written down. The things I can almost never find, I need them. um But honestly, that was kind of, it was instructional for me.
00:08:40
Speaker
Like that was in many ways. Interesting. Dear listeners, make no mistake, Mark may jump around a lot, but he jumps around to the same things and he'll end up kind of by ah process of incremental addition, like adding things here and adding things there. And by the time he's done,
00:08:59
Speaker
There is an extraordinary experience waiting for you. So, uh, I don't forget what I've, what I've built or what I started. Right. So, so like I can always come back and add a little bit more to it rather than create it all at once. I just kind of, it's like adding a brick and then another brick and another brick, you know, that's kind of how I do it, but it's behind the scenes. It's ugly.
00:09:23
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I also think, though, the other thing is that there's probably GMs out there that resemble each of us. And I think if it was only... you know, of more structured approach like mine or a more kind of, you know, ad hoc approach like yours. Like, I think people want to know that both of those approaches can be successful. So I'm glad so that all of that kind of stuff can work.
00:09:44
Speaker
And if there's one thing i think we could really inspire in people is that everybody has a unique approach to a game. Everybody has a unique way to run a game and hoping that maybe with our help, maybe you could find your voice to be able to to run that.
00:10:04
Speaker
And cause your voice is unique. Everybody's voice is very unique and gosh, we, you know, we need more GMs. We just do. Sure do. Well, okay. So how about you, Mark? What are some of your favorite
Favorite Episodes and Interviews
00:10:15
Speaker
episodes? What are some of the ones that you thought we did a good job with the topic or that you had especially a fun time recording?
00:10:23
Speaker
i I really liked the interviews a lot. You know that? i love getting that third voice in there to kind of give us some ideas to tune us up, so to speak. um Yeah.
00:10:38
Speaker
One that really stuck out, I really enjoyed, was Robichard. Robichard? Robichard, yeah. Chris Robichard. I enjoyed talking with him. i mean, we were talking about horror movies. I'd never met him before.
00:10:50
Speaker
So it was fun meeting somebody who enjoyed movies like that. Obviously, I liked all of our interviews for various different reasons. But I would say- and I liked that they were very different too. you know Yes. What you get out of a tag, Ted Lichtman was very different from what you get out of a- ah Brandon Holland or Randy Ward or anybody else. A hundred percent. And they're all fantastic. We enjoyed them, each and every one of them.
00:11:14
Speaker
So I would say the interviews were probably my favorite. What about you? That's a good call. um I mean, I think if I want to also pick out one that we haven't talked about on the interview side, really enjoyed the discussion with Len Pimentel.
00:11:27
Speaker
Give me some thoughts and ideas about game design. And I think every GM is in some sense a little bit of a ah closet game designer. Yes. I don't even think closet really. I mean, we have the boundary.
00:11:41
Speaker
The boundary between like house rules and game design, it's just one of like how long have you been house ruling? you know Yeah, exactly. By the way, ah let's plug his game real quick.
00:11:52
Speaker
Oh yeah. Prawlers and Paragons, you guys. This is the superhero game. I will go out on a limb. I've played a lot of superhero games, friends. I think that's the one to beat. I think it really does capture that nice sweet spot <unk> you know of detail.
00:12:07
Speaker
There's really great sort of combat stuff in there, but where a lot of games can really get bogged down with the mechanics of how all the different superpowers interact, ah this one doesn't so much, and it gives you a little more freedom to to move quickly and um my My one big takeaway from the Len interview is when he said, you know, his kind of criteria for how he thinks about game design rules and systems and things is how does it make the players feel when they're doing it? Does it make it feel more like what you're trying to do with that genre or or less?
00:12:38
Speaker
And so if you look at some of our RPG reviews, I think you could see that influence, right? When we're talking about Traveler. Traveler's got a very kind of crunchy kind of quality to it, but I think it's exactly right for the kind of sci-fi fan that that game is pitched at.
00:12:51
Speaker
Yeah. And we did we ever really do full-on review of his game? I don't think we did. we We discussed it in our interview. We did. i think it's i think that's probably in the cards. We should do that. Okay.
00:13:02
Speaker
No, it's great. And and we can get we can expect that check from him when? don't know. But, ah you know, if he just gives us little thumb up in comments somewhere, i think he gave us some comments. I think that's probably a good payment too. So he gave us a plug.
00:13:17
Speaker
So Lynn, if you're listening, we had a great time with you Yeah, it was it was fun.
Exploring New Game Genres
00:13:23
Speaker
Also of our other topics I enjoyed were some of our genre series, which we can only a limited amount of them, right?
00:13:31
Speaker
you know There's only a certain amount of genres you could really cover. But those have been kind of fun because we have played, between the two of us, have actually covered quite a few different genres. Yeah.
00:13:42
Speaker
I mean, fantasy is kind of the default genre a lot of people think about. So I liked that we could cover other things like pulp and science fiction and Westerns and some of the other topics that we've covered.
00:13:54
Speaker
And when we started, i think, well, you dreamed that we'd be very system agnostic. Well, i still think we are system agnostic, but... It's really hard to avoid the D&D elephant in a room though.
00:14:08
Speaker
It's true. yes yeah Because that's what we, you and I play a lot. That's, I'd say, at least for me, 80% of my games are Dungeons & Dragons. And you know what? yeah I'm okay with Like, that is, I am 100% okay with that.
00:14:25
Speaker
yeah I think it's, I think it's okay to sort of start there, but I think if you never get outside of that, then it becomes a D and D podcast and you kind of end up conforming the, yeah the topics and things to that system.
00:14:36
Speaker
And I think that misses that there's a lot of great things in other systems that even if you do only play D and d you could bring those kinds of things back into D and D as approaches or house rules, things you could play with to make it more rich.
00:14:49
Speaker
So I like that we are covering other stuff. Speaking of other stuff, Ben, what what what other games?
Games to Explore and Review
00:14:55
Speaker
and mean, we talked about wanting to try out Outgunned, I think it was called.
00:15:00
Speaker
that right? Okay. okay That's one of the games on our list to play. Do you have any other games that you are kind of like in your mind, you're like, I really got to get to this. Daggerheart is on my short list.
00:15:12
Speaker
Okay. Dagger heart is there. One of the ones for me that I've heard from multiple people that I'd like to play and maybe talk about is Delta green. Have you heard? wow. Yeah.
00:15:22
Speaker
I've never played it. Have you? I haven't played it, but I read some of the books and stuff. It's a really, that one gets any is pretty regularly. The guy who's the chief designer and that's a guy named Ken height, really good dude and at all this stuff. And it's kind of one of these things where you kind of go, look, what if ah you kind of mishmashed all that Cthulhu mythos stuff with all the government conspiracy stuff?
00:15:44
Speaker
And you realize the government's been trying to keep a lid on this thing for a long time. and Wait, wait. Is this ah this game is set in reality or? I'm just joking. No, I love that.
00:15:55
Speaker
A coworker of mine keeps bugging me to play this game. and Yeah. You should take him up on it. Yeah, I think I will. i mean We'll have to do a thing. It's super popular. I mean, as as the Call of Cthulhu stuff goes, like that's a popular system.
00:16:09
Speaker
And we probably should get into that and cover it sometime. But also the Delta Green... book line, the series of books that is a, you know, it's a kind of a take on that, um, is very, very good. So I'd say definitely check it out.
00:16:24
Speaker
Dagger heart, Delta green outgunned. but I would say those are top three on our games to try in, you know, in, in the future here near future.
00:16:36
Speaker
I will also throw out a plug for a game i played recently called Vaisen. And Vaisen is kind of like kind of like 18th, 19th century Swedish horror.
00:16:48
Speaker
It's ah by the fine folks over at Free League who have been producing, it seems like every awesome non-D&D game that's out there. ah And it's it's really good.
00:16:59
Speaker
So give that a shot. Have a look at Vaisen when you get time. One of these days too, even though it's a very kind of, i think in some ways it can be a pretty challenging game to play in. i do want to get back into Middle Earth somehow.
00:17:13
Speaker
There was a fifth edition version of Middle Earth. Somebody had some books. They're beautiful books. I've seen them. Yeah. Never played them. I've got the adventures in middle. Oh no. I think I got rid of those.
00:17:24
Speaker
I used to have the adventures Middle Earth. You got rid of, you got some books. Listen, it, it's, I have to confess, i did. But the reason is is because there's a more current edition.
00:17:38
Speaker
And what you want to look at, I think right now, we we're talking about Free League is the second edition of the One Ring. And I think there's some great stuff in there. So yeah, one of these days, it'd be great to get back into that. It's a pretty well supported game line. They've got great art.
00:17:51
Speaker
And I think it's actually... ah weirdly
Online vs. In-Person Gaming
00:17:54
Speaker
affordable. but well so there's There's also a thing of like, you know, people say, why don't you go back and play like some of the old editions, maybe even second edition D&D or first edition or just older editions of games and things like that.
00:18:07
Speaker
I primarily play my games online. As you play a little bit in person, but mostly online. um Those games are really hard to play online. The materials aren't made for them.
00:18:20
Speaker
They've got these built-in you systems that we use, like Foundry. They're cumbersome to try to play something like that. So I try to stick the games that have some good backing to it, that I can play them online.
00:18:35
Speaker
support within your existing vtt yeah that goes into a lot of my thinking as far as games i want to try and i know that delta green's got some good support um dagger of course is going to have lots of support lot of people are playing that right now so yeah so for so for folks who are wondering why we're not playing some of these other obscure games is really just comes down to like how easy is it to play online Yeah, and I think this is something we don't talk about a lot, but one of the nice things about playing online is, A, you can connect with people that you haven't seen for a long time. And Mark and I used to live in the same city, and we had a great time playing games and things, but we don't now. So this is basically the way that we have to play with each other.
00:19:16
Speaker
But also, you may have found that, like, you have a hard time finding people who want to try to play a Delta green or some other thing in your local neighborhood. But gosh, when you connect online, there's a great big community out there and you can find players.
00:19:30
Speaker
There is. And i think, I don't know what the percentage of people who play online versus in person. I'm almost guessing that more people are playing online these days, but I don't know any sort of stick statistics to back that up.
00:19:43
Speaker
Maybe we should have an episode where we talk about kind of like the differences between them, how you can enhance one. There's definitely ways you can do that in person. We've talked a lot of lot about that, but Online is kind of a different beast and the things you kind of want to accentuate might be very different than, you know, interesting topic altogether.
00:20:02
Speaker
but Yeah, we've talked a little bit about it, but I think it's worth revisiting. Certainly, Mark, I think you do an especially good job. We were talking about our different kind of prep styles before. ah you're You're always looking at new mods and new enhancements that make the online experience great. And it's interesting. I feel like if I was going to play a regular sit-down game with you at some point, it would feel sort of weirdly vanilla because all the bells and whistles would be gone. it probably would.
00:20:31
Speaker
I was just thinking about that. Like um the kind of attention I give to a map that I've found, like a really cool map that's been designed by like somebody like the mad cartographer or, you know, all these great um asset makers that are out there.
00:20:47
Speaker
might... i might have more attention to the story drawn into that map than when I sit at the table with a pen and I've drawn it right away in person at the game.
00:21:01
Speaker
Cause I hadn't even thought about the map until I'm sitting there drawing it sometimes. So um don't know. There's, there's interesting stuff to talk about there. i got ah question for you. Okay.
Streaming Games: Engaging Content?
00:21:12
Speaker
but but Nobody is asking this, just me. uh online play like this is where yeah you know you got your you're recording your game sessions okay you see these all the time on the youtubes in the uh tic tacs the utes are doing it tic tacs okay is that ever something you would be interested in doing i think i could be interested in doing that yeah Yeah.
00:21:41
Speaker
I mean, the kids want to see it on the Tic Tacs. i I definitely think it's one of these things where you need to find the right group of players. You need to find great chemistry. i think that has to come through.
00:21:51
Speaker
It's interesting though. I don't think we've ever really talked about what the success factors for ah streamed game would be, but I do think you need to do something more interesting than just like, Hey, we're some randos playing a game and we decided to put it up online.
00:22:05
Speaker
That's every single video that's out there ah people playing D&D in my eyes.
Humorous Anecdotes and Reflections
00:22:11
Speaker
which Yeah, which is why I think you need to do something to kind of differentiate yourself a little bit. and And the old version of this advice was you got to have a gimmick. you know um I certainly think that it didn't hurt the critical role people, that they were all voice actors and they knew how to follow the dramatic beats and construct characters carefully and all that kind of stuff.
00:22:29
Speaker
um There's other people that... that do that differently that, that, you know, we'll try out stuff. Maybe it could be really fun for us to, to do a live stream of little played games. You know, i think if we had a D and D live stream, we'd probably get less hits than if we figured out a way to live stream broken compass or outgunned or, or if it was a game of the week kind of thing.
00:22:50
Speaker
um I found the glass cannon podcast was really cool because they were streaming games that I hadn't really seen streamed before. So, you know, maybe we could do things like that. Or maybe we don't.
00:23:02
Speaker
Maybe not, also. I was just curious. yeah we We had talked about it a long time ago, and I think I had kind of an aversion to it. But I'll say this.
00:23:13
Speaker
I am absolutely the worst person on this this topic. there's There's a couple things I've been wrong on in life. One is that I first saw, um first of all, my my brother-in-law was playing ah game, and he was streaming his game online.
00:23:28
Speaker
long before Critical Role was. And it was a it was horrible. Like they were all playing games. it was And I was like, dude, this is never, nobody will ever watch these. Like I i told him this, I'm like, nobody's ever gonna wanna watch somebody play D&D. Like it's just not gonna be.
00:23:44
Speaker
And ah year later, Critical Role was coming out and everybody was watching. I'm like, oh, that was- to eat your words that day. The other one said that, I had a friend of mine years ago.
00:23:58
Speaker
He was a game designer, video game designer. And he yeah showed me, he's like, I got to show you this game. It's really cool. It's in beta. This developer is making it right now. And he's he was enlisted do this like demo of it whatever.
00:24:12
Speaker
And it was Minecraft. oh i said i said this is the I said, this is the stupidest game I've ever seen. nobody will ever Nobody will ever play this game. Well, ah if anything you'd like to say by way of of apology to the fine folks at Mojang and Microsoft? I just wish I had stock in it. That's all. Yeah.
00:24:32
Speaker
Yeah. yeah Amazon stock. That'll never go anywhere. That's me. Mark Lehman. I got the beat. I got an the beat on what everybody's playing right now. Yeah, he's he's got his finger on the pulse of the kids in the future. Yeah. Look, I think we've all got stories like that. You live a certain amount of time, you see some big missed opportunities.
00:24:50
Speaker
I've got my own share of those stories.
Audience Appreciation and Feedback
00:24:52
Speaker
On that note, I think, are we wrapped up here, Ben? This is a good moment to thank our audience for being with us thus far and to re-invite them to email us at tabletoptuneup at gmail.com.
00:25:04
Speaker
with your ideas for things you'd like to see us review, things you'd like to see us tune up, anything to do with the GM's craft. All right, it's time. Hey guys, we'll be back again with another episode of Tabletop Tune Up.
00:25:16
Speaker
Until then, keep those dice rolling.