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The Holiday Special
15 Plays3 months ago
In our special Holiday episode of Tabletop Tune Up, Mark and Ben show you how to create the perfect holiday-themed RPG adventure! Drawing on beloved TV tropes and seasonal traditions, we discuss how to incorporate classic holiday elements and festive experiences into your game. We'll talk about blending holiday magic with the tropes of your genre, borrowing classic holiday story structures, and keeping the tone and pace light, fun, and fast. Join us and put a little holiday cheer in your next RPG session!
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Transcript
Nostalgic TV Holiday Specials
00:00:27
Speaker
Tune up, level up your fun.
00:00:51
Speaker
Can you hear those bells, Ben? I hear the bells, Mark. it's this It's that season. You can just hear it. This episode is going to drop on Christmas Eve. It is the holiday season.
00:01:03
Speaker
Yeah. You know, if you're a fan of TV shows and you grew up like we did, ah you know, December 25th comes around. Your favorite show is going to have that special holiday episode. It's like a bass solo band. You know what's coming and you can't do anything about it. They know what time of year it is and they know you're expecting it and they're going to give it to you.
00:01:25
Speaker
That's right. ben Ben, what's your favorite episode of holiday TV? Gosh, there's there's been so many of them over the years. and And of course I can't remember most of them. One that does stick out to me though is there was a Doctor Who Christmas special with Peter Capaldi some years back.
00:01:40
Speaker
And in this episode, we went and met the first doctor again. And ah the episode kind of culminated in Doctor Who visiting the site of the Christmas truce, which, if you remember, in World War I was when the Germans and the Brits came out of their trenches and celebrated Christmas together for a moment before they went back to killing each other.
00:01:59
Speaker
That sounds very British. It does, doesn't it? That's really good. How about you?
RPG Holiday Episode Concepts
00:02:05
Speaker
Mine's Dungeons and Dragons, Ben. Today we are going to help the audience with their own special episode of holiday RPGs. I've ran a few of these in the past and um i've I've had some successes and some less than successes, but we're going to help you and the audience learn from us. So Ben, why don't you kick us off?
00:02:28
Speaker
Right. So the first thing to do when you're thinking about holiday episodes, first of all, in this episode of Tabletop Tuneup, we're going to be a little bit more narrow because we're dropping the sun December 24th. So we're going to just use this kind of holiday season. We're going to talk about it a little bit generically. But just so you know, you could you could do a holiday episode for any holiday in the calendar. You could do one for Thanksgiving or for St. Patrick's Day or Valentine's Day or whatever you want. That's fine.
00:02:52
Speaker
We're gonna just kind of zoom in a little bit though on this one and say like, start with the tropes. So what tropes define whatever holiday you're celebrating this year, right? There's some stuff that kind of people have generally and it might be things like gift giving or snowman or pine trees or cocoa and a roaring fire. Like whatever those things are, start there. um Mark, what are some ah examples that you can think of in terms of tropes for the season?
00:03:18
Speaker
I'm here out here in Minnesota, Ben. All I think about is snow. All you think about is snow. What about you? What do you got?
Incorporating Holiday Tropes in RPGs
00:03:25
Speaker
Interestingly, I think tropes kind of hit in two categories, really. Some of the tropes are about the things that you do. yeah And so, again, things like gift giving or sort of active generosity are good. Also, though, it's things that give you the sense experience of that setting. If I'm going to do a holiday episode of that's connected to the seasonal stuff, it's probably going to be set in some kind of a setting that's a little bit Northern European or at least has the chance of giving me some snow or some you know colorful lights maybe. How about you? You want it to smell like pine trees by the time you're you're in the middle of your adventure, right? Yeah, that's right. my ah My spaceship is going to have a little pine tree air freshener hanging from the rear of a mirror or whatever.
00:04:04
Speaker
Yeah, there you go. Decorate it, of course. Somebody who does a really good job of this is World of Warcraft, actually. They have like a whole catalog of seasonal holidays. Oh, yeah. Yeah. so Couldn't you like wrap up little things and and send that to your guildmates? That's right. you could You could give people gifts and wrap them up in paper and things like that. The other thing is think about how the tropes for the season interact with the tropes or complement or contrast with the tropes in the genre that you're in. So like fantasy worlds are very agrarian.
00:04:31
Speaker
And they might have midwinter festivals. Or if you were doing a different holiday like Halloween, a harvest festival makes a lot of sense in a very agrarian kind of fantasy setting. Modern action movies, right? Die Hard plays a lot with the Christmas tropes. You can do stuff like that. I mentioned Dr. Who sci-fi actually has interesting Christmas episodes, right? And Dr. Who does every year. man Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah. I've even played judge dread Christmas special where there was ah there was this guy called himself Santa Claus. It was unlicensed, given out toys. And as a judge, for we couldn't, we couldn't let that apply. a law breaker away Yeah. It was weird, but it was a lot of fun. Were you on the naughty list that year? I feel like that would have, uh, look, the order had to be maintained. That's right. Judgment had to be handed down.
00:05:20
Speaker
Mega City One's chimneys are not passageways for anybody, so that's great. We take a lot of these things.
Parodying Holiday Stories in RPGs
00:05:26
Speaker
We're taking tropes and stuff, but you could even take it a step further, Ben, and just go for a straight-up parody of some familiar holiday story that you love. Hey, you like Home Alone, Ben? What about when your hirelings and henchmen get left home while the adventures are off, you know, raiding the castle? That's great. Where did we leave my buddy here? My sidekick, he's gone.
00:05:46
Speaker
Yeah. And they have to fight off the other people with all sorts of creative traps. Who knows? You like Die Hard? Well, I've run a game where a party's pet goat had to rescue the the heroes from like a tower. So the heroes are incarcerated. They're basically behind bars, right? Yeah. Goat has to rescue them. That's how it works. So, I mean, just you could completely lampoon those your your favorite holiday movies and people will have a good time.
00:06:10
Speaker
I think you could do some fun things too with some of the other more traditional stories. I imagine you could do something fun with A Christmas Carol, the the Charles Dickens stories. I can think of no better way to to have poke a little fun at your murder hobo party's expense than to have them visited by three ghosts that they can't really do anything about, but that who show them all the miseries that their murder hoboing has you know inflicted on the surrounding countryside.
00:06:33
Speaker
the the main thing you guys is just we're we're trying to have it as much fun as we can we're trying to maximize our fun because this is your time to be with your friends right around the holidays so just let's not make this overly difficult you know it could just be a standalone episode or you could just tie it in with some creativity but just the main thing is have fun Something to think about, too, right, is if you're wondering, like, well, how do I take these kinds of things and either weave them into my story's continuity or exactly how does that work? um Is my existing party going to now have some weird side diversion and then we've got to figure out some way to put that in continuity?
00:07:10
Speaker
Not necessarily. There's there's a couple answers to this. One is you can kind of treat it like a
Innovative Gift-Giving in RPGs
00:07:15
Speaker
throwaway. And then they woke up the next day and said, gosh, I had a weird dream. And that can be fun. Right. There's lots of ways of doing stuff like that. The other thing you could do and Mark, you alluded to this a minute ago is you can also have people play NPCs that they've met along the way, whether those are hirelings or people that your characters had relationships with. There's always some supporting cast that you could then bring out of the wings and say, all right, well, today you guys are playing those guys. And here's the.
00:07:40
Speaker
more modest adventure they're going to have. Yeah. One of the ones I ran, I was talking about that goat in the Nakatomi Plaza. The whole party played the goat. It wasn't just one person. They all got to take turns and come up with ideas. What was fun about it is when you have four players all thinking of wacky ideas for this goat to do, they start feeding on each other. That goat all of a sudden starts doing some pretty wild crazy stuff.
00:08:09
Speaker
You know, something that you kind of mentioned here is you're kind of house ruling a bit when you were doing the thing with the goat. And because it's only going to be like one session or it's kind of a very light session because it's special, like you can get away with stuff that normally you wouldn't get away with. yeah I would encourage GMs to house rule the things they need to house rule to get the feel of the genre, get the feel of those tropes and have a really great time.
00:08:34
Speaker
Yeah, and these these aren't throwaway games per se. They're very memorable and they're very fun. But you're not going to be beholden to some rule changes that you have to make to make this game work. Exactly. So another thing I like to do is gift giving. What do you mean by gift giving? Are you talking about players giving each other gifts or characters or what?
00:08:54
Speaker
We'll talk about players giving each other gifts and more for the characters to use per se. Allow the players to give gifts at key parts of your games. If you have a player, you know, facing a tough role, one of the players might say, before you make that role, maybe you want to open up my gift and then you open it up and it's, it's advantage or something. That's just something fun. That's fun. Have you actually done this like real props at a table kind of thing? Cause I think that'd be amazing. We did it at ah in a virtual game and I had little icons representing gifts and the players could give those gifts at certain you know whenever they wanted throughout the game. right and and Then when they did, I would reveal what was inside the gift. That's fantastic. But I think if your players kind of have no idea, like if they have an idea of what's inside the gift, it might be more fun for them to kind of like draw from that gift at the appropriate time.
00:09:42
Speaker
Absolutely. And I think one of the things that's really cool too is you've also cued us to the importance of items for these things sometimes too.
Keeping Holiday RPGs Light and Fun
00:09:49
Speaker
Gift giving in this context could be a way of of having really fun, one shot, single use, rent out of charges, ah holiday themed things.
00:09:58
Speaker
Yeah, again, this idea that you should be getting the sense of here is keeping these games light and playful is the key to success. The point here, remember, is not necessarily to challenge the players. I used to teach philosophy and when we taught philosophy, we would say, Hey, the point of an intro philosophy class, that one on one, it's not to go deep in any one part of philosophy. It's to kind of give people the tour of the topic a little bit, right? It's to kind of.
00:10:19
Speaker
show people around all the different parts of pieces and the kind of the interesting parts but it's not really to kind of challenge people to become great philosophers in that intro class so similarly here keep these games light and playful don't think that your goal in a special holiday episode is to challenge the players and put them in some new things can take them to their next level really it's to give them the tour of the feelings and experiences that you associate with that holiday.
00:10:45
Speaker
Yeah, you know i made a little I made a mistake in one of my games. I i think I made the encounter a little too hard, a little too difficult. And it kind of brought the mood down a little bit, I got to say, ah when it became a little bit of like, oh oh, now we have to kind of get serious all of a sudden because things are looking pretty tough. um I ah should have pulled back in the reins just a little bit.
00:11:09
Speaker
I mean, you know, that natural DM's killer instinct mark, it's a hard thing to suppress, but. Oh man. Yeah. Yeah, nice. So so just, you know, again, just kind of keep this light. yeah And one thing I also enjoy is incorporating a little bit of music into the game. I love holiday music. I grew up with Christmas music in the house specifically. And um I just love, I love hearing it. So like at the game, that's what I want to hear.
00:11:36
Speaker
I remember when you started that game with the with the goat, who we subsequently named Sugar Plum, by the way, you actually started with the dance of the Sugar Plum fairies. It was the it was the from the Nutcracker and it was amazing. And boy, it put us right in the mood basically immediately. We were all just like, oh, we're here. It's a very special episode. And it's Sugar Plum's theme song.
00:11:58
Speaker
Well, and something else I remember you did too, is you were talking about parody a little bit before. You were doing something where you took the night before Christmas poem and you modified it, and you know you you did your own version of that that introduced the game oh that's right over the forgot about that over the music of the Nutcracker Suite. And boy, those two things, man, that was a one-two punch, and we were all of a sudden like, we're into it. We're here.
00:12:22
Speaker
Yeah, I think the funny thing was when I said I'm going to do a holiday episode, there was I think there was a little bit of like, there might have been a little bit of groaning. I know a few of them were like, I don't know about this. That's great. Well, you showed them. You showed us all.
00:12:38
Speaker
Yeah, I showed you all that. Hey, keep this game, the the pace kind of fast. This is, this should be a one shot, really. It should just be something you play on the holiday. Because of my earlier mistake I had mentioned where I made the in encounter a little too difficult, ours ended up being a two shot. And that's okay, it was fine. But my original thought was to be a one shot, but because I made it a little too difficult, it added time and it ended up being a two part episode.
00:13:06
Speaker
You know, if you have a holiday that stretches out over a week, feel free to make it two episodes. But most of the time, these things are just a day at a time. And so, yeah, yeah you definitely want to keep it one shot. Look, we're going to do a whole episode later on how to do one shots. And I'd say without kind of diving too much into that topic, the main thing is Keep your eyes on the clock. Keep things moving fast. If you've got to abbreviate, if you've got to do some hand waving and say, and then you fought those guys and then you move on, that's fine, right? Whatever you got to do to kind of keep on track.
00:13:42
Speaker
You know what that that sound means? That's my favorite sound, Mark. That's our tune-up segment sound.
Gift Ideas for Gamers
00:13:47
Speaker
That's your favorite sound? It's not. It's not really. okay For the purpose of this podcast, it's a great sound. I like that sound.
00:13:55
Speaker
I got a tune up for you. This comes from a person whose name rhymes with arc. ends with a man. Yeah. Um, this arc fella, he is, um, he's got a friend of his, he is trying to think about a good nerdy Christmas gift for a gamer, you know, Something that like you buy me I mean arc is buying his friend at Christmas gift Fred just a friend somebody he he knows You know for many years and he's looking for something kind of fun Something kind of nerdy right that that they might really enjoy for the holidays Did you think of anything that that person might like?
00:14:34
Speaker
wow You know, good gifts for gamers. If I'm thinking about gifts for gamers, I'm thinking about things like dice are often an easy kind of gift to give, a ah book here or there. Easy to give? When I buy them, I want to keep them. Well, that's the that's the problem with being a dice goblin, Mark. I mean, arc i mean Mark. um I think the thing that's also really cool is sometimes you've seen they've got these places of custom miniatures like hero forage i give a gift to somebody one time that was a gift certificate so they could basically design and then have three print and sent to them a miniature of whatever they wanted and so.
00:15:08
Speaker
That was really cool. That is really cool because you know we all have her like favorite character that we've got and you know if you've never been to Hero Forge it's really fun to just make your character in Hero Forge even if you're not going to like buy the actual token right but being able to actually own that and have it printed out.
00:15:26
Speaker
really amazing character sandbox and if you're doing vtt stuff it's super super fun yeah just so that you can create just that exact thing you had in your head hero forage by the way has not sponsored us in any way we're just fans so yeah uh i for sure i mean if they want to sponsor us though i'm not gonna turn it over to it i mean we're not gonna yeah that's right
00:15:48
Speaker
All right guys, that's been a
Future Podcast Topics
00:15:50
Speaker
lot of fun. we We're hoping everybody has a great holiday out there. Yep, and we're keeping this episode short because you got better things to do on December 24th than listen to us keep talking about holiday episodes. What do we got coming up in the future? We in the future are going to be talking about encounter design as a part of our series on adventure design.
00:16:08
Speaker
Folks, we got a whole new year coming up here, 2025. You think we'll be doing this this time next year? I don't know, man. We have so much more to say. Yeah, we certainly have more to say, but like I still haven't got my jet pack and it's 2025. But I was just thinking about this yesterday. I was watching somebody at work walk by and they were talking into their watch. Oh. Admittedly, I was thinking of Knight Rider and I'm like, we have electric cars, we have people talking into their watches. Is this the future? I think we're in the future, Mark. It's true.
00:16:37
Speaker
Well everybody, have a great holiday and we'll catch up to you soon. Keep those days rolling.
00:17:57
Speaker
Come get your tune up.