Mailbag III

0:20 He Hello adventures the podcast for role players and game masters to help level up your game. We're dungeon Masters Jason Portiso, I'm Joe McCall and Jim Crocker, and today we're going to dig into the mail bag. And oh no, it's a mimic. They're all mimics. That's all mimics. No going to dig into us. Ah, yes, uh, that's just a bag of devouring at that point. But that's a whole other thing. We'll do a whole episode on the cruelest things you could do to your players other than mimics. Yeah, everything is a mimic. Every bag is devouring. But today we are we are fresh out of voicemails, so this is the time for you guys to jump on the voicemail. Hello Adventurers podcast dot com slash voice. We love we love hearing you guys. Ask the questions. No dumb questions either. There are no dumb questions unless you're Nick and you absolutely cannot look up moms. Yeah, stop looking at monsters. Nick is one of our players. He sent us four questions so far, and none of them were good. But now they were all. They were all. We can say that because we're friends with them. Yes, they were all answered already, let's put it that way. And they all come down to question, how do I write a good question for your show? They all come down all these questions can be answered with stop googling during the game, which I shouldn't have to answer on the show anyway. But today's questions did come to us in an email from Caleb, who I believe gave us a voicemail on the first mail back episode and he was very happy that we took his question. So Caleb, thanks for listening, thanks for checking us out, and thanks for believing in us. And he sent us just like he said,

1:52 I'm going to email you too many questions, and I said, I dare you? And then you email me a bunch of questions and I'm like, this isn't this is? Do you think this is too much? Come on to email him back and kind of gave me quick answers on almost everything in here, but we've answered none of them so far on the show. I answered. I answered him to him because I knew it was going to be at least two months until any of those episodes were released, and you know he deserved answers at the time. So, but there's a couple of questions in particular that I really wanted to talk about on these episodes. So so all of today's questions are coming from Caleb. The first question is do you use accents or special voices? How many do you use? And which are your favorites. So the reason I wanted to talk about this one is because there's a lot of different ways to handle voice acting in your role play and my opinion, and I guys want you to answer this as well, I say that there are three ways to handle role play in character. Number one is fully in character. That's with a voice, with you know, a little face if you want to put a hat on, that's cool too.

2:55 Yes, fully fully acting, which not body, Yes, your body in the character. Yep. Yeah, well we'll call this embodied. And this is like, this is like the level of this, there's like tier three. This is the highest level of it, and not everyone's comfortable with it, and not everyone's good at it, Like some actual actors aren't great at it. You don't have to be good at it to have fun with it. You can absolutely have a blast with it. In fact, even being a little bad at it, it could be more fun. Karaoke. Yeah, do we go to karaoke and someone's killing it? Get them out of here, all right? I want to see accents. I want to see his drunk eye struggle struggling through. I will survive. But the reason that a lot of shows like all critical Role is perfect example because these are all actual actors and actual voice actors, and everyone kind of thinks that that's that's the bar and that's the standard. And it's not that they are the outliers of being fully like exceptionally exceptional. They're very, very good at voices and not just like even normal voice acting like doesn't go to the places that they go their accents and their craft like they are artisans. I have a vocal for her. I have always been absolutely fascinated by voice actors, even before a critical role. There's a there's a documentary called I Know That Voice that features voice actors like like Billy West and E. G. Daily, John DiMaggio name, I'm not sure I know Tara Strong is a part of that. She was, I'm pretty sure. J Just Harnell, there's there's

4:27 there's a lot of just great voice actors. But but anyway, so Eg Daly. Yeah, I'm pretty sure is Tommy Pickles. Let me see, so, so eg deal is a really Yeah, she was Tomles on rug Rats, She's Buttercup on the Powerpuff Girls, Rudy Tabooty on Chalk Sowne. She I mean Babe Pig in the City. She is prolific as a voice actor. She was also an actress I think in the movie Valley Girl. Okay, gonna look it up. I'm gonna yeah, I'm gonna look it up really really quick. What's what's funny about that? Is like almost every show you just mentioned Tara Stro another voice actor was also on Tara Strong. Was Dill Pickles. Uh, and she was you said she was Buttercup you daily, Yeah, then I know Tara Strong was one of the powerpuff Girls.

5:10 I can't think of which one. I thought she was Bubbles. She was in Valley Girls. So and she had a music career in the eighties. So really, really, you got that much control over your voice, It's not it's not unheard of. Yeah. So anyway, so that is gonna be like like your like your top level full embodiment of full voice acting and really going for like the critical role experience and like, you don't have to be good at it, but I'd be comfortable with it, and not everyone is comfortable with it. So the level just below that, I'm gonna say, is the your role playing. But in your own voice. You're you're you're still you're still reading the lines, but you're not in costume, right, so this you know, you're you're still Let's say that I'm the dress rehearsal. Sure, so let's say I'm role playing a fairy artificer.

5:51 Okay, if I was in full voice, it may be something like this, a little fairy voice, but in this level, it's just gonna be it's just gonna sound like me, right, Okay, and I sound like this, I sound like a half work. Then I do a fairy and like it's like, yeah, we gotta go, we gotta go get the rainbows from the buttercup field. Like it's just gonna be like some actually like that fairy voice the best, obviously, So if you're putting on voices, okay, honestly, so do I and I think the fairy should sound like this, This might be the worst, simple and I thought, so pretend this was a bad example. No, But but role playing in your own voice is totally fine speaking in first person and then and then the third level basically two versions of first person. You kind of got your first person method and your first person you know, like just like you say, your own voice first person method first person me yes is kind of what's going on, and the third one is third person. You can absolutely just describe what your character is saying. So there's a difference between like like, I think we know, guys, I think we I think we need to go follow him, right kind of guys, can we go first? Like, guys, should we go follow this dude? I'm pretty sure he's the guy we need to go after, versus my character really a louse to the fact that we should probably be following this right, and and there's nothing wrong with a mixture of all those. They absolutely flip between all three yeah, constantly, And like if someone else also flips between the three, I have a hard time noticing when they're in full character. Okay, I know it's when they're in full character, But switching from first first person voice to third person voice totally totally, totally fine as long as we keep the story moving and keep the story you know within the story that that's that's great. In fact, this

7:26 is actually really common when like, okay, the the d M one one character. You know, let's say the rogue goes ahead, does a little reconnaissance, notices this huge scene playing out, and the DM goes, okay, you see to be at a big bat is talking to who you thought was your was your ally, and you know they have this whole big thing. It's helped up at the plane. Road goes back. The rogue's not going to say, okay, guys, I saw the big bats talking to who we thought was our ally, and he's not going to recap the whole thing, right, He's gonna be like, okay, I tell them what I saw, right, that's what you need. Yeah, So now we flipped from first person to third person, and this is it. It's already something you do. I'm also a big advocate of explicitly using third person when as the d M you're describing two n PC's talking to each other, because it's like, like you've got to be very very good and keep seeing very very short if you're gonna do yeah mel blank blah blah. Oh yeah, right, we've talked about mel blank like that. That's just just say he says this to him, she says that back to her, and then put the focus back on players as quick as you can. I want I want punching Judy puppets. Yeah, okay, So like to act, there's no there's no need, there's no need to do Wabbit season Duck season. You know Mel Blank style where it's the same guy to two voices arguing with himself.

8:48 You want you want to tell me Mel Gibson is not Blank? Is like, is not the greatest of all time? There's this there's alone scene possibly in that scene season Duck season episode where Bugs dresses as Daffy and Daffy dresses as Bugs and they have a conversation I believe with them r Fudd. But it's Daffy's voice in the style of it's it's not Daffy's voice, it's it's Bugs Bunny doing an impersonation of daf It's Mel Blank doing Bugs Bunny, right, and then also Mel Blank doing Daffy doing It's that's it's spread. It's a mind blowing and like for people who nerd out over voice actors like I do, that is like beyond stier stuff. I so anything to add on like the ways that you can voice act. Yeah. So I would also just add, so somebody that likes to do this and likes to try to do voices and accents, and I just I've always kind of just been a natural. I don't want to say mimic maybe no, but it's somebody that's always picked up on like other people's accents. My wife and I and she was first pregnant, we took a trip up to the Berkshires and at that time I had changed my GPS to have an Australian accent, and we went up for a weekend and over that weekend we both perfected our Australian accent.

10:16 I'm sure it was perfect no reason. I'm sure you sounded like a native speaker joke that weekend at the end of that weekend maybe. And it was also the same time something had come up with I'll teach you guys right now on the air how to say razor blades in Australian. Say rise, rise up up lights, lights, and now say it all together, how you say rise of blights? Okay, And so there's things like that. There's actually websites you can go where you can see phonetically how to say things to get that accent at PA International Phonetic Alphabet when I was getting my theater degree. Yeah, of course class on it, and we would take monologues and break them down. Took the actor in real life. But then the other part of it is too. It doesn't have to be a voice.

11:05 It doesn't have to be a brand new accent. It can be your voice, just inflected slightly differently. So I know, like I've used it in our game, and I don't know that it'll necessarily translate here, but it's just like a how are you? It's it's just like a little bit you put a little vocal frying it, you lower it. I already know that's your partender. That's that's my bartender. Usually bartender is going to have like more of a new dog. Yeah, hey, well the bag, what do you want. There's a partender that I've used over and over again. She's Gerdia, a dwarfing lady. You met her, You met Gerga I won my one shots and she's like half New York Boston like that gruff and half like Cockney like freshen you drink governor type. Yeah, it's like, hey, we're here to meet this guy. He hasn't been in yet, doll. And here's the other thing too, you're it's a fantasy setting, like these accents don't have to even be real, and if they're not good, if you're if your Irish accent, that's like the joke that me and my wife always have is like I do these or what is it from?

12:09 I Love you man? Okak, you know he's like, why does my Irish accent sound like he's from Jamaica or something like, like it's so bad, and like there's nothing wrong with that. I would just say that you want to do things in good faith and obviously don't you know, don't try to be mean or nasty towards a group of people, and just be careful there, tread carefully any accents, any any kind of what we might think of as a you know, like like an ethnic accent or anything like that. You want to steer clear of that when you start doing accents that have particular racist overtones or that you know, right, and also genders too, I wouldn't like, I wouldn't even necessarily try to go because you know, most men are going to go, oh hi as a what and that's just not necessarily accurate, and it's that's what's it's a caricature at that point.

13:00 And that's one of the things that argues for most of the time, as much as you can talking in your own voice, but changing the inflection, right, changing the pace, changing how you know, like where the periods and commas come in your sentences, how you're you know, like like whatever whatever, like colloquialisms or you know, vocal tics that you drop in there. That's I've always thought that that's a much better way to convey different characters than to try and have to go, this guy's got to rush in accent, and so I got to remember all of the times that I got to, you know, drug you know, to pronounce this is this letter as a v instead or something. I'm also a big fan of using things like catch phrases is kind of a catchy word for but maybe like crutch phrases, little little little phrases that that's the ticket, like that kind of a thing.

13:50 Yeah, stuff like that. I'm a big fan of, like little little bumbling voices, like like like my museum curator having like constantly dappings for it is like oh my, oh, my am, I, oh, my man, my min and just like just having that Yeah, who is that? It's like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. That's always like checking the time, like a whole time, is it? Yeah? I have to I have to be moving on here. So this the second part of Cilb's question here is is how many voices do you use in which are your favorites? Uh? And it's not so much like how many because Joeye knows how to do one. It's just the Scottish accent. Joe is a pretty good Scottish accent. But my trick to this and this is something that we did an episode on this back in Karmage is very early on. But one of the best tricks I ever heard came from Dan Castleinetta, who is the voice actor for Homer Simpson and you know thousands of other voices like that.

14:39 He said that he will develop a voice by first doing a bad impression. And this is great. If you're not that great impressions, you just do it very easy. The you just do a normal impression. I've gotten a lot of my character voices by just trying to do an impression, failing and rolling with it. Yeah. So the example of that Dan Castlenetta gave was he he started off with the impression of Colombo, and then it turned into a bad impression of Columbo, and then it turned into a purposely bad impression of Colombo. And that's how we got most Sis lack on The Simpsons. Yeah, sure, yeah, I could see that, Peter Faulk Yeah, and that's that's just how that that one started. That. See. That's by the way, kids, Colombo as a TV detective when we were young, not even when we were younger, when our parents I think were when was that the eighties? Jim, can you explain Columbo? I can't explain Columbo because Colombo touches on our mystery episode. Yeah we did. Colombo was a a how done it show? A one done it show. At the beginning of every episode of Colombo, you saw exactly how the crime went down, and the episode was like, how would Colombo get, you know, the person that did it, either to admit it or gather enough facts that you know, he could then approve beyond a reasonable doubt that the person that he suspected. Sometimes from the jump and you know, if you ever hear if somebody ever is about to leave a room, and then they stop and turn back to you and say, oh, one more thing, that's Columba. Yeah, that's we actually learn something called So in my professional life,

16:14 I've sold cars, and one of the things you learn up sure a lot of cars salesmen learn is something called the Columbo close. And that's what you essentially do, is you get up to go, and then you go, oh and one more thing. If I can give you these numbers today, you know, are you leaving in my car kind of a thing, and that's essentially your Columbus. But but yeah, so Colombo was or Peter fawk right, that's the was the actor. Yeah, it was also the grandpa that reads the story. Yeah, that's that was Columba. That was the guy that played Columba, Peter. So one of my favorite things to lean on is also like kind of borrowing general like overarching character ideas from like cartoons and things like that, and this is greater that. This is better for like smaller characters and car tunes. To play smaller characters in your game.

17:02 If you're having like, you know, if you're somebody that's going to talk a lot, use something that's closer to your voice. Sure, but I mentioned that that that bubbling museum curator character. I use this voice a lot for a lot of MPCs that that are supposed to be like, you know, they're kind of tragic, but they're also like they're sympathetic figures. You want to help these request givers. You want to help them, but you don't want You want to like them enough to help them, but not so much that you want to bring them with you. I need them, I need you to leave them there, oh somebody. Yeah. And my favorite voice to use for that is Kiff from Futurama, where he's just so hello, he's perfectly pathetic to where like he can still like explain things, but he gets very exasperated very quickly. It's like, oh, it's it seems that there's been some I guess you always call them disappearances going through the museum. How many how many people have been gone? Oh? Maybe something like something five, five, maybe eight. It's just like it's it's a fun character because he's so like he's so exasperated, and you can really kind of take that stutter to like a very fun place voice wise. But I would just say just overall, like how many do you use? What are your favorites? Like, maybe, yeah, as many as you're comfortable we need can get away with. And we all have our favorites. And you know, if you play with the same people over and over again, they'll come to know your favorites. Like obviously, Jason knows who my bartenders are

18:34 when he hears them, and he knows that my one Scottish accent, which I'm not even I can't do now that it's been called out. The one of the original hosts on Curmudgins and Dragons, Jack has this one character that is always the shop keeping in all of his games, and it is supposed to be the same character, and it's the most annoying, like like a, I don't know what that is. It's too much spit in its mouth and the whole he's supposed to be annoying. Yeah, and he is, and he's great. I actually had a teacher in high school, and I'm not going to mention the name and just just a case of Chris yeah or something like that. I think Chris Chris and I had, But I had a teacher in high school with that, So that's I think of that shore every time I hear that voice. Hey, hey, hello there. I'm definitely pro anything that gets the players to not want to spend too much time in this y. Yes, I think that's that's a great thing. Yeah, making your shopkeepers super annoying so I don't spend a lot of time shopping.

19:37 That's the thumbs up from me on that. Sure. I just to put a button on this one. I was going to repeat again, and just I'm going to quote the email that I sent back to Caleb. Just steer clear of the Jeff Dunham effect and ask yourself if you're overstepping the line of good taste when doing a foreign accent. So have fun, but be respectful. Yeah. And also, I mean, and I guess the kind of the little coda that I would put on this too, is that you have tools besides just voice. If you've got a character that is constantly like scratching at their scalp, if you've got a character that is constantly, you know, twirling a dagger between their fingers or something like that, you know, or like working a coin like it's a magic trick, you know, or always looking over their shoulder, that's a thing that you can do as you're doing the voice. It doesn't necessarily need to be just like a voice all the time to be an audio game. It could it serves the same purpose, and make sure that you've got that in your tool your toolkit as well. There's even some dms that will bring around a little a little like tote of like stuff that you will find in like a like a photo booth at a wedding. It's just like a mustaches and you don't have to go all out, but it's the carrat top approach. Even just like having like a little sword with the prop and you mentioned like no it's throwing the pen and and things like that, you can have something that you twirl so like it could be the voice, it could be the it could be the the hand gestures and a fake cigar. So what what I'm saying is that there are verbal, somatic, and material components to this. Yeah, sure, take your combination. And the other thing to keep in mind is that is that you've also had that same first person third person approach where you can twirl

21:12 a pen in your fingers to indicate that they're doing a thing or work a little point or something, or you can just say you know they ask him a question and he say and you say, oh, that got his attention. He stops twirling the dagger for a moment. Yeah, just stare at you. That's just good storytelling. Then deliver what he's going to say. That's just good storytelling. But cool. I think voices are fun, and if you think they're fun, totally. If you don't think they're fun, you don't have to. Yeah, Hello Adventurers, thank you so much for listening. If you enjoy the show, the absolute best thing you can do to support us is to subscribe so you'll be notified when new episodes are released.

21:52 You can also leave us a review five stars. Of course, that will help us get seen by more D and D players, and more than anything else, just tell your friends about us. If you like what we're doing here, then there's a good chance that your DM or your players will enjoy it too. And you don't need to loop gold to do any of that. We appreciate your listening. Now back to the show, So let's take another one of Caleb's questions here. He had this under a section he called playing with new dms. So it's when one of the players steps up and wants to take the reins of dming for the first time. How can a forever DM in a PC position help ensure the new DM's success. So he's asking, like, if you're the if you're the forever DM and a new player wants to step up, what can you do to make sure that that you hand over the baton correctly? Him? Despice something that you've seen a lot. Yeah. One of the things that you can do, and this is the thing I cannot recommend strongly enough, is if you know that one of your players wants to become the DM, have them co DM with you for a few sessions. Have them just kind of ride shotgun, you know, do it like the cops do a ride along, right, you know where you know the first time you're out there, you go with a pair, a rookie with a veteran. Have them just kind of sit there and like what we used to do in the store when we had a new DM was someone that wanted to train to do it. Literally, we would just have them sit there for a session or two behind the screen and they would just watch the DM. Yeah. Shadow shadow is a great word for that, and shadow the DM just like you're training for any other job right,

23:25 have them shadow the new DM and then you know, have conversations with them, and then when they step up to do it the first time, you have that veteran DM shadow them for a couple of sessions and then they transition to be a player. But once you transition to being a player, you're a player, yes, And the most helpful thing that you can do is we talked in a previous episode about assigning a buddy of like a veteran player buddy to a rookie player, is you can make it yourself one of those player buddies. If you've got any kind of new players at the table, settle in, help the players with questions that they may have, but let the DM do their thing unless they explicitly ask you a question about something that's going on. You know, you got to let them. This is the hardest thing. You have to let them make a few mistakes. And if they make mistakes, that's okay. If you want to write it down and talk about it, you know, and just mention it later in the game that they got to that they got a rule wrong or something like that.

24:32 But you got to keep your mouth shut if they're gonna you know, like like if they if they make the wrong ruling on something, if the other players at the table are just going along with it and they don't care enough to like to jump in to look it up or something like that, just let that go and then you know, talk about it at the end of the game and show them, you know, full respect and the same courtesy that you would expect for them to show you. But but like if you're if you're jumping in every time they make a mistake, that's gonna you know, we all know how that works in training, right, Yeah, Yeah, it gets makes people to take chances and and to you know, because because it's a complicated game. It's a deeply complex game. And I guarantee, no matter how long you've been playing for, no matter how much of veteran DM you are, there's stuff you get wrong. And sure I think DM style and DM Style two can play a part of like there's certain things that I'm going to be fast and loose with that you know, Jason, or you might not that you might be real sticklers for that rule, right, never that right, yeah, And and you know I've known that like people in law enforcement, like some of them like like are sticklers for tint on windows, you know, and that's like a thing in New Jersey here where I'm from, tickets. Yeah, and then other people aren't like They're like, no, I'm not gonna because I have t I have tint on my car, So I'm not going to give anybody else a problem for that. People find their style. Yeah, exactly. And so so I think that, you know, for my answer, you know, what can

26:03 you do? I think that you can continue to be helpful. I know, Jason sometimes like if I'm if I'm like and I get caught on like like grapple for instance, and I'm like, I think or you know, you kind of see that, I'm like going to look it up and you know it like, hey, I'm pretty sure this is what it says, Like oh yeah, there, there it goes. And I think maybe it starts with a conversation, good communication before that of hey, listen, do you mind if I you know, if I see you're kind of forgetting something, or do you want me to chime in? Or do you want me to keep my mouth shut? And then I think respect their answer, you know, And we did have that conversation, Yeah, we absolutely did. And I think that different people learn differently, and so I'm very much like a jump right in and do it. And there's like I have to understand certain aspects before I can really understand anything. I have to understand how you know, the mechanics of everything of like in Dungeon Dragons, I have to understand why it works before I can really make a I guess a clear decision and learn and clearly or so this there's kind of the I was going to have this be a separate question, but this kind of ties right into this.

27:12 So a couple episodes ago we had mentioned letting a player take care of some of the clerical parts of dming. So one of the questions here is what are some things that dms usually do that players can take off of their plate for them? And I called it DM's a little helper. We can call the DM's right hand whatever you want to call it, the co d M. It would be called CODM because they're still a player. But what is let's let's let's go a little bit more into a list of things that a player could either volunteer to do or a DM could try to offload onto a player. What is? What is? What are some stuff that is fair to let them do. I mean the first thing that people usually say is track initiative. Initiative, Yeah, say say who's going when? If you you know, if you have one of those little magnet boards, they're responsible for moving the people on the magnet board. You know, whatever it is that that, however it is that you keep track of initiative, having a player take over that task. What other kind of stuff can we give them? I think it's whatever the DM is comfortable with. So it could be sometimes, you know, depending on your game. Like I know, in our game, it's we play. If we have a majority of our players that want to and can make our sessions, we play. So if that's the case, some tables might have the DM might run a player character that night. Sometimes there's NPC, an NPC, an NPC that needs to be run. DM should never run a player character again, yeah, yeah, no, I agree, And so that's something. But so there are

28:44 certain published adventures or published campaigns like Baldersgate that have PCs or excuse me, NPCs controlled by the d M. Yeah, yeah, or yeah exactly. So sometimes it's like this is so annoying because she's joining you. If you only have four players, it's really a dungeon built for five, and you don't have the experience to change those encounters. Then you need those those NPCs run by the DM, for lack of a better term, dmpcs. I know we're going to get to that, but those d MPCs, I would have players run the cohorts in battle and stuff if they were comfortable do that. Sure. Yeah, I think early on in some of our games that we played, like like over a Pandemic we're playing over Zume, there was like a an NPC or two that you had us control and combat. You can certainly do that essentially, anything that doesn't involve I mean, you know with NPCs it can even be active decision, but certainly anything the DM is doing that doesn't involve an active decision you can hand off to the players, depending on your comfort level. You can hand off tracking initiative. You can hand off keeping track of the hit points of your monsters if that's what you want to do. Sure, if you're comfortable with that, you can totally do that. Certainly, you can hand off the responsibility for moving things around the map, right if you're playing with a map in miniatures, Oh yeah, you know the thing where you've got to stand up, reach out over the you know screen and go one, two, three, four and move

30:17 the ogre. You can hand it off to a player just you know, as a matter of routine that when I do hand off. Yeah, absolutely, so all of that stuff, you know, and in some cases it may not even necessarily save a ton of time, but it's you're not having to switch modes right like like like from I'm thinking about what the monster's going to do next to oh shit, I have to do them, you know, like the physical process of moving it. In some cases, what you're doing is buying yourself a couple of extra seconds to think about things because the players doing that insteady you, and it gives you some some you know, some some planning time that otherwise would have been that otherwise just would have been busy work time, like work. Yeah. I was running a game at a brewery about a month ago, and the table that we usually used it was just a little cramps this time, and so we brought up we brought it up with a different different game though one less player, but everyone just kind of took up more space and we were using it. We were using maps and so we kind of moved everything over to like the lounge area, so like you know, two players were on a couch and like the other two were going to like were on my armchairs and like it was super cozy.

31:22 It was awesome. But then when the time for combat, I had to like get up and like it's a it's a coffee table. So I had a meal next to the table to move. I hate playing D and D and like a conversation pit. Yeah, at a table. Man, if it was if it was, if it was fully feater than mine, it probably would have been great. But I insisted on using the maps, and I had one of my logos printed all the miniatures for me, so I'm like, I cannot use them. So it was like, yeah, that's kind of that's something that could have either offloaded or maybe I could have just handled better with the space. But I'll be there again from time this recording. I'll be there again in like a couple of days. So most ye, how that goes. So one more and we almost start touching on this and I'm going to remind you guys that we want this episode to be on the brief side, so we're going to not go too far into this, and I know Jim has a very short answer, but I think we well, this is I don't know why you're going on about it. This is a super easy one to hire women, and I think I think we have different different opinions on this. The question is on the subject of dmpcs.

32:28 Are they awful? Can a dm ever do them well? And are there any major dus and don'ts? Yes, no, and there's only one don't do it And anything that anything that is not awful is not a DMPC. And that's where I all of the ways that all of the ways that people talk about dmpcs making dmpcs awful are ways to make them into NPCs with slightly more agency and not actual dm PCs. So so let's break down what d It's a Dungeon Master player character, which means that the Dungeon Master is playing another character at the table and in that regard, right, that is the strict definition we're using. Are they are awful? They are absolutely awful.

33:17 You're you are a dmy one that sounds exhausting. I just talked about how like I would hand off cohorts because they're so annoying, Like it's such. It's just another thing that I have to like on top of the monster or monsters and everything else and all the rules and everything else. Oh, I know, I have to now also run a character. Yeah, it's terrible when they talk to an NPC. You gotta have a conversation with yourself. You got to somehow compartmentalize in your head the fact that you know everything about the adventure while sincerely playing a player character that is trying to overcome the adventure. It's not And you're taking heroics away from the player characters from the other players at the table. And that's like, this is this is a time for your four or five friends to shine, like yeah, to like be the hero of their story. And you are to get to play everybody.

34:13 It's not one of their characters being so uh, you know, just just wanting to play, wanting to also get in on that. It's just kind of a little month. So here's where here's where I'm gonna I want to be that guy. There's situations where I have seen success and whether you want to call an NPC or a d M p C an NPC taking on a PC ish type of role, let's this this is I want to I want to stay away from the argument of semantics. Okay, So so except the argument of semantics is important here because he's saying, you know, how do we do this? Well, how do we? How do we not? So you know, the way you do it is you don't play a d m PC, you do something else. Yeah, So I'm saying that we'll use these for for the sake of that and for brevity, that we're going to use the strict definition of d m PC as Dungeon Master player character, which means that for an entire campaign, the Dungeon Master is also playing a player character that level and levels up and participates in scenes as an equal to the other players all of that. So I have two examples of times when it was not awful. One the campaign was kind of like I don't want to say screwed from the start, but like we were starting at disadvantage.

35:35 I'll use my own example first, and I mentioned this almost every episode, but it's always just worth prefacing that I run store level one shots and on this particular day, like they wanted me like twice a week. At this point, it was like a Wednesday night, no one was around the one, but we had like four preregistered and there was a couple that that canceled kind of on the same day. So from four down to down to two. Actually, you know, it was do with I had three scheduled, a couple left, and I only had one person. So I called up one of my friends in my hill is off floating, and they're just another body in there. And so now now I'm now I'm up to two and like, so there's only two players there. They paid to be there, and we're gonna around the game. I'm not that good to be able to rebalance encounters for two PCs. So we we actually instead of taking any of our premate characters or any of the characters that I made, I'm like, okay, we're going all in on this. I have these random character dice we just rolled dice punched them into Fast Character dot Com and all three of us played just whatever we rolled, and so I'm like, okay, I'm gonna have to take a DMPC on this one, just to round out combat at least with the caveat that, like, you know, this character will not be participating in any puzzles, not a DMP right, yeah, under under our strict definition, that is not a dm yep. Absolutely, and in that regard it only had agency in partially in combat. Yeah,

37:05 he just can't solve the mystery because you're well you already know because I play him as though he does not. But you were practicing some form of emergent mystery style, in which case it would matter you would come up with a solution together. Yeah, well this wasn't a mystery. This is a zombie horde thing. But like you know, he just knew, Like you know, I am I going to purposely walk into a room that I know a zombie is in because I have to play like I don't know, I just kind of let them make things the main calls. Yeah, I think that to Jim's point, every time that it works, it's not a d MPC, it's an NPC with additional agency. And that's fine. And that's and that's where you get into cohort territory that they're really just there to help balance combat. They're not going to take an active part in progressing the story along.

37:57 I mean, you can kind of use them as a whatever. The opposite of a red herring is of somebody that's gonna like you can't find the answer. Oh, they have the answer. It's just gonna help again for brevity's sake, I think. But for the most part, they're really there to more or less balanced combat, like, oh man, I needed five people to fight this red dragon, I only have four. I only have three. Well, the other sample is going to bring up and like, Allie, tell me if this is a d n PC or not. And I know you guys haven't listened to you know, summary or definitely not all of it, but campaign one. From that, there's a character called Balnor that that joins the party from pretty early on. He's not from the start, this was he was done. There was there was not intended to be a d m p S. But pretty early on they they find a deck of many things and they get the I'm sorry, yeah, I know it's I'm already I'm already gym is already out. But there was a modified deck whatever, blah blah blah. They get the the the is it the NIGHTCRD Squire card whatever it's called, and you get a you get a level four fighter of the same race. That's wherever draws it. Yeah, it should be played as a cohort. Yeah, and then that this ends up being played by by the DM and leveled up along with them, and like he was only supposed to be a short thing and they end up sticking around that being an important part of the story. Yeah, but he was. This is a comedy show in a in a in a D and D costume.

39:22 He ended up being a pretty major part of the of the stories. And it's a show that you know, it has ratings and ratings, but like they have advertisers that that's a that's a corner case that I don't think is necessarily applicable to people, just kind of you know, the typical table that we're going to. I will say where I've seen success again being more like MBC. So Critical Role has I think it was campaign to right, Yeah, I don't know how many campaigns are, but not actually a D and D game Critical Role. Critical Role is a television show that uses D and D to come on but their scripts essentially yeah, and any of these popular shows. And there they even say I think man Merser says like, yeah, it's a little bit of D and D. It's like based on D and D five, but there's a lot of homebrew to it. And yeah, it's just the reason to you ounce on. But well, yeah, they they have ended up using some of those rules, but I think they still use home Brewer rules. But whatever. So the whole point in saying that is there was a character that was from Jorhas, which is like the monster Nation that they you utilize in a couple of fights, and I think that essentially what what happens is they don't make any major decisions anytime, even if the player characters are like, hey, what do you think we should do? The I don't know, I honestly don't know. I don't have an opinion, and they just kind of kick it back and and there and

40:54 there you have it. Right, is is that it's really just a cohort or an NPC with additional agency, and that the way to do it is to do it that way, is to always kick back to the players that they can't have a dog in the fight. Because once you cross into the territory of d m PC, of you are a DM, but you also have a player character. You are taking away from your players. You're like you're taking even if the players want it, you're taking some of the fun out of the game. So to do it well, you don't do it, you do something else. Yeah, all right, So uh okay, so the definition that I had in my head this seems like something that you guys even okay with. It's just weird because it's not right. And that's and that was basically before before we went on air, we were going through these questions and we were like, oh, what what should we choose?

41:50 And that was something that we talked about and and that was my first thought was, well, it's this, and then I realized Jim's right, they're not DMP d MPC. We have to Again. We could argu the semantics of it all day, but just for for brevity's sake, and for this argument, we'll just say it is a d M playing that is also playing a PC and it cannot it cannot work. It just just cannot work. Not well, okay. So so the answer to the question here is ask yourself what you're actually doing right and does it fall into the character does it fall into the category of n PC with additional agency slash cohort what they call it cohort or does it now they Some older versions of the rpg R stories we used to look for were around bad examples of of dmpcs or what Jim would call normal examples of d m p C and like this is when like it's examples of where the DM is like no, he's the main character star of the show. And like I just saw that as bad examples. But if that's that's what it is, but so so, But even Jim right and says, well that's a corner case, like are there examples of of where it could work, yes, but like there's so few and far between, just don't even do it, like and more than likely, if you are doing it and doing it successfully, it's probably not one. It's probably one where you're still just giving the agency back to the players and you're not allowing that quote unquote d MPC to make any real decisions other than or am

43:24 I going to use a long stor the two things there. Okay, so let's let's let's let's forget to turn the NPC for a second, because now it's getting back into a into a semantics thing. So like, are we okay with NPCs with improved agency? Okay? Yeah? I mean, and the way you do it well is that you offload as much of the decision making onto the players, Yes, as you can manage given the situation at the table. Cool. And if that means they make all the decisions for for that character in combat, if it means that, you know, they're actually if it means that, that kind of becomes like a troop play character where you know, if the fighter goes you know, if the fighter wants to go to the tavern to get some information but the wizard isn't interested in doing that because he's studying his spellbook. You go, Okay, so for this particular scene, Joe, we're going to hand you that character as much of that as you can do. That's what you want to do is hand off the hand that off to the players, and that's how you'll get successful.

44:37 Yeah. The best example that I can that I know of that that in a way that works is the cohort example of and a game that you played with me was Raya Mantlemore in a Descent into and yeah, and that's example. Yeah, and essentially and that was even and I'll say this, the best your best bet is to just learn how to balance and without it, because that's really what you were doing. And because here's why, it's a lot as a DM to keep track of right when you're keeping track of everything else. And it's a lot for the players. I don't know if you remember, I don't know, and it might have been you, but I gave it. I was like, hey, can you just run this, Like it's as far as combat, as far as decisions, I don't think you can speak up or somebody did and they're like, hey, this is a lot, like you can't. I don't want to play two players, don't. I don't want to play two characters. I just want to play my character. And I was like, that's fair, that's absolutely fair.

45:28 I'm sorry, Like, and I took that back. And there's some cool shortcuts that you can use there that I have done on occasion, like in the store when I just needed to kind of like have a shortcut to that where like we wanted to have somebody who had an impact and have the players have some decisions about how they made an impact without handing them whole character. And what you can do there is you can say okay, basically once per combat turn that NPC can make essentially what amounts to the assist where you get advantage or somethinghere where they give advantage and at the beginning of the turn, you guys can have a conversation and go, okay, it's really important that the wizard's spell goes off, so he's going to strack the monster that they cast the spell on so that he gets advantage on his you know whatever, like a range touch attack, right, and and and just that's a that's a kind of a halfway between the DM doing it all themselves, but the player is having to control a whole character, you know, and you know, maybe you give him a x number of uses of cure light wounds and they can you know, toss that around or something like that. Because the last is the classic example is the party that like has no healer, right, and so you give them the NPC healer and you know, you just say, okay, you know, once per turn they can throw a da to healing out and we're going to assume that they're staying out of the way of monsters might and that's why they don't get to hit anything. There's

46:58 my answer. My answer to that is, oh, you go to the shop and the potions are one get one, yeah, because you obviously are going to do that more, right, I do, uh, And I've had in a lot of games. We called it the Prismatic six pack. It's a six pack of otions in every color for the price of three. There you go, or four or whatever whatever it is, whatever I need to do right to get them to buy it. And one group didn't is in my my quote unquote the MPC game the opposite problem where they both ended up on casters and I had to roll up a barbarian real quick just to keep them alive. Yeah, but like definitely, like I would hate to be running somebody as a DM and like you're fighting let's say it doesn't even have to be the big bed but like a boss level whatever, and like it just the way it just comes around is that like they have one hit point and you're and now there's you can handwave that and everything else. But again, I think that the people that tend to use quote unquote d MPs are going to be newer d ms. And I know for me, like I just didn't know that there was other options. It was like it was given to me as this cohort and I was like, Okay, I'm running this. I was like this is awful, and I just had to learn that way. I would hate. I would hate for it to come around and like the monster has one or two or five whatever HP, and it's like the cool. As a player, I'm going to be pretty annoyed about

48:30 that. Let's let's put a button on this so to answer your question, rules as written or question as written q A q A W d m p cs are bad. But I think your answer your question as intended is as you know, ask yourself, are you doing more of what I thought the m PCs were or what or Jim correctly explained MPC you're playing? Are you talking about d m p cs. Are you talking about MPCs with more agencies or more agency or or cohorts? Yeah, in which case go for if you need to, if you can get away without it, maybe, don't you know? Or or and I mean, and I think that third thing that we talked about, or are there shortcuts that you can come up with that kind of narratively say there's a character there, but we've abstracted that to a simple mechanic that you could hand off to the players to use every turn to indicate the presence of that of that character. Cool, let's let's wrap this thing up so you can send us your questions to Hello Adventurers Podcast at gmail dot com, or you can ask us your questions yourself Helloadventurers Podcast dot com slash voice. Well love to love to answer your questions. Yeah, Otherwise, Calebs asked us a lot more that we could always get to so but I want to I want to diversify this a bit. Yeah, if we're going to fly through these and we did not know, we didn't, great job guys, Now we we got to raced off from that though.

49:52 So yeah, please please please send us your questions and send us your your most egregious d MPC bills or your best accent. But yeah, I get a Hello Adventures Podcast dot com slash voice. You can always tell us tell us yourself. But that's going to wrap it up. So thank you so much for listening to Hello Adventurers. We are your host Jason Portiso, Jim Crocker and Joe McCall producer, editor Engineer Jason Portiso. Music by a Nick Spurrier, artwork by Christin Roderick. You can reach out to us with any feedback or suggestions by emailing Hello Adventurers Podcast at gmail dot com. Hello Adventures is a JCP Audio production. Goodbye s