Mailbag!

0:20 Welcome to the podcast where we talked about artig topics for role players and gms and everybody in between. Bye Jason Portiso. I'm Joe McCall and I am Jim Crocker. So today's episode, we're wrapping up the first month of bringing this show to you guys. So what did we learned this month? I learned set Tearless episodes take a lot longer to record than I originally thought, So that little lesson, but we're gonna we're gonna fix that and tighten that up a little bit. I learned we should stop in the middle of the day for lunch, is what I learned from our our first recording set. Yeah, so uh yeah, we were. We recorded six of those episodes back to back to back to back, including a two hour recording for It's Your List episode. So we were learning, and after over one hundred episodes of our previous show, you think we'd be better at it, But there's always time to learn, there's always things to do. So we're kind of wrap up this month with something I've been pretty excited about. We set up a voicemail box and encourage people to call in and ask us their d and D questions, whether it's something about rules or something of character, or just something about just like you know, table dynamics and like really just anything.

1:26 And you know, I always say the phrase, we want to make the show that you want to hear, and what better than for you to just literally call us and tell us what you want. You can also participate in these episodes if you go head on over to Hello Adventurers podcast dot com slash voice, leave us a voicemail, and if it's something that sparks the conversation with us, we'll put them on a show. So our first voicemail is coming from Christian. Christian, what do you got for us? Hi? I was hoping to get some perspective on my first time ever playing D and D back in college. So I had a friend who said he had DMed a bunch of games and wanted to get a campaign going. Most of the people my friend group had never played D and D. Aside from maybe one or two people, we started a campaign, started meeting on certain days we made our characters. He wasn't very helpful with making our characters. The only two people in the group who had played before mostly helped us as we went on the campaign. Every session we started noticing it was getting It was very difficult. Even though you know, he tried to make he said he would make it a beginner campaign, it was very hard. He started killing people pretty regularly. He would kill people just what we thought was often. We weren't sure. As we got later in the campaign, people left because they were getting frustrated. Some people joined because he would just get random people to join. We started noticing towards the end that he was killing people that he sort of had problems with in real life outside of the game. So it became clear he was just kind of retaliating on us for things outside of the

3:00 game and game and none of us played again after that for a long time. So I was wondering what you guys thought about DMS not really scaling for beginners, or people retaliating on people for things outside of the game in the game. So thank you so Christian. The thing about d MS is you have to be nice to them. Extraction shut up job. I would never extra. So let's start with the fact that there are two separate questions there that have different answers yes and you know, and one of them being how do you feel about GMS scaling, and the other being about what we might call, you know, bleed or something like like indie gamers might call that bleed, you know, like one of your feelings in your real life carrying over into the game and stuff like that. Maybe can address those separately, but you're letting you're out of game knowledge of the players, effect, player characters, unequaltion. So so so I mean, like like like jokingly, I mean, sure, it's all or whatever, it's meta gaming all the way down. But I think when people use meta gaming there, that's that's not what they're talking about. They're not talking about the social the social stuff leading over into play. And but that can be a serious thing because it's it's a social game. We're all playing it in a group. And you know, my experience with D and D is the vast majority of the games that I've played and run because I used to own a game store or with

4:30 not just with strangers, but explicitly with people who I was trying to sell the game to, right sure, so I had, you know, an obligation of professional obligation to make sure that everybody had as good a time as possible. So I didn't have the luxury to Yeah, yeah whatever, get you know, get revenge on somebody because they you know, parked me in or something like that, you know, or stole my girlfriend or whatever it is that you know that people are getting upset with each other about, Like I feel like that's that's a separate that's like not a D and D question necessarily. You know, you answer the question about, like, how do we deal with somebody who's being a jerk at D and D because they're unhappy with me from something I did at work or you know, or you know, or before, like the same way you do, like if they're constantly fouling you on the basketball court because they're mad at you, or they're you know, like hitting directly at you in tennis or flipping the board when you're playing risk or something like that. It's all that that's a you know, that's a social question that you solve just by having a conversation about it.

5:38 And you know, everybody being adults and that's there's not really D and D rule stuff that we can help you with there other than to just so many people at his table that often yeah, because it's a it's a place where you can bring them and you're guaranteed to have power over them. Yeah, we could get into the psychology of it, but it's definitely a powered thing. Yeah. Yeah, he gets to live out his fantasy of this of being all powerful because as the GM, you know, you kind of are right all right, So you get a real life fully power trip on there. So yeah, which was unfortunate. And but I don't think that you know, he was asking for a perspective on his first game too, right, Yes, so you think probably a lot of people have have something like this and it's sad. So so the the topics to cover here are The first thing is how do you deal with a DM that does not scale for beginners? That is a very valid question. Yeah, so Jim, and you know, you're the majority of the games you're running are for beginners that you need to spend money. So so that's that does come with, like you know, the circumstantial grain of salt almost and not not even grain assault, but just like it's like, yeah, you are also incentivized to make sure they have the best time possible. And I have a leg up.

6:50 A lot of my games are also for beginners. I don't work for the store, but I work in the store, and you know, me being nice to them incentive is them to hire me again, So that kind of it's it's almost the same thing. However, that aside, I love new players. We talked about this in episode one where it's the same idea. Maybe maybe it's the same power trip. I don't know, but deriving the power from giving someone a good experience rather than a bad experience. And so now like they're going to go have this new hobby because I turn them onto it. Yeah, and you know, maybe I'm getting the same power trip that the bully is, but instead running they're running home with new books.

7:32 I think that difficulty level and scaling for beginners or not, I think it comes down to balanced combat, if that's what we're talking about, and making sure that like, you know, you kind of hold people's hands, especially when they're new, so you know, as you're you we play in the same game on the GM and we have people that of all different skill levels, I guess, or experience. Let's experience. Yea rolling dice doesn't really take a lot of things, but of experience, and some people need their hands out a little bit more than others, and that's okay, and and so it's tough, right because it's just like with anything else, and teaching somebody something, it doesn't matter if it's D and D or teaching them how to read. Really it takes a little bit of patience. It takes a little bit of patience, and it's letting people mess up a little bit too, just hey like, yeah, that did can go great, you know, and you know, and here's why I think maybe, or here's a better way that you can do that next time. And here's some tools that I think you could use to make it easier on you, as a beginner or whatever to have that conversation out to have the conversation after the game.

8:39 And I think as a player, it's important to do the same thing right because egos can be fragile, especially if you have a GM that wants to like use things that happened at work or like, you know, like you didn't invite me out for ice cream the other night. I saw that you were there at DQ and I really wanted a blizzard. I'm just getting the American sech goes. I try getting your reservation, but like pulling that DM aside and saying like, hey man, that's not really cool first of all, what you're doing, but also like, this is really difficult for me. I haven't laid this before, and just being upfront and direct about that, I think, yeah, it's probably good idea. One of the things I'm going to push back a little bit on is you said you have that conversation actually the game. I say, have that conversation before the game, especially if you're a veteran DM and you've got new players, if you've played a lot of D and D, especially if you play with the same people regularly, you're going to have a sense of kind of what the social contract at that table is, right, you know, and if everybody knows the way this game goes is you know, most of the time, our characters are pretty safe, but every few sessions we have a big boss fight and then you know, my character might actually get killed in that boss fight.

9:54 But we also understand that, like, you know, different tables have different ways they handle that. You know. Some people are like, you know, your characters are fungible, they get killed. Cool, I'll just roll up a new one. I've been wanting to play a sorcerer all along. Anyways, some tables, it's like, you know, death of a character means you go on an epic quest to get them back from the underworld or something like that, because people want to keep playing that story of that individual character and the level of personal connection you have. I completely forgot about the part that this is supposed to be supposed to be if that are in DM org and you can do that however you want, and you can even have different players at the table have different approaches, because like I've had tables where, like, you know, three or four people are like, no, I want to see my character's story right through to the very end, and one player that's just like, yeah, you know whatever, I'll play this guy five six sessions and then I want to try try to try drew it after that. And that's fine too, as long as everybody is on the same page and knows what's going on. And those new players are not necessarily going to know that because this it's somewhere between a video game and a novel, right where you know, in a video game, you get killed, you just go back to whatever your saved point and you jump back in again.

11:09 You know. Novel, if a character's dead, they're dead forever. They're gone, they're out of the story, and but in D and D you've got these kind of not just narrative ways to do this, but you know, like whatever you can. You can bring them to the cleric, can get them resurrected or something like that. But you can also as a DM have a conversation with the players about what it means to be defeated rather than just like always killed. I think one of the big problems that D and D has is that there isn't like a fail state that involves the characters being defeated without everybody getting tipek right right. And so that's one of the things that I always tell new players is you know, we're here to have fun, and I am not going to tell you you can't play that character anymore until you decide you don't want to play it anymore. That doesn't mean that you might not, you know, get into a fight with something that's too tough for you. They kick all your asses and everybody goes to zero hit points and you wake up naked in the giant's pantry or something like that and then have to figure your way out of there. You can be defeated, but that'll mean something interesting for the story. It doesn't mean well, that's it, everybody roll up new characters. Sorry about that. You don't get to see how that story ends. Some people like that and that's cool, but I just think you got to make sure you have a conversation about what all that means and you know, and how people get to keep playing if those characters get killed. Does that mean you sit out the rest of

12:39 the night and write up a new character while you're doing that. Does it mean everybody just comes to the table with an extra character ready to immediately throw down if their character people? Yeah? But I think right. I think I think to Jim's point that it's the GM's job to set the expectations, say hey, because we very briefly played Balderske, and I think I made it a point like, hey, characters might die, like who knows, you know, like, just don't necessarily get attached. And I think the other thing that I definitely do is I try to check in with players every few sessions and just like hey, like, has I know I've done it with you? Like, hey, yeah, you're good with your character? Like you if there were times there were times where I wasn't super thrilled at them, I like them a lot more now. But now so you touched on what to do after the game. Jam was talking about what to do before the game. My first thought was, I was how to do this in game or at least during the game so we can tackle this them all three. So what I do, especially with new players as a and I'm just going to say an existing DM, I'm not going to say experience and definitely not veteran, but as the DM whose job it is to, you know, make sure you have a fun day today, especially with brand new players, like just enough hand holding to make sure that they understand what they can do while still giving them the autonomy to do so. And I like the hey, did you know you can do this method reminding them that inspiration exists or you know that they've got a spell that they may have forgotten about, stuff like that. Yeah, okay, we're going to do a whole

14:11 episode on that. So look Ford put a pin in that sun. If players treated inspiration like they do dark vision this world before the game starts, especially with premaide characters, or if we're doing like like a fast character dot com thing, I will go up to their page and highlight or mark off or put little you know, arrows and exclamations next to the important class features like reminding fighters that they have action serves, reminding paladins that they have laid on hands, running rogues that they have sneak attack sneak attack, and second story work and bonus action dish, bonus action hide like like my player Rose does. And then in the middle of the game, like if it's their turn in combat and they're kind of floundering a little bit or taking a little longer, or like they look a little frazzle, that kind of wait for them to give me the cues they need, the help relevant and helping them before they need it. Hey, I don't want them to rely on me because I just can't be bothered for everybody every turn. And I want them to try and if they if they hit a wall, be like, hey, remember you've got this thing, you got this thing, remember that magic item you found. Here's a couple of options that you maybe you thought of already. But and I tried not to do the if I were you do something like this because I was just taking a term with them, so I wouldn't do that. But actually a full disclosure, Christian is a coworker of mine and he has played in Someone Shots with me since he recorded this.

15:28 He was one of the first people to send them. I thought you were the yeah no no no, no, no, no no. But you know, at the time of recording this, the show has not actually been public yet, not even the first episode has come out yet. So you listening to this, this is all done before release date, so you know this is this is the little peek behind the curtain of how podcasts are made. Yet we rely on our friends to send us some content, and Christians sent this in and since then he has played in Someone Shots with me and did a fantastic job. And there was at least one point in hindsight, I should have done actly what I just said, and I didn't. For him, it's tough on the fly. You know, we all make this. He played a paladin and we kind of all forgot that land Hands is a thing, and they had a whole party that did not buy a single potion. Yeah, and you become the healer in that situation. Yeah, I forgot that that existence. Yeah, so that's just as much on me for forgetting it was a thing. But you know I did take it.

16:22 I circled it beforehand and say, hey, here's the things that make palade and a paladin, and you know, maybe maybe smite a few things here and there. This is also a situation where if you've got like a mixed table with one or two more experienced players and you know, some rookies as the DM, you can just straight up assign somebody to be somebody's rules buddy. You know, hey, Jason, you've played a whole bunch. We're going to put you together with this person whose first game it is just look over the shoulder. If they forget something, you can go, you know, don't play their character for them, but I'm going to, like, you know, put it on you, put the cognitive load on you. You can trust to do that exactly. Yeah, rather rather than, like you said, because the d you're juggling a lot of stuff already. But but you do and you're no, but you do it in a helpful way.

17:06 But you know, in are games you'd absolutely do and you you are, like, you have an encyclopedic knowledge of some of the rules. So even I'm like, oh wait, how does that work again? And You're like, oh, this is it's like this joke thank you, and I don't. It doesn't hurt my feelings, you know, it doesn't bother. The last thing super helpful, it's super helpful and right exactly, some of our players, you know, they might struggle because again we have a mixed bag of of of players at our table that they don't necessarily know how The best way is that their character works are what they have at their disposal. You know. Some of theTimes like hey, do you have the spell? Oh, I do have that. Yeah, just you know, just keep in mind that you have that. Yeah, And it's I think it's super helpful to your to your point, that's that's actually are everyone find your buddy.

17:55 Yeah, it's your job to keep rules. There's a lot to keep track of. And if you've never played any game like this, right because the Dungeon and Dragon is a very it's a different kind of a game right in these tabletop armgs. If you're used to playing video games or you're used to playing board games, it's different. It's the novel and the video game all at once. And there's a lot to keep track of. The Other thing that I want to touch on is something else Jim said is the social contract and that we're like the guy's just pulling people out of the woodwork to come sit at the table, and like there is there is a social contractor yeah yeah, But like anytime you and you're going to bring somebody else to a group, you know, I feel like a conversation has to hey man, or hey I'm I'm I want to invite this other person. Is everybody cool with that? And they don't have to necessarily be cool with it, but like at least give people a heads up, like, hey, I'm going to invite it's a person I know, right, It's not just some stranger that I'm just gonna throw into this group here. Like at the store when when we ran, I mean it was groups of strange and new players would come in and stuff like that. But we had a very explicit code of conduct that you know, we used as the baseline that you had to in principle agree to before you sat down at the table. That kind of laid it out for everybody, talking about the things we expect and the things that you're not going to do and things like that, and everybody that ran games at the store was good about enforcing it. But also because we had that code, of conduct that everyone agreed to before they sat down. The

19:26 players at the table also helped enforce it, you know, just simply by social pressure, because that was how they were all behaving and acting by example. And it was great because we had, you know, everything from like young kids on the autism spectrum up to you know, like like long time old neck weard grognards like myself, all getting along because we all knew what those expectations were. And so when a stranger sat down, they weren't I mean, they were a stranger in the sense that you hadn't met them before, but everybody knew what the x expectations were and the rules were the same for everybody, so it wasn't just like Joe random coming to the table, right and at a store, it's a different expectation than at my friend's house, right, yeah, oh yeah, yeah. And that's that's all is.

20:14 Let let's let's star wrapping this up a little bit. So the the actual questions that Christian had for us was what do you do about a DM that does not scale for new players? You're allowed to ask your DM to give you the experience that you want to give, So, like if the game if the game wraps up and you didn't have a good time, be like, hey, listen, this was difficult for me for these reasons. Can we start doing more stuff like this? And if they say anything other than emphatic, yes, you go play at a different table. Yeah, yeah, I would agree. No one is forced to be there. This game taste a lot of hours and life is short. Yeah, and there's the there's the old No D and D better than bad D and D. Yeah, but but bad D and D is not the only D and D that there is, so you know, like in exactly the same way, like if you go on a shitty first date, that doesn't mean you're done with dating forever. It means, you know, you'll learn from that and to do it differently, you look for something different next time. And D and D is exactly the same. I just that's the most frustrating thing is when I hear, yeah, we had a couple of bad D and D games, so I didn't play D and D for five years, Like, no, no, you just had a bad table. Find another table.

21:18 There's great tables. There's probably more good tables than there are bad tables. So it was in the same jump back into it. That's my advice. In the same metaphor, pad relationship can take you for five years like that, that could absolutely happen. But but yeah, just like and learning from the bad ones will teach you about what you do want And that's in the same metaphor too. Yeah, and I don't be afraid to ask for it. Yeah, I think that's the important thing, right is communication is super important in any relationship, and it's metaphors. It's great, But that to my point is right is the communication part, Like, don't just say like it's bad day and day, ask for good D and D. The GM might not even know what they're doing, you know what I mean, and you may looking for something that that the DM cannot provide. It's it's not a style of the idea and this is God is the same metaphor. But if someone came up to me and said, hey, I want a gritty realism campaign where I want to keep track of all spell components, I want to worry about stuff like the environment and and and rations and things like that, and I'm just going to be like, yeah, that ain't Me's So it was very nice. It was very nice to meet you, and I hope your next day was better. But you and I know some dms that are like, you know, the classic, like you know, first Edition Grizzled Oldheads. If I said, hey, I want something that's silly and off the wall with tons of magic items and and a wise crack and squirrel as my sidekick, and he'll be like, what game are you playing?

22:36 Meanwhile, I can call out many of my friends and get that game. And then the last thing is that this is unual question, but just like, I'm sorry you had that as your first experience, Christian. Yeah, and knowing you personally, I hope that the games you played with me played with me twice. Now at the time of this recording, we got another one scheduled, and I hope they've they've been going better, and I hope we keep learning, and I hope this becomes a real, real happy for you. It sounds like a fantastic opportunity for a follow up. Yeah, yeah, Christian, you'll be receiving our bill. 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. You can also leave us a review five stars.

23:17 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. Awesome, So let's get to another one of these. This is from Jordan, and again Jordan is one of the players at Mine and jos game, So this is let's see what Jordan's got. I suppose this is aquirt question. What had crossed my mind was does AM have some forethought in whether they are guiding the players towards circumstances they're wanting them to go down?

24:03 And if players roll badly or don't go down and create a German direction, how does it hand with that? So this is a question of I'm interpreting this two different ways. Short term and long term can have different results with this or is this a one shot or is this a long term campaign? And then the question sounds like the the railroading debate. It's like how much, how much you DMS kind of prepare for you versus player or autonomy, And that's that's how I'm interpreting the question. One. I really liked this question. I thought this was an awesome question. Yeah, I agree, And I thought of it more. And that's funny because I think of it more in the long term of a campaign and building a character and like how much forethought you have of like where this character's arc is going, where's going, where's going, where it's going to end up, and how you're going to get there and stuff. And then also so now we can take this from the short character, long term character, and also short term story, long term story, and I have four different answers either, there's quite a few answers. Yeah. Yeah. So my first thought is, since I primarily run one shots for public games, my perspective on this is that story wise, there is kind of a destination that I kind of need the story to go, and like there's a way to do it without railroading them, but also kind of only giving them the one option to go towards that, And I understand the debate of how fair that is to them, But we've only got three hours to get this thing done, and your parents are going

25:34 to come pick you up. So like, as far as short term game story wise, I know where I need things to eventually end up, and I have ways of kind of making you get there one way or the other. Short term character wise, we kind of like, you know, in a one shot where this character is not going to exist in a few hours before the game starts, I ask you, you know, what's your character's whole deal, what makes them tick, and try to weave that into the story as we go and kind of make some of those things the motivator to move the plots forward. Like one of my characters her whole things as she grew up Ferreal and she wanted to make a hundred friends, and so I used that to motivate her to go towards the next thing. One was like he had to figure out what this ORB thing was, and I'm like, Okay, well this person might know about it, when really I just need them to just go talk to this person. So short term story wise, I can use your character motivations to move you towards where I need things to go. By the end of today, long term, all that's out the window, and I think I think Joe, you might have more to say on this, but for me, long term, it's like where the players go is where they go, and I've got ideas for like what things I want to happen, but like, if that's what they don't do, that's what they don't do. Sometimes you got to scrap a prepsession for it, yeah, or use it later. So I hate the term rail roading.

26:53 I actually really buzzword, but it's not a real thing. Yeah, because again you've agreed, well, you've agreed to play this game, and just like any other game, like do you call it railroading when like a mission comes up? And even in an open quote unquote open world video game, like it's a mission, Like that's how you get the campaign to continue. I will be And this might be panantic even, but like video games by their very nature because they have to be coded, every eventuality has to be programmed into that game. It's the rails are built into the games, right, But so that's it's impossible to do that as a human being preparing a D and D game. It's also what makes it really fun to be a DM or a GM for a tabletop RPG is is the nature of that exact thing of like maybe I want you to go down this alleyway and you don't, or maybe there's a battle that I want to have and and then you talk your way out of it. And so the answer to Jordan's question is yes, right, like, yes, do I want you to go a certain way? And do I need it to go a certain way to have the story continue? Yeah? Are there ways to doing that that are less railroady quote unquote railroady than others? Yeah? I think so. And the one thing that I've found is what they call sandbox. It's a lot more prep but you essentially have like roads that divert three or four different directions and

28:26 they all end up leading to the same thing. So there's I mean, that's a we could go in. It's a huge episode to even go into that building a story essentially as a sandboy, I already want to listen to that episode. We're gonna put that on a list. But there's a there's an article that I read on it. But essentially, so do I have What I really wanted to answer is do I have an idea of where this character's arc is going to take it? Yes? If I know you and I know your character, and we've done the work to build that character in their backstory. To your point, we are we're going to eve that into the story. It's going to help point me as the GM, in the direction that we're going to take the story. We're going to bring people in from that backstory where events are going to happen. That that helped push you in that direction. But to Jordan's question, right, it's not always going to go that way. Sometimes the dice are going to tell a different story, and sometimes the players are going to help tell a different story. And that's where I think it's fun. Being a GM is like I now have to figure out how I'm going to move my pieces to intersect with the story that my table is telling. Yeah, it didn't work out this way, so how can we get there? No, you don't want to You don't want to have a character whose goal is to be the greatest warrior from this country and then like the dice don't work out. You're like, Okay, well I guess he's a chef now, And I mean that's interesting though, Like that now now it's like now it's really it's a lot, it's a

29:56 lot more to realize that the violent ways that he was taking are are all for nought, and he finds real passionate. Maybe the greatest warrior was being a chef the whole time. Is that maybe the battles or the sushi we made along the way, Yeah, there you go, just accidentally made a better character. Okay, bad metaphor, but good character. Right. Yeah, But that's that's what's really cool about this game, is like we couldn't even real road that joke, Joe. No, there is something to hear about having being be pre planned, which is, you know, if every story beat is pre planned, that's what railroading is, where you're forcing the characters to go down the one track that you laid for that. I want to go check this out over here, it's it's closed. That's you can't.

30:37 There's there's a fork in the road. Okay, we go left. Okay, so you go to the right, and so that that's that joke's on you. That's the bad part. Left and right are built the same exactly. We call it the house moving castle. There's a castle. Just use it all the time. Yeah, there's a there's a castle posistance to the east. Okay, I guess we go west and I guess his castles in the west now castle, Yeah, with the blue flag. But the to answer the question is like how much of it is pre planned? Some you may have bits of the story, maybe maybe beats, and maybe a general idea, like a fuzzy version of the final outcome, But planning versus reacting is a huge part of it. And there's also a very big distinction to be made in any given D and D campaign, even in a one shot, between the plot and the mechanics, because you know, if people are going into town and you've got the town written up and you've got you know, you've got the tavern, and you've got the Thieves Guild, and you've got the you know whatever, city Hall and the cathedral, they can go wherever they want and you're good to go. But if like they're down in the middle of the Dungeons, sitting outside the door to the you know, the temple to the Big Bad and you spent the week prepping that and suddenly everyone decides, you know what, We're just going to blow off the temple and go do something else completely shopping. Yeah, like that's your you know, you're kind of within your rights. As the DM say, look, guys, I prepared this, We said last week, this was going to happen. You know, let's let's let's do this thing, because you

32:09 do need to do a certain amount of because of the rules complexity of DD, You've got to have stuff ready to go, and so kind of making that distinction between there are places where you can go where you want in the story and there's other places where you know you're kind of committed to that. And like we said, you know, another episode we talked about the social contract, and the social contract is kind of the DM is going to do a certain amount of work and you agree that you're gonna you know, you're gonna let that pay off for everybody. Yeah, as where I describe a cut scene, Yeah, the analogy I'd like to use is like the campaign shouldn't be a railroad, And like I don't love that sandbox analogy because it does kind of imply you can go in any direction. I like to think of it like a river. Right, Sometimes it's super wide. You can start up at the island, you can you know, maybe go upstream a little bit, stop on shore for a little while, but it's all kind of going in the same direction, and every now and then it's going to narrow to where you've only got one choice. Sometimes you can go down little side tributaries and spend some time there, you know, or you can just go straight down it. But you know, if you're all playing a campaign and you've agreed that it's going to go somewhere, because it's totally cool if you just go, yeah, we're just going to play a bunch of modules right in a row, and they don't necessarily have to have any connective tissue because we're just more interested, you know, kind of having fun kicking doors and killing monsters. That that's a totally fine way to run a game.

33:34 I've heard of campaigns that are like, you know, these like twenty year long campaigns, like, yeah, I still play with the same group twenty years. Like my character has a family, and they're like kind of mundane, like to me, to me, yeah, And I think that's great if you're like, yeah, like we own a business, Yeah, we run a business, and you know, last week we got audited by by the Fantasy and I'm like, yeah, it's awful, just like progress is to the point which just a lame dad, But they know they really like it's the Sims boulders Gate Edition R. And I was like, cool, Like, it's just it's not for me. And that's where would I would have a conversation with fine. One of the things I like to do, especially if it's a if you're playing a one shot or like a short series of games, is you can give people choices, but you ask an establishing question that kind of connects them all together. Right. You know, you can say something like build whatever kind of character you want, but include why are you in prison for a crime you didn't commit? You know, and start everybody all together kind of in the same boat. And if you want to get more specific, you know, why are you in prison for a crime you didn't commit? And why is a big, bad, evil guy responsible for that? And that gives everybody reason to throw in together and you know, have a motivation without telling them specifically Okay, your dad is this guy and this happened to them, and but just just to answer these one or two questions and but then within that you can be as free as you want. That's a real nice way to kind of find a balance between like

35:07 you say, you know the railroad and then just kind of let it like a lot up whatever store they want to gat them the plot hook for one shot that I got invite to see like a year ago. No really, yeah, excellent, that's a great way to start again. Yeah, I do like the river analogy. I'm going to treat this as the highway, where like your destiny is the interstate. So like you're driving prazy to Florida, and of course you want to end up a Disney World. But there's all kinds of attractions along the way, right, and you know, sometimes you want to see the world's biggest foil ball, and sometimes you really just think the bathroom, and you know, there's little little pit stops of Starbucks and stuff. But like there's all kinds of exits, and depending on how much of a rush you're in to get to your destination, you can do some cool side stuff. Yeah, there's like a ratty like a big ratty fiberglass t rex. I'm going to stop there for a little while. Of course that's going onely so yeah. Yeah, the world's largest cup of coffee.

35:55 I go for the good world's arts cup of coffee. Jordan. I hope that helps you out. Yeah, thanks for every Thanks for stening that in all right. Our next question comes in from Caleb. Hello, DMS, I was wondering how you go about teaching the game. Do you recommend YouTube videos or do you treat it like a board game and do a tutorial before you start? Or is it best to learn why you play? So we'll do like, not only an episode in this or why I do a series on how to teach, like like really in depth, but for the sake of this episode. My quick answer is I get new players at every game that I run. If they've never ever played before, I'm just gonna assume this is coming from nothing. They just they saw the movie, they watched Stranger Things once they heard Balder's Gate was a good game, and then I have to find them sounds on my table. So I would first ask them, Okay, what do you know? And if they say nothing, it's like, right cool, Here's what we can do. Here is a twenty sided die. We're going to roll this for almost everything until I'll tell you otherwise. Here's a character sheet that I made up already. Do you want to play this kind of thing, this kind of thing, or this kind of thing? And then we find a character for them. Cool.

37:01 Here's what these things mean. Here's a couple of things that you can do. Don't worry too too much about any of those things until I kind of like give you the hint that maybe you need to worry about those kind of things. I tell them, you tell me what you want to do, and I will interpret it into rules. If it doesn't work for your character, if it's totally impossible, I will tell you, and I will tell you why. If it's only kind of possible, we're going to roll to see if it happens. And if it's super easy, it's just going to happen. A Dylan just kind of you know, be part of the story, get in the headspace of the character, have fun. That's what we do for day one. And then if they come back and say, cool, here's some mechanics to worry about. Here's some things to keep track of, and we kind of just add a little bit every time, which kind of makes it a little bit less of a like board game or video game experience and a little more of like a skill that they're learning. I did the same thing with my guitar students for a year. I talk guitar for nineteen years and here's you know to play guitar before cool. Here's a couple of chords, here's how we use them, and here's a song. And then as we go and over the course of years and years, here's another skill you can learn. Here's another way you can use it. Here's a more complicated song that you can play. Now that's the two minute version of how I teach the game. I think if it's at all possible, get your new players together and have everybody sit down and build characters together, kind of with the books open, all talking about it all, kind of building your characters sort of at the same time, going back and forth. You're going to be a fighter, That's what this means, because then everybody.

38:30 One of the problems that new players can really have is you can kind of get siloed in doing your own thing because you're like, I'm going to play a fighter. I only need to worry about what fighters have going on. And that's not the greatest way to learn the game, because there's bits and pieces of what's going on in the game sort of coded in all of the different character classes. And if you have everybody sit down together, if you've got the luxury of doing that, which you know, if you're doing a one shot at a store and you're just whatever, handing out pregens or something, you don't necessarily have the luxury to do that, but you know, if it's a new campaign. When I ran at the store and we ran kind of like like ninety whatever ninety day, like three month campaigns, little mini campaigns that would then they then start over every three months so that new players could have a hook, a way to get in. It always started with a great, big, everybody builds their characters altogether session because that was a really really cool way. And in another episode we talked about how dms can assign buddies to people. That's a great way to like right from the jump. You know, Jason, you've built a hundred characters. You know, I'm going to put you together with this person that hasn't built one before, you know, and they're going to make the decisions, but you're going to look over their shoulder and answer questions about what's going on. You know.

39:46 It's good like team building exercise too. Yeah, yes, especially for like a longer campaign and if people don't know it, because it's going to be a mixed group of friends I don't know anybody friends, it's a stranger, So a strangers are not strangers is great with them to not become strangers. Yeah, and if it's the friends that sounds like that. I mean, this is good ice breaking or just team right, just fun and then getting like, oh, like you're going to do that. That's a good idea, And I wonder if there's a way that I can kind of dovetail my story into that or something. Yeah, and you've got the added bonuses the DM that like you're hearing people put their back stories together like as they're building it, and you can maybe ask them a few leading questions, you know, like, oh, well, if there was a particular cult that was active in the city, you know, what would that look like?

40:31 Do you think that you know anything to do with your character? Kind of thing like that, And so you know, you can kind of start to get an idea, like if you don't have a big overarching campaign idea, or even if you do, you can start thinking about ways to weave them in where they're all at the table and you can ask questions kind of all together as opposed to you know, over the course of two weeks, you know, half a dozen people send you separate emails that you got to read with what's going going on. It's a lot more organic, and you kind of that we do it that way, and if you're a power hungry GM, you can control what kind of character your players build and make sure that it's not something absurd. Yeah, call back and yeah, now I'm looking at this mostly from a one shop perspective, just that that's from most of my experiences. Having them build their own characters is like a they came back because they had a good time the first time, handing them a character to just like here you go, let's just play. You think this is a hobby, and I've had people come for their first games. They think it's going to be something that they were interested. They want to try it out, and it's not for them, and that's cool, but they still like the culture and they go play ball to skate on PlayStation instead, and you're happy to have them and just really big Chris Pine fans. Sure, yeah, and why wouldn't you make hashtag guilty? So they did a good time, they come back and now they wanted to learn more about it, and so like what I was saying about giving them new skills to learn. Building

42:02 your own character from scratch is absolutely one of those skills that they can be learning. Yeah, I think it is important. And this is a kind of a I don't want to say a lost art because then I sound a thousand years old, but I think there is a lost art to building your character from scratch with nothing but books and pencil and paper. It is. And that's going to lead to what I was going to say, And I send them to D and D Beyond yp I love that website and accompanying accompanying app now not not so much for character building, but as a as a GM. But no D and D Beyond because I can share things like the player's handbook with them, of course, and they don't have to run out and buy it if they're not sure this is a hobby, because it's an expensive hobby to get into. If well, maybe challenge I'll challenge that.

42:46 But it doesn't have to be, but it can be. And so what I want them to do is take a look at the mechanics of how to play the game right at its core, which I guess you can get for free online really pretty you know, like it gets the price of dice, right, yeah, the online so but I want them to go there. And I'm gonna also because the way that I kind of learned right because I had the ten thousand foot view of it and then but I didn't understand the mechanics of like, well, how does a turn work? And how does what's the GM or DM going to say? And how is that? And so I listened to media. I took in D and D or tabletop RPG media and like, listen to Critical Role and one of our players at our table listen to nad pod and I found a whole new thing that he's into now. Yeah, most like most of it helped him kind of understand and not I guess visualize like how the game works. And I think that helped a lot. Yeah. Now for mechanics like combat, and I tell new players all the time, like, listen, there's the rules in this game are kind of fast and loose until we get into combat when they actually matter.

43:58 So outside of combat, you just tell me which want to do and I'll tell you how it works. That's kind of what everyone does. And in combat, I'm going to take care of most of the legwork for you. But I have a pre printed pdf that that I've had for like at least a year now with all of the things you can do. Yeah, here's all the things you can do. Here's attack, defend, disengage everything the best board games give you do dip, dive and dodge, you know what I mean, like the best board games, Like here's what you can do on a turn yep, So I love that. I also spent about thirty dollars on a little lemonator and I've got that in my bag ready to go to hand out. And if they want to take dry erase markers and mark them up, cool and wipe them later, so that they've got that little cheat sheet ready to go. They don't feel the social burden of asking one hundred questions. It's like, hey, it's all here. So this is everything you can do. Here's a couple of things you probably actually are going to do, because no one ever does this, this or this unless you know here's what it does. And if you find yourself needing to disengage, you might need to disengage. So to really just come down answering the question, handing them as much as I can pre done, explaining what they cannon can't do or or where they can try to do not as much where you can't do because like if if they tell me they want to do something and it's just totally impossible, then your character is just going to fail and that might have consequences, and that's you know, we make that clearer from the front. Feeling can be fun, though, feeling can be great.

45:15 Yeah, I like having to forget if I said this another episode. I kind of like trying if I can, if the schedule's add up, if I can get one of my more experienced friends to come sitting in at one of these public games and be my ringer but also be my anti ringer, where if the players are going to screw up and somebody has to take the fall, I'll kill him with impunity. I will flat out kill him just to pay. We can make an example out of them. Well but I mean, I mean, and we laugh about that. But the other thing is that like they can model what that means in the game, Like you can kill their character and then go, oh that sucks. Oh man, okay, give me ten minutes. I'll write up a new character and everyone else sees that it's no big deal, you know, Whereas like like, if you don't know and you've never played the press like, you might feel this tremendous pressure or something like that. But if you've got someone at the table who gets it and is just like, yeah, no, no, it's no big deal. We just keep playing, absolutely, that's that's super raceful to have. Yeah, that's another thing that helps us separate D and D from video games, where the video game is you have a protect you don't. You don't have to start your may Okay, so now you dies, We're going to continue as Luigi no he sucks. Yes, So being able to have someone else is and maybe your table won't have that option.

46:32 That's something you got to just explain from the start. But we this is going to be on the list of episodes to make. I want to make sure we do this right and that it becomes a resource for other people to use for some time. But we'll probably do like a multi part series on how to properly teach brand new players in way more depth than we just so, Caleb, I hope that was helpful if you're teaching new players. I hope you can use some of that where if you are hoping to be taught better that's so, that's how I would hel Yeah, but sounds like the TLD are there for the Like I think he offered us like three options. All of those options are good. Learning through play is absolutely the best one if you can only have to pick one. Yes, Yeah, I like that one. Yeah, And I think that's that's pretty much with without actually using the phrase, I think that is pretty much how I described it, which like, hey, here's what we can do and let's go. Yeah, depending on how you learn. But yeah, I like the idea of introducing new tools every time they come back. Yeah, that's great. That's a good one. I would do one more quick one here. This is coming from Ken, another one of our players, Joe, and I just like that. I just like this question as a little little palate cleanser at the end of the episode. Here, that's coming from Ken. Hey, Jason, Ken here, so just want to note from your perspective, what would be the perfect d n D campaign. So this question is just for me out of think he knew who else is on the show, and there was a good chance you weren't slated to be on the show at the time, Joe. But so what's your what's your ideal campaign. We're bringing this back to the dat's metaphor what's your what's a perfect like? But for D

48:06 and B it's one where the players all get to do cool stuff and it's not too easy but not too difficult. I'm not sure. I mean, I like the campaign that we're doing now. It's a lot of fun. As a GM, it gives me a lot of opportunities to do a lot of different things. But yeah, I just basically the campaign I'm looking for, my dream campaign is for everybody just to have a great time at the table. That's a wonderful compound answer, Joe. But it's the truth. It's I know, it's like world peace, you know, but it's the true person believe everybody. I don't think that I have a perfect campaign in mind. I just want to I want to have fun and use a lot of different voices, which is three different Scottish perfect or ideal is too high bar to set because then you really need like I don't think so. I don't think so because I've already run my ideal campaign. So what was that?

49:00 That was? We started it out. If you've ever read Perdido Street Station by China Mayville, which is a fantasy novel, kind of like a modern, weird fantasy novel that takes place in this gigantic kind of country sized fantasy city that has all these different neighborhoods and stuff like that, so you know, kind of city stated the Invincible Overlord kind of thing. I ran an urban fantasy campaign. What I said was, when you create your character, create the neighborhood that your character comes from in the city. And then the campaign was all about like everybody had something going on in their neighborhood, but they all tied together to like the politics of the whole city and stuff like this. And then within that we kind of played some adventures where we sort of got everybody together and got them involved in what was going on, and you know, got a close knit group. And then one by one I said, okay, you tell me what, like your perfect idea of an adventure is, Like, what adventure do you want me to create for you that the group will go through and then one by one will go through it for everybody. And the guy playing the dwarven fighter was like, I want a Western I want a dwarve in Western And so I wrote a dwarf in Western so the dire cattle stampede through the streets of the city and stuff like, you know, through the dwarven neighborhood. And another guy was a police inspector. This was in fourth edition, so he was playing on Marshall and he was like, I want to do, you know, a noir

50:32 style murder investigation, and so, you know, I did a noir style murder for investigation for them, and somebody else, you know, was like they were a wizard who was a librarian, you know, was their job, and they're like, I want to you know, I want a crazy magical library adventure. And we did that, and so that kind of thing where like I talked before about establishing questions, so I have that establishing question We all know it's going to take place in the bounds of this city. And like you know, at the beginning, we said like we're going to dive under the city. We might climb up into the towers of the city, but it's never leaving the city, like we're you know, however high level we go, we're always going to find something to do in the city.

51:13 It's not going to you know, we're not going to go tripsing off to other planes of existence and all this kind of stuff and it was amazing and we had a fantastic time, and uh, you know, I would love to run a game like that again. And if I ever, you know, had a group that was like, we want to play for years, and we all want to play together and we want to do something cool, that's the that is what I would set up because hmm, god, that game was fun to fun to run, but it was also a ship ton of prep. So one of the things about my I Feel game is I need at least ten hours a week to work on it, which like as an adult with a life, that is, you know, when I own the store, I could justify it, right, and because that was when I did it, because these people were actually playing, because these people were actually paying to play in the store, So you know, I could call it, I could call it labor. But it was super fun.

52:00 I would love to do something like that again. That sounds like that sounds like the way to make like the perfect game if you're if you're going for it, if perfection is your goal, then like having every player just show up to be like, hey, I want these things please. It's like a Mongolian barbecue. It's like each player's got the little plate and then you the DM got the little circle stove and you with giant chopsticks and you're you're cooking up their Mongolian grill. But it was also a really good crew. I mean, you know, like like the kind of like, well, first, I want to have the perfect table of people whose play styles all compliment each other and get along great, and they all love the way I DM. So there's like, you know, there's a lot of stuff you gotta comesarily always have control of. Yeah, yeah, that's that's really what I want, right, It's just everybody to be at the same table.

52:45 I'm just like I want like three friends just in general. Start there. That got dark real fast. No no, no, if I was bringing up like my ideal campaign and like if and I feel like this might be my interpretation of the spirit of the questions, like what do I look for in a game? And like some this this is kind of what I said earlier. I figured if it was this episode or or the or the previous one, but where finding a a DM that matches your play style? I might have even been earlier in this episode we recorded for a while now but where like, I don't see games like I know, the gritty realism, keeping track of everything, dying in the elements. I don't think that sounds like fun. I like a little bit of Looney Tunes in my game.

53:30 I like, I like, I like silly characters, but memorable ones. I want to fall in love with the with this, with the silly wise crack and sidekick, and then cry when he gets taken from me. So I I like, I like sillier games, and I like I like when we, you know, get together. I prefer in person the online. I accept the bullet it has to be, and so like it. This is very much a social thing for me, and getting people with at least one thing in common that you know, if this hobby is all we have in common, we have one thing in common, and filling a table with those kind of people and and just having like just like a fun kind of lighthearted storytelling thing. So so to me, I'm not super into the grittier, more crunch crunchier games. I like some numbers in my game. I like, you can do you can you can have a crunch of your class in a sillier game. That really, what's one of the great things about about classes. You know, if you want to spend all your time, you know, drilling down to research obscure spells, you can do that.

54:25 If what you want to do is just kick indoors and stab things and take their gold, you can do that too, And those can coexist. That's one of the firs. I'm playing a kicking door and swing a next character right now when I really want to be doing something, I think that, so I'm going to a bridge or a bridge. I'm going to edit my answer. I'm not I'm going to a bridge, Yes i am. I'm going to you're and bridging it and unabridging. So yeah, I'm bridging it. So I would say that my perfect campaign, and yeah it would. It would have a little bit of both those elements though, But I do like kind of a serious for me, like my favorite kind of story to read or to experience, and I would want to play out It would be like a political mystery power struggle type of Game of Thrones, ask you know what I mean, Like a political of political injury. There you go.

55:23 So it's like part mystery, but there's saboteurs involved and stuffing. I love that. I think that's so interesting to me and a lot of fun to play. But like your Joe Abercrombie kind of thing, something like yeah yeah, and but with a good amount of like being stupid an evil kiss, you know, And that's like there's got to be a good amount of levity because I don't know, for me, like real serious things. It's just why bother life is really serious. I don't have fun, so not Joe Abercrombie. Yeah yeah, not exactly. Books are great, but they're pretty so yeah yeah, so Ken, thanks for the more lighthearted message. We got to kind of muse about what kind of games we really want to play.

56:06 And this is something that you asking yourself getting into a game. It's like, what is my ideal campaign? And then this is the conversation you and your DM half And that's pretty much what you just described, Jim. It's like everybody has their own even very specific I'm going to be taking around the phrase Dwarf Western for lots of times. Oh my god, it was so much fun. It was awesome. But having an idea of what the game you want to play that you're going to be spending the next you know, several months or years on is not a it's not a wild to ask, And that's a conversation you and your DM should be having. And you never know. Sometimes your DM well means ideas. Yeah, oh my god, let me tell you Dwarf Western dwarf and Western is I never would have thought of that in a million years, Joe, I swear to God, if we sit down the moment, yeah we found that the dwarf Western.

56:54 Now, yeah, a tumbleweed to the beard goes by. But yeah, this is this is things you should be asking yourself as getting into a new game, and if nothing else, to make sure you and your DM are on the same page and that you're going to be delivering equal experiences to each other. All comes down to communications. Absolutely. Yeah. So you can participate in these types of episodes by going to Hello Adventurers podcast dot com, slash voice, or hen you send us an email if you would prefer to do it that way. This Hello Adventurers podcast at gmail dot com. We don't to hear from you even just even just fro feedback episode ideas, but little stuff like this for for these episodes, these are a lot of fun. I feel like we know you guys better now we get to connect on this, so I keep sending in those questions. Yeah, send us, send us all you got, So we're gonna wrap it up here for the day. I think that's enough for for one. We've got a couple more of these. We'll get to them. We're gonna do these every month, so keep sending them in and the links are all in the show notes if if you didn't write them down fast enough. But I think let's let's wrap it up here. So I'm jas Bortiso. That sids Joe McCall. This is Jim Crocker, and this has been Hello Adventures Podcast stats l