Interview with DM Tony from DND404

0:20 The Low Aid Adventurers, the podcast for role players and game masters that help level up your game. I'm your dungeon master, Jason Portiso, and today I am joined by none of my co hosts. We are not recording it on a normal day and they've got lies and stuff to do and I don't, so I was able to record without them. So Joe, Jim, I'll see you guys on Wednesday when we record again. But today I do have a special guest. I've mentioned him on the show a couple of times before, not only as being another podcast that we're friends with, but a show that I have guessed on a few times. And just to prove that we actually are really truly friends, I came up on the show. So from d M D four four I've got d M Tony on the show. Tony, what's going on? Man? Hello? DM Tony. Got to give him the signature, GI him the signature. How are you doing?

1:03 Thanks for having me? You're coming on my show? You were you were due? Is your return? Yeah? After having you? Wait, we got a couple of adventures with you. It's more crucial ones too that I can talk about now. Oh yes, I gotta see how the Aftermath turned out on that because I have not made it that far because I am a bad fan. It's so good, like hundreds of episodes. It's totally fun. It's a while, so quick background, so we'll talk about we'll talk about your show in a second. But so I met Tony through one of the local Facebook groups. I was looking for people to just come onto. We were doing Commercions and Dragons at the time. I was looking for some guests to come on and tell us their their horror stories. And He's like, nope, I'm coming on and telling a wholesome story. And we were like, we didn't think people had those anymore. We happily had him on the show. We had him record in person with us over at our friendly local game store, and it's and we've been DMan at the same store since then. It's a lot of fun. Since Amy sat me on, not only two guests play, but the guest DM on the D and D four or four. So let's let's kind of introduce people to what is What is D and D four or four? Yes, DND four four is an actual play podcast that I do with three of my other friends. We are I'm a long time player of D and D. I've been playing since I was about thirteen, on and off throughout college and high school, and they are all first time players, which is something that we kind of like leaned into, especially during the beginning, and even now it we're up to like episode one oh three by the time this airs, we still explain uncommon rules and

2:34 such so that everybody, whether they're experienced or new, know what's going on. I think that's something that actual play shows should do. If they're not already doing it, they really should be reminding people, even if they even if their veteran players, just remind them of we have this rule work. I look up you know, I relook up spells. I've casted myself through my own monsters, and I forget what things do all the time, and we're constantly fact you should. We look up rules for mechanics that we use often. I had a whole character built around like stretching the limits of grappling, and we still look up grapple checks every time they come up. We just learned around episode ninety nine how concentration really works. I don't know, and we have a warlock that uses only concentration spells that we still learn the nuances of concentration. I gotta ask, what was the most recent thing you learned about concentration? Oh, if you ready as spell, it's a concentration check and if you get knocked on the head or take enough damage, you can lose that spell slot if you're cast level that. We did an episode.

3:46 I don't know the episode number off top of my head, but we did an episode recently of rules that get overlooked and this and the that's one of things we brought up. And even Jim, who has been playing since day one for a blue Box early edition like like first edition D and D, when I said that, he's like, wait what, so like it's this, this is this is not like you should be looking at your rules and this is where it shows like this, this is why like an actual place show like like yours and a discussion show like mine, like like not only can we coexist, we should be like we should be doing stuff like this more often. Yeah, I listened to well yours like Corimudges and Dragons when you were doing that a lot, and when you started this show back up or instance, the camp trip to your List episode that you did I have some words and comments, but we won't get into that now. But I love that and I love the app recommendations because those things, yeah, help players out im mensely. Yeah, I was and proud to put that episode out with. I'm not going to shout out this other episode other show that I used to listen to, but they used to use do deep dives on very specific topics. I'm like, oh, I'm running that monster in like a week or two. I want to know everything about it. Cool, So we're gonna by doing more deep dives now too. That is something that that actually Joe insisted on that from before we started recording, even episode one. And you want to do deep dives. Dives are great, and we kind of think more of them. You know. The the amount of time that we have allowed to ourselves to do the research for all these episodes doesn't let us do as deep of a dive as I think people want to

5:21 deserve. It's just too much to comment on. And yeah, and it's just like, you know, it's just an amount of research that like, it's just it's just it's time. We all got jobs, we all got stuff, you know, we have families. It's it's it's hard, man. So what we end up doing I kind of just kind of rebranded them a little bit when they're a little less deep dives and a little more elementary school book reports. Now that's amazing, and I think and they're they're just a little a little more fun, more knowledge for pea sized brain. You still you still learn a lot, and if you want to continue learning, you can go down to your local library. If you can make that a pop out book, maybe I will. It's so oh, that's a million dollar children's book. Idea. Friend, we just we just cut this out. We're gonna we're gonna talk about this, all right, So tell me about so that that's like the the thirty thousand for a view of D and D four or four. So what what do you want to tell us about?

6:15 Like what's going on with the story of the show, or or even just like what sets it apart from from other from other actual plays? Give me, give me, give me the pitch. I'm gonna give you that elevated pitch. I'm gonna try to be as broad and specific as possible. One it's an epic style campaign with a big, bad, evil guy that doesn't really show up until about in the middle of the campaign. However, he affects things around him constantly, and the further the adventures go, it's it's just like you gotta keep digging dance. It's like always conspiracy and the the show is going on about over one hundred episodes. I theorize that we're gonna be about one hundred and sixty if we were to finish it. I am trying to. We are in a late game of that and starting to lay in the plane. Yes, so we're starting to wrap up some loops ends, We're trying to bring back some of those characters that may have got lost in the ether. And the biggest pull of our show, I think is that it's the highest quality that we can possibly make it and we will not drop an episode unless it's perfect to the best of our ability. So we do sound effects. We make sure that it's not just like generic slashing or hacking. It's actual sound effects that relay to what the characters are doing.

7:30 And we have starting on episode thirteen, we had like generic scores. Dan has made all the scores. Danis one of white players, has made all the scores for each episode, and every episode is unique scoring to it. Quite a couple of revisits from crowd favorites like downtime activities and such. But it's a huge epic campaign starting in one city, going all the way over the ocean and then coming back and these are really starting up. Yeah, I mean I got into the team, like I'm so very very early into it. But the everything from the like I said there, the music, sound effects, the general editing, and this is something that after we met, after you were on my show, but we got into talking about podcast editing and I was trying to skee if there was anything I can do to help you. Guys, this is what I do for a living, and I listen to it, I'm like, no, they got it.

8:22 We want to hire editors to save our own time because it does a lot of time. We lose sleep editing this stuff and you you edit full time. And we had like had conversations with you and we had broke the subject. Yeah, and just for a full transparency, The reason why we decided to not go through not because we want to not see you succeed, Jason. We love to have you on the team. We had bad experiences with colleagues and friends that have tried to help us, and it always ruins that friendship if it doesn't pan out. And I did not want to put that between us, because I'd rather stay friends with you, you know, like you have your own editing job and like you edit your own show and other people shows, and then like what happens if we like ours falls on the back burner, not just because life happens. And then it's like, well, we prought ourselves on being consistent and like, you know, that's why we don't work with like friends. Yeah, totally fine, Starl. My rent is still getting paid. Man, you're you're good. I was great to hear what. I would have been very happy to have my name on the on the roster, but but I'm happy being a listener if that's all I ever got to do. Hello Adventurers, just stepping in here to remind you guys that we're actively looking for submissions for our Hello DMS episode that gets recorded every month. Send us your burning D and D questions to Helloadventurers podcast at gmail dot com, or send us a voicemail by visiting Hello Adventurers podcast dot com slash voice. Don't forget to begin your message with Hello, DMS.

9:52 You can't wait to get your questions to talk about them on the show. Send us your questions today. That's Hello Adventurers Podcast at gmail dot com, poorly the voice at Tolowadventurers podcast dot com slash voice. Now let's get back to the show. So one huge thing I want to get into today with like, So let's talk a little bit first about your general dming style. And I mentioned that one of the episodes and actually even just you know, five minutes ago. So you and I are are pretty local to each other and we have the same friendly local game stoes. I think it's about five minutes in your house, about twenty from mine. So we both are on the roster of DMS to run one shots there. Yes, and you've sat in on a couple of mine. I've sat in on a couple of yours when I get the time too. And every time I play in one of your games, I'm like, I need to go home and study.

10:46 I always feel like I'm phoning it in every time that I play in one of your games. And that is that, And I mean that entirely as a comment. It's I'll be I'll be honest. Most of those Local Games is straight up play testing from and I try to make it as fun as possible. But some of those encounters I actually give to my players on a higher scale or to see if the monster's just interesting to people. So it's like a you know, it benefits me at the same time other than just getting a couple of bucks. But yeah, and but when it comes down to DM style, I gotta really give it to the players. So we got Dan, Jared and Alec and it Dan plays a ranger, he's a mini tour minas Pela Walker. We got Jared who plays almost Vannin who's like the angry rage warlock who just wants revenge. And we have Alec who plays Drove the Ashbourne who has a crazy story arc coming up no spoilers, however, he was one like I just want to kill monsters because he's got to always get that one guy that doesn't want to play the and he's like, I just want to be the cool monster hunter. And I leaned into that as hard as possible. And that's a totally fine play style. That's that's something we can talk about too, and it's there. It's their quick quips and the way we're able to speak to each other because in any friend group, like there's boundaries. We kind of destroy each other's boundaries on a daily basis, with the exception of like a few topics, because we're so close in that way that if I say something not necessarily mean but like it's just he like, Dan can take that, do a yes end and calm and

12:18 hit it right back on. You can turn it on me very easily. And Dan's really good where if I'm like stuck, I'm like, I don't know how to nudge you guys in the right direction. The three of them will just start role playing themselves. They kind of see me struggling a little bit and push the narrative forward, whether it's the wrong or right choice, and they are fantastic I do. It's really all about the synergy. And you got people who like have never had anything played before. No, So Jared is huge on board games, Okay. Alec is a really big fantasy nerd, which we didn't expect because if you've met Alec for the first time, you think he's like, oh, it's up, Brad, I play Gulf and drink beers and like to hang out California, And he's like the smartest person I ever met? Would you really talk to him? And Dan is kind of like me. We have like the same interest that we all play games, and we did twitch streams, so personality kind of rubs off there a little bit, and maybe we have a little bit of easier time talking into a microphone from micro streaming. But because when I heard that these were like first time players, I think, like in your first episode or so, I think you even made a point to say that these are first time players. Yes, and then they come out with like already knowing how to role play. So we did a lot of dry runs. Okay, yeah, we did about four or five dry runs I want to say four.

13:31 One where it's like I gave them characters they have they didn't know what they wanted to play at, gave them eric a deep beyond characters. Yeah. The second time, I let them make characters and now it was like a two part session. And then I did a boss fight and I'm like, okay, so here's where you want to like kind of talk to the monster. It's not really story changing, but like you can have fun with him on your turns. And I really stress free actions because free actions is where you get through a lot of the role play. I feel they don't really change the tide of anything. M Yeah, it was just and even even that, just like a couple of sessions under the bellt's like they really like dove fully into the role play part of it. That stuff that I that I see a lot of players who have been playing for years just like you know, it's it's it's a it's a combination of you know that you need a certain type of player where that is within their comfort zone. This is something we talked about on the show before also with like levels of embodying the character and you know, and they go you know, full in first person, throwing on the voice and everything, where like, you know, players who are not being recorded for the masses might not be comfortable with that even at their own table with their own friends, and they'll they'll role play more than third person and and not you know, just speak with their own voice and and that's and that's fine too, but like, but for them to go from never playing to like a couple of quick one shots and adore two shot a little bit of coaching and then just like coming out like with a podcast level of role playing behind. I think it really surprised me the first time I heard when you were claiming that these were first time players.

15:01 I'm like, they they've done stuff before. We so, like I said, if you're starting a podcast, and I hope you do, like I don't want people to be discouraged to not start one because one sounds great. Hours didn't start great when we first started in our in our perspective, our first couple of sessions were five hours long. For one episode, it's about an hour and a half because we cut down the fluff. There's a lot of oh hey, like this is how that spell works, and then a lot of it was theater of mind, which I learned that Jared isn't necessarily the best with the theater of the mind. So that's where I started incorporating maps to hat to his style of play. And we don't like some people might call it cheating or like fluffing the episode. We everything's real reactions and it's completely open world only during like specific boss fights. Do I a little railroad in air can make it more interesting, but all the choices and outcomes are on them and we just remove the fluff from the episode. If they're like if they're asking how eldritch blast works and he ends up shooting his crossbow.

16:07 We don't need any of that elast dialogue. It's it doesn't lead anywhere, and anybody who's listening is going to get bored, you feel, I remove that editing wise, I think that should be expected and even appreciated to get the stuff that, you know, just kind of get to the game itself. And even like the really high level actual play shows, I'm thinking that Pod Critical Role things like that, they cut all that stuff out too. Sure, Critical Role Critical started as a live stream and they kind of keep true to that live in person feel. But as they progressed as not only gamers and performers, but you know that's the show progressive popularity, then they can kind of, you know, they naturally cut them. They don't need to do that anymore kind of clos you know. But on that Podmurph, it's pretty open about like the stuff that he cuts and doesn't cut, and like he'll get rid of them rolling dice just to get just to shave off a couple of seconds here and there. Dan yells at me, but I do it all the time. He just run, He just throws metal Dice, I'm talking about you. Then he throws Metal Dice on a microphone.

17:03 It sounds clanky and horrible and ear shattering. He's like, it feels good. I'm like, no, no, Metal Dice. I don't know. But you know, Plastic Dice. I I just love that loft, that clackety clack sound. And you're gonna and you're gonna find a subsection of listeners that will agree and some that that love you. Soak it out. Those use Plastic Dice and other other shows that I've listened to. There's another one that I listened to. It was called Bombarded It is it is finished. Now you know that show. I've seen it. I haven't listened to it. Actually, the the DM from that show is the one who composed the music for this podcast. Oh that's all shot A big shot out to Nick s Burrier. Well the bigger ones too, right I. One thing with podcasting is like I don't get to see anyone else's numbers. Yeah, you know, you can. You can track your own numbers, but you can't track someone else's numbers. So like, as far as like you know, they didn't have much of like an Instagram presence, but like not podcasts even bother with Instagram, so like it's it's very hard to judge, you know, were they one of the bigger ones. But what I can say is I enjoyed it very much and that means something to me. But I just go based off Spotify ratings. I'm like, oh, let's see how they do. And sure, I think Spotify ratings is huge, sure, or even like any any podcast platform. But I bring them up because they made a point, even in the early episodes, to leave the dice rolling in and then also speak out loud what their modifiers were, so players following along, especially new players following along, can see like it's like, okay, well they rolled a twenty side, diye, how did they roll twenty

18:33 eight? So stuff like that. We I was doing that at first, and I started getting rid of everything because now everyone's like level fourteen about the h level fifteen. Now you're gonna get to that end game where like everyone has seven attacks bonus actions and their presence stops them from doing other things, and even at lower levels, like in the games that I'm running at the Breweries now, one of my pre generated characters is a is a fay uh is it they touched one of the of the ranger subclasses. Oh whatever it is, but right, but they add on like another D four on top of all their attacks. Plus they're casting hunters mark. So like if I made them do that every time, it's okay. Well to it's the D eight for the bow, and then the D four for the for the fay thing, and then the D six for the for the tunters mark. It's like, we don't, we don't like got three hours in this game.

19:23 But just like moving, they wanderer. They wanderer. That's that I that I didn't. I knew it, knew it's something, but uh, they wonder at low levels anyway. So you mentioned, you know how much you're cutting out of the show. Your early episodes were five hours getting cut down to one and a half. Let's stop at the sheer daunting amount of work that it takes to make a successful actual play show. I feel like this is a huge misconception that a lot of new players have, and I'm coming at this from from two directions. One, they feel like making the podcast is easy, because it sounds like it was easy if it was edited well.

20:07 And and the you know, the first thought is Okay, we're going to make our own live stream, our own podcast. Then we're going to make the millions of dollars like My Critical Role does. And then they get on Twitch and they see there's a thousand other people doing it and out of maybe three or four are watchable and there's no offense to them. I'm I'm glad they're playing games. I'm glad they're having fun. But like the IF I IF, I call it a delusion that I feel like that's being too harsh, but the the the misconstrued idea that it's easy, but also at the same time feeling like the show is not edited at all and that your game is just naturally that good. And this was actually called the Matt Mercer effect for a while because he was operating on such a high level that people expected their game to be at that level naturally. And then when they started playing for the first time and their game wasn't that good despite them not putting in their effort as the player, they get turned off of the hobby.

21:03 So let let's talk real quick about just tell me about the just the mountain of work that goes from getting the episode even before recording, then recording the editing, then getting it out there, any people to understand how much you're actually doing when we started this. It's very important and this is the most important thing I could tell you, and I have nothing to do with d D. You need to find people who want it as much as you, and you need to be consistent. If you are not consistent, I don't think it'll happen. And if that's once a month, that's great, twice a month, that's that's still great. It's just you need to be consistent in your work, and the quality of each episode needs to be consistent getting gradually better. Sure, everything needs to be the same level of quality overall.

21:56 And so let's just start from the bottom up. What we have weekly meetings and at this point in a game, we've been doing this for about two and a half years. We each have roles. Dan and I are the editors. We edit videos when we get a chance to do videos. We edit the assembly cut, which is what you actually hear when we play, and then I do all the sound effects and Dan does all the scoring, and everything is from scratch. Jared takes care of the finances and we had to recently just do all our tax stuff and the amount of work he did on his end just to go to the bank and talk to people astronomical. But that's like if you're successful. But these are things you need to think about once you've got your start getting ads on your show and a little bit of money comes through. And then Alex is on marketing Patreon as well too, and like yes, with without getting into given away the given way too much, Like you've got a good amount of actual let's just talk like just followers on Patreon. Forget what they're paying, but like you know, it's I haven't looked at it, and that is public information. But it's like, you've got a good amount of followers on patreons. So we have about one hundred to over one hundred patrons right now. Record it's a round about one hundred lest that look, yeah, some of those are free, but majority of them do bad. You that cash money, that greed and you have to understand, like all this money that we get, which is not a substantial I realized how that just sounded. It's not a lot, but it all goes back into the show. We want to make art, if we want to make ds, you have to advertise if you want people to listen, and we tackle every type of ED avenue we can take of,

23:27 like Spotify music, Podbean, ads, Instagram post, Facebook post, reddit post boosting those and it doesn't seem like it does a lot, but it's just repetition. And so we get together, go back to my main point. We get together and we decide what we're gonna play, and normally we play once a week, which is already a huge shut of the curve for most DD groups podcast aside, we play once a week and we record for two hours. We keep track and like, hey, we're getting towards the end of the episode, I'm gonna stop building things up, or if I feel like nothing has really happened or they haven't progressed, I'll start pushing things along through my dming style. And we stop recording around two hours, and then we edit from the two hours and we usually get about an hour and a half episode out of that because now we're fully in it. We're also in all different time zones and and I live on the East Coast, Jared lives Central, and we'll work I'm not gonna say his jobs, but it's pretty important. Alec is in Hawaii right now for the summer, and that's six hours behind us, And yesterday we did two recordings back to back because he can't record as much because of the work he's doing, so now we're doubling up, and that's probably why I don't feel the best. They got like no sleep, there's no there's no video. But I got a little blanket on me, like abushka, and I'm trying to keep warm in the summer. You get your head right now. It is eighty something agrees up there right now. You gotta a blanket. I'm so cold. That's

25:00 a fever. That's what that is. Probably from when we were doing when this show was coming in the Dragons, we our co host Josie was in England for school and that was five hours ahead of us, So like us recording at like noon, put her on like five pm, and then being with him being six hours earlier, you gotta be recording in the middle of the night pretty much. Although I would always want to be the one that's in the earlier time zone, not the ones after, because that's dan Alec was playing in Hawaii. It's like ten in them the morning for him. We're done with two episodes. It's like five o'clock and it's one am for us. Yes, yeah, we were. We were very fortunate that, you know, Jim being retired, myself working as a as a concert engineer where I work nights, our afternoons were wide open so we can catch Josy after dinner. And it just kind of worked out as often as we needed it to until until it didn't. And that's why this show is. That was what it is now if everyone has the understanding that this comes first within reason sure, and that's where the consistency part I was talking about. People miss episodes all the time. We do it. We take holidays off on purpose so we can catch up on our backlog. We take the big eight holidays and we take two weeks off during Christmas time for Christmas and New Years, and it's just so like we can catch up and don't get editing fatigue.

26:17 One episode takes about eight to ten hours to edit from start to finish. That's two hours of recording here. Yeah, and with the show, with the with the amount of production that goes into it, and you're adding on a lot more, it's a very different kind of edit then this show takes and like you know, on this on the surface level from the from the We'll take the that was a thirty thousand foot view, Let's take the sixty thousand foot view for a second. From sixty thousand feet. You and I are both D and D podcasters, And the video on the show with his big finger quotes there and like the Not only is the final result very different, but the amount of work that goes in it is very different too, which is one of the reasons why I do a show like this one. This fits in, this fits in my lifestyle right now, and it's a similar editing techniques as most of my clients. And you know, and if a show like yours came to me right now and needed the type of editing that you need, not not that what not the part of it that we were talking about me potentially doing for you guys, but the whole thing.

27:14 I tell them. That's why we're like, I think, if we do get an editor in the future, we're just going to get an assembly editor, and we're still going to do the score on sound effects and probably chop it up even more. Just a vocal of work is done with the assembly cut. Yeah, and that's that that's going to change from the show to show what your particular workflow is. But I've seen I think we talked about what you were what your general workflow is, and I would agree with most of it, but obviously it's working on the show that the show sounds great. Man. So one huge thing I wanted to talk about with you is your dming style. So I've I've sat with you at at a public game, I listened to your podcast that we have not done a home game together, which might be starting one soon. If you want to come over, don't you tease me? Pretty much? The second we're done with this interview, I got people from work coming over and we're going to start our sessions. We're doing a session. I'm going to take them through tales of the Yawning Portal. I want to play that. I want to Dad, you don't live far by coming on over. But so I want to hear your your thoughts on how to change up your DM style between doing a home game versus a public game versus a game that is meant to be listening to from an outsider like a podcast. Do not compare yourself to other people, like especially the Big Three Matbers, Brandley Mulligan and Murphy. All those people do not try to copy them. You can use them as inspiration, sure,

28:45 and I think early on I probably use Randomlee Mulligan as inspiration, as a lot of people do. And the inspiration I took for him was mimicking weapons sound effects like pushing swat, and that helped my players really get into it, you know, trying to paint the image as best as I can in their head. Talk to your players. That's it's it's astounding. Like you just go on Reddit and you can see like these horror like not horror stories, but all these suggestion pages. How do I talk to my players to do my players aren't doing a B and C I set up plot hooks to not fighting, then they don't seem to have an interest in my big talk to them, ask them what they're into. They might give you big dms to copy, but like ask them if they're like more into role play, do they want to do combat? Maybe you got to shorten your combat a lot, you know, take off twenty help points for some of those bigger monsters, keep the keep it flowing. Nothing kills a session like combat.

29:41 And if you get feedback and your players will give it to you keep asking, they will give it to you, and he might hurt your feelings a little bit. May have had that happen. But if I hurt your feelings a little bit, You're hurt. There's right back next session. Can neither confirm nor deny, Jason, I accept. I accept your criticism and that that magic armor just doesn't fit you anymore. Man. You will put on a few pounds in between sessions there. But ye talk to you players and see what they want. You know, like we're a group of four friends that we have great synergy. We also have the perfect amount of people. I think for an audio podcast, I think maybe five people might be pushing it. That's the most that would go. And it just keeps.

30:22 Everyone's going to have a turn and have a moment and I feel like they're being heard. And then your DM style will just shine through it because you're trying to make them have a type of dmu are will really come out. So that I I'm one hundred thousand percent on board with all that. For all three of those situations, do you change up anything when the audience, well, when you're trying to cater to the players and in like a Homer Store, game or something where you're trying to cater to the audience. I've never cater to change you at all. Never I sometimes we don't. We don't get negative commentat We got one comment on YouTube that just said gay whatever.

31:03 Sure it's probably whatever, but we don't get negative comments. Welcome to Yeah. Also it was like we made it boys also everybody. I'll take that as a compliment. But we do not. And I say, because I had people like personally private DM me, I do not cater to people's ideas or anything. We have Patreon mbcs and we'll talk about that in a second. But I do not cater and I ignore them, not because I think I'm better than him. I want the story to come for me naturally, and I know I have a good sense of what my players like, and if they're not receptive, then the session goes stale, and then I change it up. I change it up specifically for them. They're having fun.

31:45 I'm having fun. If we're all having fun, people listening are having fun, that's not a shot at audience at all. That's great, And I think they're they're tuning in because the story is good and because the players are good. Because everything is everything they're they're turning into a show, but it's it's essentially it's a show. You're they're they're tuning in because the show is good, and like you know, you're if you're watching. I honestually, it took me it forever and I kind of forgot that existed for a while, but I just went back and finished Fox Makina and like, you know, that is just as much of a show as any of the actual play shows are. Yeah, and you know they're they're not catering to me specifically, They're they're they're trying to make a good show, make good story. I definitely think Matt Mercer, not that he has ghostwriters, I don't want to say that, but when you have that many people, you definitely like I think people prefer a beholder over some ghosts. You know. That's when like I feel like maybe I would be like eyebrow, eyebrow. Well we have even said on this show and then, and I think Jim was the one who kind of put it this way, where like Critical Role is no longer an actual play show, it is a it is a basically what is essentially a television show, an audio only television show built around a loose D and D show, you think, so it's it. It is a show first more than it is a D and D campaign. Yeah, I don't think they. I mean I don't really watch them now. I don't season three dollars people want a fan of. But I think they still, you know, do what they do. You know, I don't think he

33:19 coerces them to like, hey, you should go down this specific alleyy, And that's that's not that's not what what we what we think is happening is just like the the end result is way more. It's way more based on being a piece of entertainment, not scha okay, based on being accurate, you know, recording of a D and D game. You know, I could definitely see, like the guy in the microphone, like we're losing viewers, we're losing viewers, show something in there and then he might just throw something and I could see him doing that. I don't talk about the the the the the edited and recorded show not as much. Lesseram where like you know, if the if they've got they are they are no longer just a loose collection of eight or nine friends. They are now in an entire corporation. They are, They're an unity, They're they're literally any tam And company, especially now they're putting out things like Fox Machina. They're they're an entertainment company. You always get the comment like, oh, I wish I could play at match table. I wish I could play at Brandon's table. I don't. I don't think I would be a good player or DM. If I was playing, It's like walking out to an elevator full of girls.

34:16 I do not think it would go over well at all. I'd be too scared. Sure, but like it's just like it just it just comes down to synergy. And like if I don't have synergy, maybe Brennan could probably lean into the skid because he does a lot of improv comedy. Sure, Like if I played a critical role, I got my big chance, I would take it because I'd be dumb. But I do not think I would. Yeah, he played performed good at all. And let's not forget their critical role started because they already had a home game. Yeah, and like you know, they're all voice actors. How do you think they met each other? You know, you know, Brennan, these were all people from former college humor and current dropout in that thought, that's his wife and like and Jake is technically his boss. Like, oh, big man, it's got a wife. What do you think you better than us? Until next year? Yeah, I got a fiance party half screw you. Sure I'll take it. But like these people who have a long standing rapport with each other and they know exactly how to get a good game out of each other.

35:17 So let's talk about it's not about me for a while. I've been I've been on your show a few times now and it's a blast, and I love every time you invite me. So we I put a link to the episode that I played on which I think I stretched into a two shot. It was a it was the prequel episode. Yes, yes, I got cutting episode seventy five, seventy six. If you go to a firm, Yeah, so I have a little collection like one of those like like link tree type websites on a biolink for all my dming stuff. And so if you go to bio bio dot link slash Jason, the DM games that I'm games that I'm dming coming up are on there. You can and register for them there. Links to the podcast stuff will be there and then I have I have a link to that episode on there as well. I'll put them. I'll put in the show notes here too, but yeah, tons of fun. I feel like I should have already known it was going to be an evil campaign, but I went, I went. I went pretty evil on that. I think I was like pretty upfront, like, hey, you guys are gonna play bad guys. The aha moment for the four Dan and Jared was that your your squad captain was at o Ram, who was a bad guy. They'd been fighting for several episodes, so they wanted to do like I think Jared text me, he goes, I'm about to do a paradox right now because it takes place before, and I was like, no, do don't care. I think my thing was like because my character was supposed to be like the new recruit and didn't really know what was going on, I didn't really know what direction I was going to go in, and I think I think it played that pretty naturally. Your sessions are

36:52 a great point of schedule conflicts because we didn't have an episode ready and Alec could not record. It was actually he was a part of the world that didn't have Internet for about a solid month, so we needed to come up and play stuff. And I didn't want to just do one shots. I wanted to keep the movie, the story moving, so like we brough, you wanted to it as a prequel, and now there are callbacks to that moment that you played it. That's what I want to talk about, yes, because I didn't get that far yet and I needed to know what happened, so we could do a couple of spoilers. If the diehard listeners of my show are listening to this now, they probably already know what happened. So you were a late song wizard and you had it familiar black dragon named Timbat, and you were working with eight Aram pseudo dragon, pseudo dragon right and you the three of you were sent to look out for a disturbance, to stop a disturbance at one of the farms in a farm stead's basements.

37:50 It turns out to be this massive blood shard, which won't go into it, but it's a major plot hook for the campaign. The blood sharts, even like are super early episodes, like they come up yes, they come up home immediately. The whole whole campaign is this is the driven factor and long story short, a giant monster, a giant demon is summoned from it and essentially destroys the farmstead. But you were also like robbing the house at the same time, because they had called all the dwarves had called for help. They were the farmers were dwarves. And then you guys just sort of ransacking it because ad Orem gave you the like the go ahead. And the big moment at the end is that you met a dwarf and child named Warwick, and he had a hammer in a bag that he was hiding a false panel, and because you decided to spare him, you had like this moment of good. You decided to spare him and you let him just hide under the floorboard, and then you guys blew up the house. The result of that is that now he's been like this tropical island and he's learning how to be a blacksmith from the god of crafting himself. And that's like a whole other big story hook that I'm not going to get into. But he's learning how to craft, and he has his helmet on and he's a very specific dwarved helmet on it, and he can't hear he's deaf because when you guys blew up the house hurt his ears. So I wanted to add like a little like a pool, like, how are they going to talk to a dwarf deaf dwarf? I think is fun role play. Yeah, it turns

39:22 out he's the key for a greater story plot because you gave him that hammer. Those are legendary crafting hammers that they need to basically create weapons to attempt to fight the big bad guy. And he's learning from the god of crafting to harness those hammers because they're very, really strong. And when they fought ador Ram, Tim Bat had teamed up with him and kind of kicked you to the rocks because you saw that you were being good and it wanted to be with ator Ram, who was like, no, I want to hell, I want to steal, I want to blow shit up. They kicked you to the curb. Your character hasn't made an appearance yet since that moment. If I did, I think I would just have you back. Yeah, I would be like happily shoveled. Happily. Yeah. I think the character more of a true neutral direction. So I think if Tim Batt, if Tim has that much of a bastard then maybe yeah, oh he was a baschtlory and that boss fight was so much fun. That was great.

40:16 Oh man, this is uh where we're kind of hitting the amount of time that I wanted to I wanted to wrap up, but we touched briefly on this is one of the things I wanted to get into when I asked you about your dming style that boss fight. And again, if you haven't heard the episode, go check out the episode. The boss fight was just in in these like layers and layers and like, you know, we see you see this in like j RPGs all the time where the boss has different forms and and and different different what's sort of looking for fass, Yeah, theasis is actually, well, the boss has different phases, and like this is something even at the game store games that I played with you, this is something you're you seem to be really good at, and like, this is something this is what I need to like go study when we're done talking today, because like it's such a it just really changes the whole dynamic of the battle, and that's something I need to be bringing to my players. Can you teach me very quickly how to do this and let's let's give the listeners some value. Today. There's quick and dirty, which is the oh shit, they're killing it too quick. I'm gonna add a phase two. You just add more health and he make them look a little different, or have the phase be a part of the story to tell a key moment through its actions rather than you describing what it does or just giving any asswer to a player. Well, that specific boss was based off a mosquito. He had this tall, lanky demon. He impaled a guy and drank his blood and he like or he blowed it up and he was like now twice as strong,

41:47 and it was showing. And what that was shown was that, oh, there are powerful monsters inside these stones that can get stronger when they feast on people. And then when you guys actually kill them floated, which was pretty cool. Everyone took some damage, I think, so one of the characters died, one of the players, I think Jared's character died. Who lost the hand, which was no, he was he was me and he lost an arm. Yeah, human die, but like but losing the arm and like and now not only was the combat itself in multiple phases, but then like you kind of ended it on, like circling the camera to each one of us and forcing us each to make like a big decision. Yeah, it was such a cool way to end it, so like he had to choose whether or not he like, no, it's like this, this this curse is crawling up your arm. What do you tell everyone? They just like take the arm, get rid of that. I learned from paid games where we run games at the local shop, that people won't come back if they don't feel heard or unique in the story. You got one shot to attended, You got one shot to keep their interest, and you want to make sure that everyone has that defining hero moment, and if you don't give it to them, that means you don't like them. Really who I'm talking about? Not to throw anyone on the bus. I have a DM there in a while because my schedule has been so crazy. There's a few players I can move it out despite conversations happening. And that's just that's just true for the general public, which is who just who we are dming to.

43:17 You know, it's just the general public. About three quarters of them can just go away. I hate to be mean, hate to hate to throw that out there, but plus you just got to be honest and you'll have a better time. Yeah, And then this and this goes into my other question before, which is what do you do when you're dming for the public, and like it's it seems that you're kind of like taking the same general ideas of like making sure everyone gets through spotlight moment, and it just manifests in different ways where like on the podcast, this this now becomes like a story moment, or at least like a soliloquy type of moment where that point where that character gets to shine as an actor, versus a home game where it's just like no, where we want to tell the best word we possibly can. It's just for us versus a public game. We want that player to feel like, well, they paid to play, they want to make sure that they got their money's worth, and you give them their spotlight moment for that, which is easier when you have three or four players signed up and not eight like I get most of the time. I had them a game once with ten people. It was super fun, but not everyone got their moment. No, poople that were a little abrasive definitely did not get their moment unless they got eaten by the dragon. That was the fun one. I've got that, like I get it with like like whole families will come like three like three or four time and and and the trick there, give the kid the spotlight moment and let the parents watch the kid shine.

44:34 And then that's that's two players you don't have to worry about. I'm super proud. I'm super brad. But when they play like they they'll let you know just by playing that they're more into RP. They want to have that cool, cool the ground moment where they chop off something ahead of something. It's pretty easy when you're just like when I come in by the character, like you get that one kid who's like I just want to cause chaos and steal everything. Okay, steal stuff. It's gonna be cursed, but steal stuf. Have that moment. You know. My biggest thing is I have a a pawn shop. Magic shop. That is half the items aren't even magical. He just says they're magical and just a fifty to fifty shot. That is it anything? Or if you did try to buy a bag of holding, they got to roll eighteen or higher. Otherwise it's a bag of the val ring. Yep, you know I think that that was my that was one of the games I played. I'm like, you know, I'm just gonna do a detech magic. You're like, you're like everything's cursed, Like it's so bad. All right, Tony, this this is this is the time I had set aside for us. Man, I want to keep talking about this. I'll absolutely have it back on it. Maybe I want to bring you on just kind of like introduce, you know, our current listeners to who you are, what you do, what your show is about. And I definitely want to get you back in and we'll go a little bit more into some of the things that make you a unique DM, and we'll bring on other other dms to maybe some other shows, maybe just maybe just some locals that I think are great. You would love Dan honestly, or you talk to him and his DM styles absolutely crazy, great voices too, really big on voice acting for him. Awesome. And but thank you for having me on. It's it's blessed. I would love to come

46:05 up here and just talk about topics and please and and if you're coming here to listen for me, for my for my discord and stuff in my part of Spotify. Here's another show you can listen to when you're waiting for our show. They come out what every Monday and Friday or every Monday? Right now we are we're just gonna do every Monday for a while maybe and maybe maybe in definitely what do you maybe at least for now perfect We air on Tuesday, So when you're getting ready to tackle the shittiest day of the week, now you got something to listen to. Whether I'm here or not, These guys a shot. It's you're gonna learn a lot. And for those who ask for DM tips, that's your man, that's this is this is what we do on the show. We want to make our tagline is we want to make your game better and everything from our experience, we want to make sure that you are learning along with us. And then Tony is a is a great example of what do you do when you already learned it and now we got to implement it. So I learned in voting school. Is we have a ton to learn from you from on futup. So it's hopefully we'll figure out times to bring it back in because I definitely want to go more into like we'll do a whole episode on like how to build a monster and phasis and that kind of thing. That's something I really want to learn myself. So give us a give us a plug for em D four four and they'll they'll they'll take this out. Check out D and D four four.

47:19 We're available on all podcasts and platforms. You can also go to D and D four four dot com, dn D four for dot c A D four four pod dot com. We are cleaning all the websites. As a matter of fact, we've been so aggressive on having different websites that did you know that A D and D four four is a military licensing Canada and we're more searchable than a military licensing Canada. That's right. That's how good the adventures. If you want to have your stomach filled of butterflies, go on an epic adventure and D D four four is a show for you, and you can learn from Jason for the stuff we don't cover. Awesome, man, Tony, thank you seriously much for coming on. I love having me on the show. We'll do it again, man, absolutely, goodbye everybody, Goodbye Adventures.