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The Joy of GMing - with Special Guest Jareth of Labreth Games!
43 Plays10 months ago
Welcome to the sister-series to Anywhere But Now— our Doctor Who Actual Play Podcast! Our special guest today is Jareth, of Labreth Games!
Join us for a great talk about Jareth's *unique* approach to creating dramatic Pathfinder moments. Learn how he and his friends put his "refined gnomishness" to good use in their TTRPG shop! Discover new tips and tricks to inventive home-brewing you can use yourself!
We’ll cover some making-of and behind the scenes tidbits of our mods as well, so do stick around, with host Casey Jones.
Learn more at our Discord! Be sure to subscribe and leave a comment, and follow us on BluSky and Twitter for more updates. Don’t forget to send your questions & fan art to [email protected]!
Don't forget, Casey can run your very own game of D&D for you!
Music by Tabletop Audio
Theme by RJ Pirchinello
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Transcript
The Joy of GMing and Tabletop Magic
00:00:14
Speaker
you
00:00:34
Speaker
Whether you're at a game table, in your comfiest chair reading a book, or listening at home, there's nothing like a great adventure story. But they don't happen by accident. Welcome to the joy of GMing, a special interview series on the craft of great gaming.
Episode Overview: Guests and Topics
00:00:50
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There's just something magic about sitting down to a good table with great friends, isn't there? If you're a lifelong gamer or a newbie rolling up your first character sheet, if you're a DM or GM or just can't get enough tabletop talk in your day,
00:01:04
Speaker
This is the show for you. Each episode will bring you amazing guest speakers to talk about writing games and running them, building fantastic worlds and compelling story arcs, and oh, so useful tricks of the trade. Here's some amazing stories. Get inspired for your next game and join us for an hour and a half or so of lively conversation.
Casey Jones: Writing and Producing Background
00:01:24
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This sister series to anywhere but now, our Doctor Who actual play podcast, will be released between mods or episodes of our ongoing serialized show. We cover some making of and behind the scenes tidbits of our latest mod as well, so do stick around.
00:01:39
Speaker
I'm Casey Jones. Over the last dozen years, I've written and produced screenplays, children's animation for TV and film, graphic novels, stage plays, murder mysteries, and audio adventures. I've also been writing and running tabletop games for over 10 years. Join me as we dive deep into tabletop with experts in the field.
Introducing Jareth from Labrath Gaming
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Experts like our special guest today, Jareth of Labrath Gaming. Hello, Jareth.
00:02:06
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hello thanks for having me and can i just say as someone who spent roughly five or six hours trying to come up with a youtube intro for our channel
00:02:18
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That was amazing and I'm in awe of you. Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate that. Yeah, I took a great course on building out an interview style podcast and it had a lovely formula for how to do your intro, breaking it down like what it's going to be about, what the special perks of sticking around are, and introducing our host and our guest, which is a wonderful segue to introducing you.
00:02:48
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Yes! Labrith Gaming is an independent tabletop game shop specializing in minis, custom arts and t-shirts, homebrew supplements and character art commissions and campaigns. Founded in 2021 by two fans of Tabletop Gaming, Labrith LLC brings a combined 40 years of tabletop experience to the front and center of their business and their passion for the game.
00:03:12
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really shows.
Jareth's GMing Experience and Love for Pathfinder
00:03:14
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Jareth is the forever GM of the business and has 20 years in GMing experience alone. Everything from comedic campaigns to horror and fantasy. He's run the whole gamut. His favorite system to run is Pathfinder and always brings an energy best described as refined gnomishness to the table. I can't wait to hear more about that. Jareth!
Role of Game and Supplement Makers
00:03:36
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Hi!
00:03:37
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Hi, again, thank you so much for having me. You're very welcome. We love having game makers and supplement makers on this show because if anything, anywhere but now is a supplement, it's fanfic with some decent sounding people at the table with me. And we've been very lucky in that respect. But yeah, no, we love having game makers on the show. Welcome.
00:04:03
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Well, thank you. It's definitely a different like I found like being a supplement maker. There's game makers who they're making the whole like you take fifth edition. There's a couple hundred different full conversion things to make it like a whole new game.
Challenges in Creating Game Supplements
00:04:22
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You have people who created
00:04:25
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our modern D&D, our modern Pathfinder. And I feel like being a supplement maker in that way, it's very much the same, but it's so very different because when, you know, TSR Wizards, they sat down, did their thing, there wasn't anything really to box them in. They were able to take a thing, run with it and do whatever they needed and felt.
00:04:51
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I have to sit here and be like, I have this crazy, wonderful idea for a class, or a player has come to me with this crazy, wonderful idea of a class, but I have to follow X, Y, and Z, and I have to do it in one, two, three way. And so really, it's an interesting, it's like a puzzle, and it's fun.
00:05:13
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It is like a puzzle. I'm a big believer that limitations can foster creativity. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Like, if you only have the budget for a black box, then by God, you will fill that black box with color and shadow. Exactly. Interesting textures.
00:05:33
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But yeah, having the underpinnings of what makes that class work, I imagine that's helpful. It's been helpful for us for homebrewing monsters, but I would love, and I'm sure our audience would love as well, to hear about your process of coming up with a class.
Homebrewing Origins from Player Ideas
00:05:50
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Does the idea come first? Do the logistics and the rules kind of feed the flow towards that? How do you find your way to forging a new class?
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Well, it does vary. We're up to, I think when I was setting our physical books up last night, we're up to 15, 16 class books and a couple of our big tomes hold seven or eight classes themselves.
00:06:18
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It varies. I know there's occasions. So my business partner, I was living with him for quite some time while we got this up off the ground. We figured 24 seven access to us could help to each other could help us hammer out the first year of business. He has children.
00:06:35
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His children like to sit in and watch our D&D games. A lot of the things they said would help spark things, especially even in the campaign, like just running the campaign. A lot of things that those sweet children say were wonderful, wonderful ideas to sidetrack. And just for example, we were running through Rise of the Ruined Lord's Pizoid Venture Path, their first official pathfinder.
00:07:01
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And we got to the point where the party was sitting just outside of town at this nice little lake, having a little refreshing moment. I decided to roll up some random encounter stuff, and they got the Sandpoint Devil, which is like Pathfinder's Jersey Devil. It was like 2 CR above them. So I was like, grab their oldest kid, who I love, and he is my co-GM forever. I don't care where he goes in life, he is my co-GM.
00:07:30
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i pulled him out of the room i'm like so this is what's happening to your parents right now this creature that could kill them they have been fighting it for two rounds everyone's a little wounded i'm not confident they survive i'm not confident the jersey devil survives what happens does he run i want you to make this call
00:07:53
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He looked at me, didn't miss a beat, didn't take a breath. It says, he attacks my dad. I'm like, okay, this is what we are doing. We're in it. That's fantastic. We've had monsters created by them with classes. They said, hey, I want to see this. Like, okay, cool. With players, the hardest thing for me and also simultaneously the easiest thing for me
00:08:21
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when at a table is to tell a player no I don't want to tell a player no because as I've told players I don't run the game the game is like a boat you guys have picked your cruise destination okay you have your itinerary you've chosen it
00:08:39
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all i do is steer the boat put my hand on the wheel for a little bit for a couple bit little rough currents and then i take my hand off the boat and you guys sight see i love that that is how games should work so if i have to tell you no i don't like it you don't like it
00:08:58
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So we don't, we kind of redirect. I have a player who was a sorcerer, and there's a tattoo sorcerer archetype. And so he's like, cool, wonderful, I'm doing this. But I also have this pet saber tooth.
00:09:15
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and like we're kind of stealthing here could I work some magic since I do tattoo magic can I tattoo I'm like if we stop session now because we've been going for six hours and you give me time to make up a class before next session next week you absolutely can so then it's like sit down make a better tattooed mage make sure everything he talked about is in the class
00:09:40
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Plus more, or there'll be times where I'm out with friends, we're talking, we're having a couple drinks, and just that creative mind goes, it's like, you know what Pathfinder needs, you know what every adventure fantasy tabletop needs. We have clowns and bards and jugglers. I want to see a mind taking on with invisible swords and invisible walls and locking things in boxes. I want a mind adventurer.
00:10:10
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So now we're working on a 20 level mind class for that class. That's absolutely incredible. It's also complete. It's completely batshit, which I love. Absolutely. There's that refined gnomishness. You know, you have that idea of the crazy insane tinkering gnomes who super excited, high energetic, crazy hair colors, crazy hairstyles. That's me.
00:10:36
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But in a way where your ears aren't bleeding after 10 minutes talking to them because they're insane. So we kind of refine it. We use it and channel it. I love it. Well, I mean, you've already mostly answered this question with talk of your Kojian, who is your son.
00:10:53
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My business partner's son. Your business partner's son, got you. But is that what inspired comb brewing in the first place? Hearing suggestions and like that beautiful kernel, what this game needs is and filling that void, filling that niche that did not exist until you thought it into existence.
Jareth's Creative Process for Classes and Monsters
00:11:14
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So, homebrewing for me, a lot of, like you had said in the beginning, we're talking like 20 years of GME experience. I've run the gamut with players, with ideas, with them wanting to do custom stuff. And sometimes, sadly, you go five or six years between running the campaign.
00:11:34
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Oh, oh, yeah, I know it's it can get crazy what I said as a standard for one game Some of you like well, my friend told me you did this like I don't remember You know what allowance I made here and the heat of the moment during my improv piano So I need to start writing these things down and codifying them and for a little bit that
00:11:59
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was kind of all it was. And then about seven or eight years ago, I got involved with a Pathfinder living world on Discord. They're like the modern Westmarch of games. Nice. Played there a lot. At one point I was like, I want my character to do a thing, but we can't do it. And they're like, you have a suggestion on the forum. I'm like, you never should have told someone with my mind to a open suggestion. Why did you give us a suggestion box? Why?
00:12:29
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I remember what I think my very first thing was. I had made a monk inspired and shamelessly ripped off of Wimp Low from the cheesy kung fu parody movie Enter the Fist.
00:12:44
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And the one thing Pathfinder didn't have mechanics for that I was like, I would like to have is I ended up creating a wondrous item called the Shoes of Sleep. So I took penalties to myself and got a couple extra key points. And from the moment they okayed that, it was on. My mind was racing. So by the time we sat down to this business last year, we started it with just minis.
00:13:13
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And they're like, okay, well, how can we expand? And I'm like, I have so many home brew ideas. So we just started cranking them out. And now, I just kind of whatever takes my fancy for a home brew thing, we work off. I work on it. I drank one out, spend a couple weeks working on it, run it through a play test. And then here we go. So it's always been a mixture of necessity as a GM. You can only play the same system
00:13:43
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so many times in the same way before you yourself are bored of it. So fun and necessity kind of combined. I was like, I can just crank these things out. I've been an avid reader of fantasy my whole life. Well, you can make a wizard that, you know, is parallel to this one in a fantasy genre. Why not make him as a class so you can do it even better?
00:14:11
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You know what? You've given me an idea.
00:14:13
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I would like for you to lead the conversation and I'll contribute where I can. But I would like you to talk our listeners through the process from inception of idea for let's say a monster or a character class and where you start and where you start filling in the details and what you end up with because you struck it when you mentioned play testing, kicking the tires on these things to make sure they actually work or fly depending
00:14:43
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I think it would really be useful for our listeners to hear from someone with so much experience their creative process.
Developing and Testing New Character Classes
00:14:50
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Where do you start? Where do you go? All right. So I will preface this with my creative process is not the industry standard, or at least I really hope not. The way this operates is insane. I mean, that's the creative process in general. It requires a touch of insanity, at least.
00:15:10
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Oh, absolutely. They, when I was doing theater, they talked all about that. We'll talk about that too.
00:15:15
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awesome so it starts with the concept either that's been voiced to me that a joke has been made in one of my sessions or with one of my you know tabletop buddies we on some occasions i've tried to build something and found that unless i am the man who argues on discord for five days with my gm that i should be able to be permanently polymorphed into a shield
00:15:45
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there's no answer to it so then we it's like hey well here's the here's the idea now the latest thing i'm working on the mine we'll just go to the mine because we've got a couple other things that are going to pop out that i want to i want people surprised on the when we drop them but like no one ever expects to see a mime
00:16:02
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Nobody does and I thought it was such an out-there concept. I've had a friend in that living world who made a Grandiferous Grandspot who was just a forest wizard dressing as a man.
00:16:19
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And we talk about that sometimes. It was wall of force, telekinesis, mage hand, was kind of the bread and butter. And we would talk about it and it's always sat with me. Like, Gredispot was fun, but doesn't cobble together well. And one day after I had had a physical injury at work and was given medicine at the
00:16:42
Speaker
emergency room. I was talking. Oh no. I always find some leg issues but they gave me you know some medicine to help and I was talking with my business partner and we were watching something on YouTube at the time about about mannequins which led to minds because I'm terrified of mannequins and I'm terrified of minds. As well you should be as is right and good.
00:17:08
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. So the idea came back in my head. I'm like, all right, so here's what I want to do. I want to do this. This will be fun. This will be wonderful. We've done some serious stuff. We just hit out the gorilla fighter. We just hit out, you know, a warrest people. We just did all these more serious ones. Our big psychic overhaul. Let's do something fun now.
00:17:33
Speaker
People like the fun classes, too. Joke classes and such. Oh, sure. I sat there, opened up a Google Doc, and I just started typing the basics of what I want. Do I want this to be a marshal? Do I want this to be a spellcaster? Do I want it to kind of gish? I like gish builds myself. A lot of our classes are capable of gishing in some form. Can you explain what gishing is for me and for our listeners who aren't familiar with the term?
00:18:00
Speaker
Absolutely. So the idea of gishing comes back from 3.0, 3.5. I confuse the two so often of the Githyanki race. Okay.
00:18:11
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They excelled at both spell casting and martial prowess, where most classes you're a spell caster, or you're a flavor of fighter. You're a wizard or a fighter in some flavors. A niche like in Pathfinder the Magus, who is able to deliver
00:18:31
Speaker
spells through their weapon hits can do both. Basically like switch hitting long range, short range, and marshals. This is the switch hitting of marshals and magic users. And I have always been a proponent that the best classes are classes that can gish. Not just because our level keeps you like your power curve stays.
00:18:55
Speaker
keeping relevant, but because even a beginner can pick up and learn an entire system. If I give you a class that has all the abilities of a wizard and all the abilities of a fighter staggered together, by the time you hit 20th level you understand martial combat, you understand spell casting, you understand how each of these classes
00:19:20
Speaker
acts in combat so now by the time they're like i can go pick up this most insane magic thing because one campaign and i have the baseline of how the entire system works and i'm like that's wonderful that's great gish classes are the best so i sit there and i decide are we going caster are we going fighter
00:19:40
Speaker
Our Marshal, are we going Gish? From there, it's a matter of, especially because we work in Pathfinder, a lot of it's the rules I need to follow in Pathfinder. Our base attack bonus, how many attacks are we getting a turn? So that's going to tie into, I have to have this hit die.
00:19:56
Speaker
Well, let's hold that thought for just a minute because that's a great step one.
Merging Mechanics with Flavor in Abilities
00:20:01
Speaker
Absolutely. I'd like to chime in and use an example of our own. But when you're starting with a class, when you're starting with a monster, something that isn't quite in the system already, it is a great idea.
00:20:12
Speaker
to figure out not only what it is going to be but also trimming off out of possibility what it's not going to be and using your example like figuring out the balance of what abilities or spells or attacks it's going to have by figuring out if it's going to be a straight warrior
00:20:30
Speaker
or it's going to be a wizard or it's going to be somewhere in the middle is a really great starting point. We used a monster, we used a homebrew monster in our game zero called the knowledge as in to gnaw on things and knowledge because that's what it ate.
00:20:46
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So, we concocted this idea for a legless, hovering apparition that looks like a rain cloud, if the cloud had certain brain-like swells to it, and a mouth towards the top with teeth a la something out of a Monty Python paper cartoon sketch.
00:21:05
Speaker
I love it. I love it already. To get around and by figuring out what it was and what it wasn't the fact that it did not have legs made it fairly slow and you know trepidations to just get around in the first place but getting into step two of figuring out the framework of the rules it's going to have to apply to and asking that question of you know what this game needs? It needs a floaty not too fast
00:21:31
Speaker
brain-themed monster that eats knowledge, that eats information right out of your head. What already does that in the system? And in our case, it's the memory worms of Doctor Who. They were introduced during Eleven's run when he was in Edwardian Christmas times. The santaren with him kept dropping the memory worm and getting
00:21:52
Speaker
the last five minutes completely evaporated. But stats for the memory worm exist. The beautiful thing about having bought all the source books from Cubicle 7 via drive-through RPG. We have those stats. We have access to those stats. So can you tell us about where you start on the rules side of things now that we're in that step two, when you're coming up with the MIME class that can gish
00:22:19
Speaker
All right, so yeah, this is where like the nitty gritty and where being in the tabletop scene as long as I have on both sides of the table has vastly helped. Okay. Because I need to know, at least in Pathfinder, you have basic metrics that everything's going to have their level.
00:22:42
Speaker
their base attack bonus, their fortitude save, reflex save, and will save, or for fifth edition, what bonuses to their con checks, their dexterity checks, and their wisdom checks. Now all of that Pathfinder has created tiers for, so like if you have good fort, your fort is going to look like this on a table.
00:23:03
Speaker
as you level it's going to increase like this if you have bad it's going to increase like this so a lot of that stuff is a matter of again what isn't this thing i don't want to give the mime amazing fortitude saves and being as hail and healthy as a fighter or a barbarian that's not a mine you know what a mine is good at will saves wisdom stuff and most definitely dexterity
00:23:30
Speaker
Sure. Oh, absolutely. Coordination is going to be a major, a major stat for them. So a lot of the nitty gritty gets really dealt with just by saying what to say, like you said, is and isn't from there. It's now. Okay.
00:23:47
Speaker
we have this basic shell of what equates to a commoner. What does it take, mechanics-wise, to go from a commoner to an adventure? Where is this character's little character development hero journey in creating it? So that's where it becomes a whole... I end up with six Google documents between every class.
00:24:13
Speaker
because I will start down a path. I'll be like, no, never mind. Start another path and be like, I have fully re-envisioned how this works within the framework. So that's where things get a lot more creative, a lot of the things flowing. And it ends up easiest for me
00:24:32
Speaker
is if I do not consider the mechanic, which I know is counterintuitive, but if I sit here and I say, all right, so I want the mind to have access to mime techniques. Cool. What are these mime techniques going to be? I want my mind to be able to throw an invisible rope and trip an enemy.
00:24:51
Speaker
All right, cool. Now, let's move to the next mime trick. I want to put people in invisible boxes. Get these things put on paper. Solidify that this is what we're doing. Now I go back and I'm like, okay, we want to trip people with invisible rope. It's fun. It's light. It's great. Mechanically, what check is that?
00:25:13
Speaker
okay that is a trip attempt so what action does it take to trip so as a standard action you can trip under these mime circumstances so the flavor is now grafted onto the mechanic repeat with the next thing so it's running them parallel but together so that
00:25:35
Speaker
I can open up my Google Doc at any point and see I have things I want the mind to do. Now, what does that mean dice wise? What dice gets rolled for this? Then it's a matter of, okay cool, I know how this mechanic works, so now we just kind of hook them together like Velcro.
00:25:58
Speaker
You hook them together like Velcro. That's so beautifully put. No, and you're absolutely right. By figuring out, and not necessarily focusing on, because you'll have to have the numbers ready eventually, but by figuring out what the impact should be first, in your case, the tripping, by pulling the invisible rope and figuring out how you're gonna do that, you then figure out what the attack is and what stats it's gonna call on. Similarly, with the knowledge,
00:26:27
Speaker
I knew that it was going to be eating information out of a victim that it managed to sink its teeth into. What did that attack look like? Well, it was going to be with the teeth count as a minor weapon, so they're a plus two to the attack. And then we figure out it's the resolve
00:26:48
Speaker
and convince plus 2d6 because it's it's a it's a d6 game versus the players the pcs resolve an ingenuity plus 2d6 and the result uh can depending on how the dice roll out they could lose minutes of information they could lose days of memories or weeks or months or longer and by figuring that out by figuring out not only
00:27:16
Speaker
what the creature's attack is. It led us, interestingly, to the creature's weakness as well. Because this thing is made of, like, it's a floating cloud. It's fairly misty. It's incorporeal. So it wasn't until we were halfway through putting its stats together that it occurred to me that it would only be material when it is feeding.
00:27:39
Speaker
when it has actually latched its teeth onto someone or onto some object like a book that's full of information, and it can just down it like a paper shredder. Now we have this mechanic of, okay, it's only solid and can be hurt when it is feeding. Great. What kind of tests do our players need to roll in order to notice that or figure it out? I love how in the creative process, the first begets the second, which begets the third.
00:28:07
Speaker
So you've got your mind, you've got the concept, you've rolled out the specifics of how it's going to impact the stats and the attack bonuses and the defense bonuses. Where do you go from here, Jared? All right, so where I go from there is as much work as all of that is. In my mind, it hasn't come together as a class yet. It hasn't come together. The next step, once I have hooked the mechanics,
00:28:36
Speaker
to the flavor is formatting, just formatting the document. At that point, putting a class ability, giving it a header, folding something. Because at this point, I have 20, 30 pages of hodgepodge cobbled together ideas that don't necessarily flow. And there's something about, as soon as I, you know, select a class ability, hit apply heading one,
00:29:04
Speaker
throwing a little mark, a little format line, now it's real. Now we are actually doing this. Now this is a real class that's going to look real with my stat block. Once I throw in that, you know, iconic little red diamond line, as soon as that is in a stat block, this is now a real stat block, not a crazy idea. So the next important step then
00:29:31
Speaker
is format formatting so that i'm in the headspace of all right we are doing something real now this isn't a side thing just for a player and a campaign in my personal campaign this is now something for everybody
00:29:46
Speaker
So we get it formatted all nice and
Testing and Feedback in Class Refinement
00:29:49
Speaker
done. I have a handful of five or six min maxers and munchkins that I'm good friends with just turn over the years. So once the formatting is done, I grab anything that I think might be a little broken. If I even have a
00:30:07
Speaker
a sniff of something's cooking in the kitchen with this. Hey, can you go break this ability for me real quick? Do it as hard as you can. No limits. Standard campaign rules. Destroy this. And they do. Say what you want about people who min, max, and munchkin. Whether you love them or hate them, if you need something to be broken, by God, they will break it.
00:30:34
Speaker
I have had to go back to the drawing board on so many things that I thought were harmless. They were harmless little fun things. Until. And it's like, oh, oh, you're one shotting bosses with this and one thing from the core rule book.
00:30:53
Speaker
Oh, all right, I didn't see that. I normally try to toss and turn every scenario I can come up with, every scenario I've seen. But having more people dedicated to doing that is a wonderful thing. So at that point, things go back to being formatted and go back to, all right, let's change. Maybe this is not a D8 of damage. Now, maybe this is a D6 because we need to kind of pull some of the damage back.
00:31:23
Speaker
sure then we run it again and then it gets broke again and we fix it and i run it again eventually i write up a one-shot for me a level 15 character i'm going to be the GM and the player here my goal is to destroy my own campaign with just this character wow how bad this is yet
00:31:48
Speaker
And from there, after we've hit that point, it's a matter of, so I know where this is capable of. I know where it would be in my campaigns, but my campaigns are not your campaigns are not Todd's campaigns and so on. So now it's a matter of where do we want this to actually go? Do we want this to be a for a high powered campaign? Do we want this for a lower powered campaign?
00:32:13
Speaker
Yeah, are we going under the hellhole rules where it's like a 38.5 takes max health feed at every level I'm going to throw things that are 5 CRs above you guys at every moment in this one shot total dealing upwards of 1200 damage because that's what we're doing this one shot and
00:32:32
Speaker
I've seen it. I've seen it. It's not pretty. I've seen it. It doesn't sound pretty. But so then it becomes of what power level do I want this at? Is it okay if this is broke? Am I bringing this in for novice players? If so, we're going to turn the power level down.
00:32:49
Speaker
Am I looking to give something new for expert GMs who have been in it forever and players who know every rules lawyer, FAQ, errata, sentence of the books like the back of their hand? Okay, you guys will make this a strong one for them instead. And so it's a matter of who's getting this book. Obviously, I don't know who's getting, but I could be like, who would I like to get this book?
00:33:18
Speaker
from there watering down or buffing up again and by the time I've ran it through five or six times it's ready to be released. There you go.
00:33:29
Speaker
I mean, you're basically talking about the creative process of publishing. You come up with a first draft of something, get it in as good shape as you can get it, and then hand it off to experts for that poking holes and things and examining weaknesses and catching typos, getting it back and seeing what needs to change so that it can actually work, so that you can catch all the things that fall into blind spots naturally on their own. I love what you have to say about how formatting makes it more real.
00:33:59
Speaker
Like you're absolutely right that there is something more that makes it feel more tangible. Yes. When your scratch paper that's been cast across half a dozen Google Docs or pages documents or Word documents.
00:34:15
Speaker
into something that actually looks like the published material that you deliberately aim to emulate. Gives it, lends it some of that legitimacy of like someone actually took the time to make sure this not only sounded good,
00:34:31
Speaker
on paper, but also looked good on paper, you know? Absolutely. And it's like a situation where like, I'll be on page 10 out of this 30 page document, italicize the spell and this spell effect in this paragraph, give it a heading, tweak that, tweak that, color the font the right way for the heading. And then you sit back and you're like, I did that. I did.
00:34:58
Speaker
a thing that looks like something the big people would have done. And once you hit that, I get a lot of creative fatigue with it sometimes because when I start a book,
00:35:11
Speaker
my free time, all my free time goes to that idea before it can leave my mind, before I forget it forever. And so it's like you get to that point and even if you're just dedicating time here and there and it's not hyper-focused, making homebrew stuff carries so much fatigue, creating in general, making a campaign, making music. Absolutely. If you don't have something that's like a benchmark like
00:35:37
Speaker
you did the thing you are currently doing the thing that picks the energy within you back up you won't get things accomplished if you can't when like that spark of creativity starts to like dole if you can't like pump the bellows and make it a raging fire again
00:35:59
Speaker
you're going to lose everything. You've got to find something, even if it's as small as this is applied heading one versus normal tax. If that does it, wonderful. Take that and that will keep pushing you forward.
00:36:15
Speaker
I was watching a fascinating video yesterday on procrastination. The rule du jour was no zero days. On the idea that a day in which you do nothing towards a creative project is a day that seriously
00:36:30
Speaker
harms your momentum. And even if it's as simple as writing one line of dialogue, or drafting one email asking someone for help, or proofreading a sentence or two of a work in progress, as long as you're doing some kind of work on it, then you're still making progress. And progress, not perfection, is what we're all striving for.
00:36:54
Speaker
But on the subject of creative fatigue, I absolutely hear you and I absolutely understand you. As someone who has been writing professionally for over a decade, the more projects that you see to completion,
00:37:11
Speaker
whether it's a short story, whether it's a one-act play, whether it's a webcomic for a day or two, whether it's act one of a TV pilot, whatever it is that you're trying to work on, the more of those that you actually finish, the better sense you have internally of what your creative reservoir is gonna be good for. Allah, how many miles can I get on this tank of gas?
00:37:38
Speaker
Does that make sense? Absolutely. The more experience you have with your own limitations, when you can tell that you're down to like a quart tank left, take the break. You do not gain anything by running yourself to exhaustion because as fun as it is to talk about steps one, two, three, four, five, and six of getting a idea to a finished class that you can sell on your very own website,
00:38:05
Speaker
Rest is part of the cycle.
Community Input and Collaboration Value
00:38:08
Speaker
Rest is part of the cycle. Listeners, Jareth did not do this project by himself in a vacuum, as fun as it is, as invigorating as it is, to jump in with both feet to creating the class or writing the story or building out the campaign for the love of God. Take breaks
00:38:30
Speaker
tap people in your circle that you can run ideas past because I can guarantee you ideas that you share in the development stage, ideas that you refine, nomishly or otherwise, in the creative process will be ideas that are polished, will be ideas that are stronger, will be ideas that go further than what you might have imagined on your own.
00:38:59
Speaker
I would like to just add something about that, tap other people if I could. Please do. Something I learned that was an entire like clouds open divine light shine from the sky type revelation.
00:39:17
Speaker
And this goes for this kind of thing. Now that I've noticed it, it's kind of a general rule in life. I was very hesitant to tap people because I was like, we're a two man operation. I clear maybe at the moment, I could clear $40 in a month on our books. That's it. I can't pay these people to like do this with me and sit down. That doesn't matter.
00:39:46
Speaker
There are so many people that you don't know will but are willing to jump in and be your biggest fan and be a supporting being. We created a mole person race because I wanted to play as a mole person. I thought just the lore of them don't.
00:40:09
Speaker
And I was like, dropped into a server that I'm in. I'm like, hey guys, what do you think of me making this poopy mole person? Here's a little bit about it. They jumped in.
00:40:21
Speaker
They said they liked this part. They said they didn't like this part. They brought up an issue because our mole people are blind. Well, how do they have an oral tradition in history? It's oral. Well, you can't do that. Look at the druids in real life had oral tradition and now it's gone because they're dead. So how about they carve it on rocks? So now mole people have Braille. Pretty cool. Now all the juices are flowing in the entire server. There are six, seven people who at this point
00:40:50
Speaker
all they want is exactly what you want and that is to see a mole person race so now we took the next three hours and we all brainstormed the thing and that was it their only request at the end hey can we use it in the server boom you have fans that you don't know you have you have support in these things
00:41:22
Speaker
damn brakes, support, floods open. It is there, I promise. None of it is something you have to go alone. Exactly, exactly. If I can share of our own experience, like I myself have struggled with asking for help for years. And it has only been recently that I've finally internalized the fact
00:41:43
Speaker
that just taking the moment to tap somebody when things are tough
00:41:45
Speaker
I have very little to lose by asking for a little help. It's not very likely that I'm going to offend someone, I'm going to rub someone the wrong way, or something like that by just stating, hey, I'm excited about getting so-and-so done, but I don't know how to do blah, or my hands are full with why. Can someone who has some expertise here give us some help, point us towards someone that can, or shed a little light, give us some advice?
00:42:13
Speaker
And in this particular case, the most recent one, anywhere but now, has been interested in breaking into video, possibly streaming, possibly doing Twitch. We have a presence, small though it is, but starting to grow into something on YouTube. By being so inexperienced on the video side of things, it actually did not occur to me until my spouse mentioned, why don't you go ask for some help?
00:42:40
Speaker
So we were able to find a volunteer video engineer who's going to start working with us in the fall and winter of 2023 because we asked because we got on Disney. That's right. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain working this stuff and asking for help. Oh, especially with you guys, the audience.
00:43:04
Speaker
I'm sorry, but the Doctor Who fans are some of the most like diehard, loyal, let's come up with stuff. This is fun. Expand the mythos. I don't see it very other places. So you have like an entire like cornucopia of people who would jump at just making
00:43:26
Speaker
your stuff be seen if they could because that's that fan base has been around for so long they're so big and that's where they what they want to see is more stuff official and unofficial yeah there's always somebody it doesn't matter what your your thing is like i got a lot of help with our book of the barrows our fae overhaul by people who just love like
00:43:50
Speaker
old fairy tales, like old stories of like Irish fairies. It's like we don't want anything other than the story to be told in a book. Fans of things that you're fans of are fans and help other fans. It's just that's how it goes a lot of times. Yeah, absolutely. People that like one thing share it with a friend of theirs who hasn't necessarily been into that before and then suddenly like, oh, wait, what is this? It's called Doctor Who? And it's been around since the 60s.
00:44:20
Speaker
I would love to talk with you about making minis because you said you mentioned that that was something that you started out with. Are your minis for your classes? Okay, so we have not done them for specific classes. We have like your generic like the ones you need to play at our table. It's crazy we're talking about this because we just had a huge setback with our minis. Oh no. This heat wave that like has hit America this last week. The heat dome, yeah.
00:44:50
Speaker
You know what it's not good on? 3D printers and 3D print resin. So we're out of commission with the minis until I replace things. Sadly, you had like a couple, but yes, it started as my partner and I, we are huge tech teams.
00:45:12
Speaker
We're huge nerds on just about anything at this point, but we got a 3D printer and we were just printing small little fun stuff. And eventually we were like, hey, let's throw some of this up on Etsy since we have too many minis. We don't have room anymore. There is nowhere. We have to stop buying them. We have to stop backing the kickstarters as cool as they are because
00:45:39
Speaker
You might have a Patreon problem. Yeah, we might have a bit of a Patreon problem, right? I can quit anytime I want.
00:45:46
Speaker
Exactly. It came to a head when a couple of our kickstarters got delayed by like three years. It was supposed to be his birthday present that we had backed it because it should have been done and arrived by his birthday. There were distribution manufacturing issues. They happened. We had forgotten all about it. We went out, bought some
00:46:12
Speaker
some new stuff and all of a sudden within the span of two days we have six boxes of minis that show up oh wow from everything everything decided to show up at once the kickstarter the amazon stuff the patreon everything hit it one day and we're like oh um we might have an issue plus all the ones we just printed let's try and sell them
00:46:36
Speaker
people seemed a little interested in it so we started selling more we eventually just got to the point where it's like we could do this as a business and then we started with that and once we were you know printing away seeing that there was interest or what other dnd stuff do we know because this could be our brand this is what we love we do 10 11 hour sessions once a week so like i saw your face yeah they're just like
00:47:04
Speaker
message me like we're about 10 minutes from your house it's D&D night and we'll start at like eight o'clock at night we'll be done six in the morning maybe seven we'll take a break about seven for them to get the kids off to school and then power out another three four hours and then we sleep all day till the kids get home
00:47:22
Speaker
oh my god yes so like we marathon session and this is our big passion and so we went from the minis to everything else but the minis we we tapped some people again just tapping people for help we were having issues with the modeling because blender is a very difficult tool and i applaud anybody who is very good at blender
00:47:46
Speaker
yeah we we tap some people who make designs they make the 3d models but they don't print them uh-huh some of these people do amazing work and they've got patreon so we're like we buy a license from you we print your amazing work we tell people it's your work and we sell it and you make the money off our patreon because we don't have a problem there's not 30 patreons that are about to send us new emails tomorrow or anything like that and so we just
00:48:16
Speaker
started making them and selling them. We've been working with some in-house in-house artists on making some of our own but that's great. Life has really gotten in the way lately. Everything was on pause for a couple years and now everybody's life is like slingshotted forward so the menus were falling to the side to begin with and now we're having issues with the printers so they might be stopping right there but
00:48:42
Speaker
We have so much other stuff that it's like, it's a slight, it's a little scratch in the hood. It can be buffed out soon, but we still have a running car. There you go. I wanted to ask you, what is it that makes Pathfinder your favorite of tabletops? Hands down. Like, tell me on Pathfinder.
Preference for Pathfinder's Depth
00:49:02
Speaker
Alright. There's a short answer, a short and humorous answer, and then there's a
00:49:07
Speaker
more compelling answer. The short and humorous answer, I like lots of options. I like big number. Okay. It becomes that simple at a point. Fifth edition's great. It's monumental and it's easily recognized. But numbers that are used, like where the power cap is with numbers, I don't get the high fantasy, you know,
00:49:36
Speaker
the vibe of Wizards First Rule or the Lord of the Rings stuff, I don't get a lot of that with 5th edition. Purely because I'm not seeing large fantasy powered mage numbers in a way.
00:49:53
Speaker
And I see that a lot more. 3.0, 3.5 did it great. Pathfinder does it wonderful. I can get big numbers. I can play with big numbers. Fifth edition, toned it down. They're like, hang on, because we did our first edition fiasco. Let's pivot and make this beginner friendly again.
00:50:09
Speaker
and they kind of kept it that way so you don't get huge numbers anyway okay cool so i'm going to do three attacks on this dragon that's after rolling dice 200 damage and they're like you gravely wound this dragon who is also very powerful and now rolls 10 d6 breath weapons because 200 damage doesn't take down an ancient dragon that would be too easy and so you get more of the high fantasy weapons
00:50:39
Speaker
There are other, like, systems out there that do the same thing, but instead of the high number, you still hit that same narrative. So, like, I love Mutants and Masterminds. It's great because their wound system works differently.
00:50:55
Speaker
where it is small numbers. It's only up to like three wounds. But what it takes to get a wound, that's a whole like cinematic movie to do that. So I like the big number tied with the big narration. Got it.
00:51:11
Speaker
Okay. Longer answer is Pathfinder's kept itself pretty self contained, which I like. I like that it is a system I can go to AON PRD or D20 PFSRD. I have every rule right there. Those rules don't really change. Paizo Aratus things on occasion, but
00:51:34
Speaker
nothing huge. I don't need to know anything outside of Pathfinder. So like with 5th edition, because it being the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons, there's lore. There's established lore that has been going on since like the 80s that while not absolutely essential to running a campaign, it's there. Your deities,
00:52:03
Speaker
okay they have backstory you know there's a lot there there's been so many multiple iterations that there's a lot to unpack and when you work within fifth edition you're still able to do the forgotten realm stuff a touch of the greyhawk everything some of the planescape stuff it's all still like there i like to know my lore i like to know my lore and there's so much fifth edition is not self-contained
00:52:31
Speaker
And because it has such a large homebrew market, it expands it further. It goes from being a base system to this strange, long forgotten ancient lived creature with like tentacles pointing in every possible direction to every possible thing ever. And
00:52:57
Speaker
That can be a lot for a player, that can be a lot for a GM to handle. Pathfinder keeping itself self-contained is very nice. The variety that Pathfinder gives with their archetypes and all their extra stuff
00:53:14
Speaker
I don't feel like I get enough features in 5th edition. I don't feel like I'm growing and going through, you know, that whole concept of a hero's journey. I don't feel that mechanically in a 5th edition class. So when every level I'm getting something new and every other level I'm getting a new feat, I can sit here and be like, wow, my character has grown.
00:53:40
Speaker
And I like to hit that. I like my players to feel that. And Fifth Edition does a lot good. It doesn't do those things good, in my opinion. That's fair. Yeah, it can be tricky. They're not necessarily related, but it can be tricky working in a franchise or a story setting that has a ton of backstory and a ton of lore.
Enhancing Storytelling with Descriptive Language
00:54:04
Speaker
And with something like Pathfinder that's more self-contained, just like you say, it does seem like you have less of a challenge of telling something of a story where the players don't need to come in with an associate's degree in backstory.
00:54:25
Speaker
you know exactly like with doctor who not only for fans but also for players like we strive to make it as newbie friendly as possible running a game for someone who has absolutely no idea
00:54:42
Speaker
what anything is beyond I might have heard of a TARDIS before presents its own kind of challenges but also its own kind of rewards too because I've heard GM's give the advice before of
00:54:59
Speaker
Staying away from using the monsters species when they're describing them. Like instead of saying, you know, half a dozen goblins creep through the shadows, it's half a dozen small green figures with pointed noses and ears tiptoe closer.
00:55:15
Speaker
Because number one, why not have a little diversity in there? Why not have a little variety? But also by using adjectives and traits of the creature to describe it instead of, oh no, a Mark 3 Cyberman shows up. That might present a picture, but it might not too.
00:55:35
Speaker
Yeah, cause like, it's something I try very hard to do too. It's like, you know, you don't be like, okay, you opened this door at the end of this dungeon and there is a beholder there.
00:55:49
Speaker
For players who have played the game forever, you can feel the path, oh shit, a beholder. But for you people, you'll be like them. But if you switch it to as you creak the door open at the end of the dungeon, you see this strange floating creature with sinister eyeballs and these eye stalks all turn on you. Then even a new player gets the, oh, this is scary.
00:56:14
Speaker
Oh, this is scary. Like if I'm telling someone a Dalek approaches at the end of the hall and they've never seen or heard of a Dalek before, what is that going to mean for them? But if I were to say that an impervious bronze colored tank turns the corner and aims a small gun in your direction as an ominous blue eye turns and focuses on you. Strange whirring noises lifted off the ground as it transports closer with an air of supremacy.
00:56:43
Speaker
radiating from its strange bulb exterior. Now you have a description. Game player, new or old, is going to love that and feel where the stakes are. I like when players are knowing what the stakes are. I am waving my hands like an idiot at the screen. Emphasis, yes, I am agreeing with emphasis. A fun thing with that
00:57:05
Speaker
And it's one of my, one of my bags of GM tricks is you can do that. You know what's great about that? Because you didn't use a noun, it was all adjectives. You can decide, you can real quick gauge interest reactions on that and be like, actually,
00:57:23
Speaker
Everyone seems like they know what I'm describing. It's not a Dalek. It's something brand new that looks similar, but is very much a, like, different type of thing. You can click reskin and throw everybody for a loop. And that's where, like, for GM's improv is beautiful.
00:57:43
Speaker
Exactly. I love starting with a reskin and going from there. In our pilot episodes through the Looking Glass, we've got these two-dimensional mirror monsters. Are you familiar with the term the Uncanny Valley? Absolutely, yes.
00:57:59
Speaker
Okay, for our listeners, the Uncanny Valley is when a thing closely resembles a person, but it is just off enough to seem alien and disconcerting. Like early CG models of people, one could mention the Polar Express is being full of the Uncanny Valley.
00:58:17
Speaker
So the Mirim are these creatures that occupy, and for at least for the introduction, resemble people trapped behind the mirror in some frozen rictus of a screen. And they're based off these also two-dimensional creatures that more closely resemble graffiti called the Boneless that were introduced in Peter Capaldi's era of who? That's the Twelfth Doctor.
00:58:44
Speaker
and I liked the concept but spray paint monsters weren't really a thing or spray paint itself wasn't really that that much of an accessible thing in the 1890s and I wanted to take that concept and bring it back into something that was creepy and had menace and would feel right at home in 1890s
00:59:06
Speaker
United Kingdom. And the Mirum, because they're trapped behind the glass, at least at the very beginning, get to have this additional mechanic of requiring light as a medium, as an actual source of something to bounce off of before they can start to steal the mass of whatever is close to the mirror.
00:59:27
Speaker
Having that as a mechanic, having that as the thematic, not quite a weakness, but a dependency of theirs, I feel really added to some of the mystique and the creep because it wasn't just, oh, it's a reskinned boneless. It's like, no, this is its own monster that you've never faced before. And you have to get close to it in order to understand it and know how to deal with it, you know? Absolutely. That's just
00:59:53
Speaker
That's the power of being more descriptive with things because you can switch and turn things. You can do all that. And it's so much easier for new players, too. Yeah, they don't feel excluded because they're not being asked to identify something that has been used once over hundreds and hundreds of TV shows. Exactly. This is new. It can be a new experience for them. They get to have that discovery feeling of their own.
01:00:22
Speaker
You know, just like characters that just stepped into the TARDIS for the first time, who have never seen a Cyberman or a Dalek or a Rutan spy. And another, just like a little fun thing about seeing GMs use descriptions, at least for me, it's just like, it just tickles me. If you've ever gone back and looked at old AD&D books that with the illustrations of how they envisioned like a lizard folk or a beholder then,
01:00:52
Speaker
And now they're fast. They're similar, but vastly different. It's been a large game of telephone and I love GM's describe something. And I can be like, I know enough to know what this is, but the way you see in your mind, the beholder is not how I see one. And I love yours. That is cool. Is that one of the holders to you? I love it. That's fantastic.
01:01:21
Speaker
how other GMs picture things. It tickles me wrong a player. Then again, I'm a forever GM. It's so rare I'm in a campaign. So when I am a player, everything tickles me. I am constantly new GMs. If you want to feel good about your campaign, it's your first ever campaign.
01:01:42
Speaker
put your forever GM in the player seats because they're going to be your biggest fan. I'm going to be asking a million questions. How you handle this interaction is so cool. You know what part of the coolness is? I didn't handle it. You're rolling this encounter. Awesome. It will be your biggest fan purely on the virtue of they aren't doing it.
Player Agency in Storytelling
01:02:04
Speaker
Exactly. And they want the campaign to do good. So they will help you in every way because the longer your campaign runs,
01:02:12
Speaker
is longer time before I. Yeah, as a fellow forever GM I share that ache for being able to sit down at a table
01:02:24
Speaker
and not have to be, you know, operating half a dozen things at once. I am actually joining my first D20 system this coming week. I am starting with a Star Wars 5e group playing a blue-skinned ex-Jedi. I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to that very much. That sounds like so much fun. I've recently joined a
01:02:48
Speaker
One of the Pathfinder's adventure paths, The Curse of the Crimson Throne is a fun one. It's all about like plague and uprising and anarchy and a land ruled by devils who work with the nobles to like rule over the land. It's crazy. It's fun. It's one of my favorite ones that I've ran. I know the whole thing in and out, but guess what? The GM
01:03:12
Speaker
has altered things and now me so that I can't metagame much I'm constantly messaging him do I know about this in character what I know about this I know this is a thing have we got to this part and even with him answering yes or no I took the party on the wrong path
01:03:31
Speaker
fully we detoured where our line of suspects were because I'm like I remember this person being important and now they're like yeah we met them they're dead I'm like okay well now you know I gotta help GM out here because now we're going back and forth luckily I'm playing a low intelligence character so I can come up with like out-of-the-box ideas just to add the fun so my Tango is like what if the
01:03:58
Speaker
ghost is the assassin there was like that wait what if the ghost is the assassin and now the plot's moving again it's in the wrong direction but the plot's moving again and we're having fun the GM doesn't have to dig themselves out of
01:04:14
Speaker
We're talking for three hours trying to figure out what our next step is. Our next step, let's interrogate a ghost. How do we do that? How do you interrogate a ghost? I have no idea. Oh, you haven't done it yet. Okay, great. Nope, we got distracted again when I stole a rain barrel because I thought it was contraband. That's phenomenal. Yeah, no, there's a great question.
01:04:40
Speaker
that you can use to thwart possible metagamers if they make an extremely insightful guess that they should have had absolutely no means of getting. Just ask them, how does your character know that? Oh yeah, absolutely. At least for me, I don't try to metagame. I've wore the covers off all the adventure paths I have. I've ran them so much. I can tell you exactly
01:05:04
Speaker
who is
01:05:17
Speaker
nobody's singing vampires but i'm picking up holy water so everyone's like why are you doing that and so it's just like i try to avoid that and i i honestly do that by playing characters who are lower intelligence and lower wisdom if i can shut part of the brain off isn't it wonderful then i can have fun the gm doesn't get surprises ruined and
01:05:37
Speaker
other members of party take front stage because as a GM, I'm used to I have to take front stage to push the narrative and move the campaign forward. And so I think that if I'm just like, no, yeah, I'm just a sleepy little bird who lives in the slums. I don't really know anything and can't read. The party gets to play and I'm like, but I know enough about the system to make a efficient melee person for when we get into trouble. But I'm not
01:06:07
Speaker
taking anyone's glory at that point? No. I mean, we shouldn't try to be the center of attention on the stage. For our games, my greatest hope is that everybody that showed up has a phenomenal time.
01:06:21
Speaker
Absolutely. The best way I can do that is set the table with some vivid detail, some emotional hooks to get them going, and then to shut up as much as possible, give them room to play with each other.
01:06:38
Speaker
My players love it when they'll be, I will have described what's going on, they're talking to the mysterious assassin man, and plots unraveling, and they found the mystery and the intrigue, and now they gotta go deal with this, but how are they gonna deal with it? And they'll start talking. And we have a couple home rules that I love to implement. I would love to credit whoever they are,
01:07:01
Speaker
but I don't know exactly. Okay. So we have one where any out of character talk can be done at the table with fingers crossed. Fingers crossed means my character is not saying this. This is like off the record. Out of character, OOC, yeah. And they'll be doing that and then they'll just stop doing that for a while and they'll start saying stuff and look at me like trying to gauge like, is this the right way? Is this where we should be going? Is this what you plan?
01:07:30
Speaker
And the players know I have an infamous sign in all the things. I will have my hands like I'm gripping a steering wheel, and I will let them go and stare at them. And they're like, oh, OK, we're running the show. I'm like, that's it. I put you back on the road. I put you back on that ocean. Sightsy, what's your itinerary? Captain's taking a break. That's wonderful. That's wonderful.
01:07:55
Speaker
I might be leaning on this too much. The idea of offering a tour of the facilities or more. We've had a couple of different mods where if it's on a theme park planet or a science center ocean world or an art gallery floating around in space, we've offered
01:08:18
Speaker
a tour to the players to just give them like the hopefully brief look at the whole magilla as a preamble getting into the nitty gritty deciding where they want to go having been informed and been able to make some interesting decisions you know versus just throwing them into the northwest corner of a dungeon and saying okay go off in that direction see what happens you know yeah definitely like
01:08:46
Speaker
giving the players the agency to essentially write their own story within your story is so important as a GM. That's why I found the easiest way is if there is a given session, then it ends up that I look over my notes, I come up with four to five things I want to happen in that session that have to do with the story. That is it.
01:09:12
Speaker
there is no other planning that goes into my session. There is then, all right, the whole like act react type thing going on for everything that goes on. All I have to do is, and again, I go back to the improv thing, give me a name, give me a place, give me a thing that's happening, boom, type situation. If I can hit my four points in the session,
01:09:35
Speaker
then the players are hitting whatever points they want to hit in the session because it's their story and then I just record all of it and spend the next day listening to a 10-hour audio recording of our session, type up what the new story is based on what they've done and what my next four or five points are to get us eventually to the end goal with them running the entire thing.
01:10:00
Speaker
That's really cool. That's smart. It can be helpful to be taking notes of like what major plot beats have been hit during a given session. I've also found it useful to encourage characters who are journalists because in addition to figuring out, well, what are you paying attention to? What are you actually focusing on? If you ask the right way, they will recap.
01:10:29
Speaker
At the end of the episode or the end of the game, the biggest things that have stuck out for them.
01:10:38
Speaker
yes and that's always so important because like as a GM you know what happened last session you know where you're going but if I have my players sit here and be like okay this this this and this happened I'm like that was a minor thing but it's a major thing to the team wonderful let's expand on that they didn't touch this plot point we can just drop it they're not interested
01:11:00
Speaker
And half of your session planning is half the campaign's rope. I just first thing, all right guys, what do we remember from last week? That's it. That's the story now. Absolutely. It all depends on what they latch on to sometimes. That's wonderful. I am looking forward in the future to running my first D&D campaigns. I'm drawn to systems or
01:11:28
Speaker
campaign settings like Spelljammer and Curse of Strahd, you know, something leaning more towards the Gothic and the sci-fi, because those are my particular tastes. But I can do a lot within those scenarios that'll bring enough of the open world. You're off on an adventure. There isn't a specific set story beat by beat that's been pre-orchestrated, you know?
01:11:57
Speaker
It's a different kind of storytelling from something that's more episodic in nature like Doctor Who, and I'm really looking forward to trying out something in a different kind of system with a different set of parameters.
Incorporating Horror Elements in Games
01:12:11
Speaker
Yeah, I get that. There are a lot, like you mentioned Curse of Strahd. It's one of my favorites. It's one of my favorites. It's very interesting. The settings interesting. I do know that's, that one's like a point of contention with some players though, just because of how dark certain aspects get.
01:12:30
Speaker
But it's also a good one, like, if you have experience running any sort of tabletop and you know your players, it's a really good one to, like, get out there, flex the muscles there. Do you want to, like, okay, we're gonna skip over the kid in the oven, because, you know, we don't want that. But we can lean into the wild hag and the forest part. And it's like, I love horror. I just, I love horror systems and campaigns because it's so different.
01:13:01
Speaker
You know, oh, we're gonna play Dungeons and Dragons. Fantasy, epic wizards, swords, barbarians. No, let's try haunted trees and willow wisps and oh, something's following you in the woods, but you can't make out for one eye? Wait, is that eye green? Is it red? Don't know. It's very subversive with it and I love it because
01:13:26
Speaker
There are systems that do it, can do it better. Call of Cthulhu is great for the horror and the supernatural space eldritch thing. But there's something about working within a Dungeons and Dragons frameset and doing dark horror or gothic horror that it hits different because like every player in the back of their mind is like, we're doing like Victorian era Jack the Ripper is a lich, but I am a wizard who passed Fireball and there's like a
01:13:56
Speaker
a little disconnect there that makes it so much more enjoyable because you could have played 30 wizards and be an expert at wizards but are you an expert at wizards in the haunted woods where there's no enemy to see no you're not are you and so even old players can like get a new experience when you switch those genres
01:14:18
Speaker
Well, that's one of the wonderful things about horror as a general rule. The result, the actual terror you feel, the fear, is because you've been drawn out of what you recognize. Things are not adding up right away. Things do not match what your senses are telling you. And that...
01:14:39
Speaker
discomfort that hang on this isn't how things are supposed to be wait a minute that's not right that is what sparks the terror in the first place and that's honestly that's one of the things that makes me most excited about things like Ravenloft and the curse of
01:14:56
Speaker
To kind of, you know, two Pathfinder's horn again. They did a wonderful little thing. It was, uh, it's their strange aeons one. It's very horror themed and very like Lovecraftian themed. But you start the campaign like, all right, the players all have a dream and they get murdered by something in the dream. And they wake up, they're in asylum. You don't know who you are. Start.
01:15:23
Speaker
And it's like very much, right? It's like taking them out of that comfort zone, this whole new thing. See, the thing is, I'm grinning like an idiot for our listeners. The reason I'm grinning like an idiot is because very similar conditions are about to kick off in, I wanna say, like a month or two, a very lighthearted fantasy setting where our characters are gonna wake up in a pit in the dirt, maybe eight feet deep,
01:15:52
Speaker
with no memory of how they got there.
01:15:56
Speaker
Oh, boy. And it's going to be presented as lighthearted fantasy comedy. That's going to be fun. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah. I have a soundtrack already picked out for this, and I've relabeled the tracks for my own library just so that I remember which track is for which versus the original track title from Tabletop Audio. But the track is, you wake in a pit.
01:16:25
Speaker
It's just lighthearted fun. It's going to be fun. Jareth, it has been an absolute delight talking with you today. How can our listeners get in touch with you? We are on the Twitter. If you can get to the Twitter, you've got our link tree for everything else that we're currently running. The link tree's to our shop. You can shoot us an email. It's just labrathgamingatgmail.com. If you are feeling a little bit extra with wanting to contact us and you are in the
01:16:54
Speaker
Quad Cities area within Illinois and Iowa. We are actually about to start moving in on one of the game night tables down there at Nerd HQ in Davenport. So if you want to like face to face get these orders, get to talk with us, see some of this GMing. I was asked if I could plug them here as well because they are wonderful people who spent six hours just talking the other day trying to get in and
01:17:23
Speaker
so we'll be there we're on the twitter we've got the facebook we've got patreon we've got the instagram we're around we've got a link tree to keep it all safe and combined for you guys that's great and the link tree will be available in the doobly-doo of this very episode
01:17:41
Speaker
There we go. Even better. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Jared. Thank you for me and our listeners. I really appreciate hearing everything you had to say today about modding your making up your own class and your expertise on Pathfinder and talking our listeners through making one up from start to finish. It's been really nice talking with you.
01:18:02
Speaker
Yes, it's been very, this is my first time doing one of these podcasts. So like, it's been quite an experience for me. And you did great at like, keeping everything amazing. You flatter me. I appreciate that very much. And finally, to our listeners, another great big thank you for sharing your precious time with us. If you feel it's been well spent, please share the joy of GMing with your friends who are looking to enjoy themselves.
01:18:30
Speaker
You can email your questions for me and our future guests and send that wonderful fan art to anywherebutnowpodcastatgmail.com. And if you'd like me to run a game of Doctor Who for you, reach out on startplaying.games. Leave a review, rate the show, and follow us on Blue Sky, Twitter, and YouTube at anywherebutnow and wherever you get your podcasts. Don't forget to join our Discord. Links to everything in the doobly doo. From all of us, I'm Casey Jones.
01:18:58
Speaker
There's exciting things to come, my friends. I'm glad you're along for the ride. Thanks so much, and have a great day.