July 5, 2023 • 39 mins
As the best of college buddies, Cameron Abaroa and Dax Levine founded a comedy improv troupe, explored the island of Hawaii, and dove into the world of Dungeons & Dragons. Learn the foundational origins that defined Dax's style as a Dungeon Master and how D&D shaped Cameron's career in the fine arts. Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/dungeonsanddax Hire a Professional Dungeon Master: https://dungeonmasterdirect.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:35):
Hello everybody.
I am back from our little hiatusand I am here with one of my
very best friends in the world.
This is Cameron Abaroa and we'vebeen friends for 10 years now.
Yeah, 10 years, officially.
10 years ago, we were studentsat BYU Hawaii and we just liked
(00:59):
telling jokes and having fun.
And those jokes became, projects becameentire, you know, experiences that we
had that now affect our careers today.
Yeah.
So before we get into thoseorigin stories, who are you?
Cam, Cameron Abaroa what's your story?
(01:20):
Yeah I am Cameron and I am a whole.
Plethora of things.
But my biggest thing is thatI am a full-time teacher.
I teach theater choir, stagecraft.
I do a lot of different thingswhile, while I'm working
for my school that I'm at.
I do a lot of different projects.
I am also a dice maker.
(01:41):
I make a whole plethora of R P g diceincluding D six and D 20 is the whole.
The whole gamut, and I'm justkind of a nerd who is really
obsessed with storytelling andit's all thanks to this guy
right there.
Oh no.
You were a nerd before I met you.
You were a nerd before I met.
(02:02):
True.
When I started a, a comedy improvclub in college, you were one of
the very first people we recruited.
You were just wandering around campuslooking at the different club signs.
Yeah, I remember that moment.
Exactly.
I am walking through the student union.
I had met you briefly in the cafeteriaof the university the day before.
(02:24):
Mm-hmm.
And you're like, you, I know you.
That's where all freshmenand sophomores meet.
And is
that the cafeteria?
It's very true.
Very true.
And you see me in the student union, youlike yell my name and I walk over and
you're like, yeah, we're doing improv.
And without missing a beat, I signed up.
I'm a theater kid.
I'm a theater kid.
And I, the university that wehad, didn't have a lot of theater.
So they were, I was like an improv troop.
(02:45):
Yeah.
I'm in.
Sign me up.
Here we go.
And here we are now 10 years.
We are now,
10 years later.
I loved teaching improvbeing part of improv things.
I loved having you on stage.
You're always one of our strongestperformers, but also someone who worked
really well with your scene partnersand helped them look, look awesome too.
It was so great having you.
(03:06):
Thank you.
Every time you were on stage, I'mlike, this is, this is gonna be and so
we taught we taught improv together.
We had to learn it.
Yes, we did.
We had to teach it.
We had to get better at it.
It
was this weird kind of chainof events and we taught improv
for our entire time there.
And yeah, I can say that teachingimprov in that troop is why I'm
(03:28):
actually teaching theater today.
It started this journey whereI'm now a full-time teacher.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Live in the dream.
Live the dream
man.
No, there is a, a dark side toour improv history, and that dark
side is Dungeons and Dragons.
(03:48):
Because I was a big d and d fan andI tried teaching my improv friends
how to play d and d and when itfirst started, it did not go well.
Why didn't go well, Cameron,
who Whohoo?
We were, it was 2014 and you werelike, Hey, my improv friends, I
(04:10):
know you're all nerds at heart.
Do you wanna play this gamecalled Dungeons and Dragons?
I, who was a theater kid, butnot really much of anything else.
I was like, this is cool.
What is it?
And we'd played a session of 3.5.
And with 3.5 did not quite match ourgroup's sensibilities our, our math.
(04:33):
But I gave you spreadsheets.
I gave you spreadsheets for everything.
Listen, I'm a creative.
Me and math
do not get along.
Oh, there was so much math in it.
There was so much math in it.
It was, it was wild.
But then, It was right around thattime that a certain new edition
came out.
Yes.
Fifth Edition came out that summerand we, we were playing like part
(04:58):
of the the What's the word for it?
The play test stuff.
And we, yes, before the books wereeven out, we were playing things as
they were being released to the public.
And fifth edition had such a a shiftin how, in how it was run, focusing
less on the math and the mechanics,and more on the storytelling.
And how did that change our
(05:19):
group?
I mean, immediately you had a group of.
Improv artists, storytellers whodidn't really latch on as much to the
math, the complex spell systems thatwas in 3.5, but really the more loose
I guess loose rules of five reallyallowed for that greater storytelling.
(05:39):
And so we all jumped in.
And immediately fell in love.
That first, those first few sessionsthat we played, it was, it was
night and day, just the atmosphereand the party in the room and.
You know, it, it started offo started me off on a 10 years
journey with Dungeons and Dragons.
(06:00):
I'm still playing to this day.
I'm still a huge nerd for d and dand that fifth edition really started
that.
Yeah.
Every time I, I run a game with newplayers, I talk about those early
sessions, how I got my improv friendsinto d and d and they were terrible at it.
Right.
Couldn't remember therules or the mechanics.
Yep.
Then we focused more on the story.
(06:21):
It was fundamental in shaping mystyle as a DM as well, because
I was with other performers.
We wanted to build on each other's ideas.
It was no longer me settingout a world and have forcing
other people to solve problems.
It was more of a collaborative.
Process.
It really was especially that first world.
(06:41):
That first world that we played inwas almost, it was semi home brew.
It was like Sword Coast, but our version.
And so you kind of allowedeach of us to kind of build our
own section of the world Yes.
Where our characters is coming from.
We can talk about the pages of backstoryI created for that first character.
(07:02):
Yes.
But so, so here,
here's the design philosophy behind it.
We slapped down a map ofthe Sword Coast and Yep.
Gotten realms and none ofus knew anything about it.
Absolutely nothing.
No, I was still pretty new to d and d.
So I didn't know any of the lord,I didn't know any of the history.
None of us did.
So I slapped on the map.
I'm like, all right, everybody.
Point to where you're from, and we allpointed to someplace on the map that
(07:27):
we thought would fit our character.
And like, okay, you're in chargeof coming up with what that culture
is like and what it's like there.
And so some people were, you know, moresimplistic and you were going with.
Other classical fantasy things.
You pointed to the highforest and knowing nothing.
Yep, I did.
Knowing nothing aboutthe forgotten realms.
You're like, I'm gonna writethe political intrigue and the
(07:48):
governmental system of high forest.
And you did.
You did.
I did
all to end up playing a very angsty
spy.
Yep.
And then when he died, youbrought in someone else from
the alien from that is what we
called it.
Yep.
It First few characterswere all branches from that.
But it was this interesting thing becausewe all had the opportunity to invent
(08:11):
this part of the world, and it really didbecome this huge collaborative effort.
And we had barely played like two orthree sessions, but building that world
together and then to get to play init with you obviously as our guide and
kind of the overarching like, Caretakerof that world was so incredible cuz
(08:34):
we got to really dive in and get messywith our character's backstories.
We didn't, we used the Sword Coast andthe forgotten realms as kind of a jumping
off point and then we all went wild with
it.
We went deep into it.
Yeah.
At that point we had so manypeople wanting to join and this
was before d d school, right?
(08:55):
Mm-hmm.
It was 2014, but peoplewere still trying to get in.
We had to split into two groups.
Yep.
And so our friend Trevor, Trevor,if you're listening, you're awesome.
We love you man.
We love man.
He would run a group on Saturdaysand I think I would run the
group on Sundays or vice versa.
So I got to be a player.
I got to be a player.
Yeah.
And that was awesome.
But yeah, and eventually some peopleleft after that semester cuz they
(09:18):
graduated or transferred schools.
So we combined it to one party again.
But we had even though the group waschanging and shifting, there was still
like this through line behind it, all ofthis we were running Tyranny of Dragons.
And if anyone's read Tyranny ofDragons, you know that it's a hot mess.
Absolute hot mess.
It's wild.
(09:39):
But so we had to make it our own.
We had to cut things out.
Yeah.
We had to streamline it.
And we started with lost minds ofFan delver, which is the perfect
opportunity for a new DM to learn.
And I learned so much from Lost
Minds.
It was, I got to be a front row audiencemember to watching you develop your
play style and your DM style and.
(10:01):
It was
pretty darn awesome.
It was.
It was.
Oh man.
So many feelings right now.
So many feelings.
Nostalgia.
Yeah.
Back then we were thinking, oh, D and D's.
Great.
Wouldn't it be great if we allhad, you know, fancy, high paying
jobs someday and we could justplay d and d on the weekends?
Well, did we know that theseextracurricular activities that
we were doing in between classesand on weekends, we're going to
(10:24):
define our careers in the future?
Yeah.
Very much so.
Yeah, I, I mean, neither of our degreesthat we ended up getting really pull
into what we do now in the terms, oh,mine does terms like mine does as well.
But it's not, you know, I didn't goto school to become a theater teacher.
(10:45):
You didn't go to school to becomea professional dungeon master.
But the skills that we learned inthese, I was a communications and I
had done Essentially what our school'sequivalent of a theater minor was.
And we had done that, and it allgets pulled in as the skill sets
that we've built that then allow usto then take these passions that we
had and build careers out of them.
(11:07):
And Dax will try and psychoanalyzeour characters from time to time.
No, I,
I didn't psychoanalyze them.
I wasn't a Freudian, itwas more of a behaviorist.
Speaking of behavioralpsychology, do you remember this?
So for those of you, anyone not watching?
Yeah.
I, my heart is starting topound because this is the first
(11:29):
dice that he he uses a dm.
It's a gold shiny dice.
It was the happy dice.
If he rolled that dice, itmeant good things were coming.
There was also another price.
This is like 50 cents.
This is worth about 50 cents.
Yeah, it's
just going glitter.
Priceless.
The memories we made withthat dice are priceless.
Now, before you describe what'scoming next, I'm show you, I just
(11:51):
wanna see what happens to your face.
Mm mm-hmm.
Yep.
I'm still having a full reactionto that and that what he's showing
to anyone listening out there is abright red D 20, and that was the.
Let's see how it goes.
Dice the, Hey, are youactually gonna die now?
(12:13):
Dice.
It was the, essentially the dark dice.
The bad dice.
Yes.
Whereas the gold shiny one waslike, oh, he's rolling that one.
We did something amazing.
Oh, he's rolling the red one.
Oh, we all gonna die.
And I never told the party what thedifferent dice meant, but I started,
they started noticing habits.
They started noticing when things weregetting more dangerous, when their
(12:36):
characters were more precariouslyclose to the edge of death.
The red dice would come out tothe point where people would
go quiet when I switched dice.
People would be talkingand laughing, eating pizza.
I had the gold dice out,switch the red dice.
Instant change, an
immediate change in in the atmosphere inthe room cuz we knew something bad was
about to happen.
(12:56):
I loved being a psychology major so much.
It, it
was the equivalent of when you walkinto a room in a video game and
the music changes, but you don'tknow why, but you're now scared cuz
it's always that like enemy music.
But you don't see the enemy yet.
Cameron was there.
He can attest.
These stories I tell are all true.
(13:17):
They are.
What are other things wediscovered while playing d and d?
Because we were figuringthings out, right?
I was new.
It really was.
It was.
I was very new.
All of us were new.
You were introducing us to d and d.
But we really, I think through thatprocess of just discovery, we didn't
have anyone gate keeping us so wecould just make mistakes, get messy.
(13:42):
All the Miss Frizzle stuff.
Yeah, and we, I think we alldeveloped our own, our own play style.
You developed your DM style.
And I think by the, the end of our timein college, we had built a very cohesive
group that was telling stories thatjust were emotional and life-changing.
(14:05):
I distinctly remember our last game incollege at least while I was in college.
Cause I had graduateda few semesters before.
You did?
Yeah.
Was that the end of the TMA arc?
It was the end of the TMA arc and.
It was a very emotional experiencefor every single person in the room.
Because we had built this, we had notonly built this world, but we had built
(14:27):
to our own individual's play styles.
We knew how everyone else operated,so we were flowing really well as
a, as a player team, as well as ateam of adventurers in the game.
And so it was this really.
Incredibly powerful session.
And then it was over and it wasour last session for a lot of us.
(14:50):
And it was really emotional.
Because we had built this like very,we, we knew how each person was gonna
play and so we knew when to stepforward and be like, okay, this is my
character's time to take the spotlight.
Okay, now it's not, wedidn't even have to say it.
We knew it cuz we had built theserelationships with each other for so long.
I remember
your character was the cleric,Josiah, was that his name?
(15:13):
Yes.
Wow.
Okay.
I remember I took notes.
But I remember your big thing wastrying to redeem rules who had fallen.
Yes, it was.
And there was a villain that I hadintroduced that was actually my character
when I explained he twisted a villain.
Yeah, it was wild.
Yes.
He came in as a villain in the, in thefinal act and everyone was terrified
(15:35):
of him because he was the Paladin.
And you don't mess with paladins and.
2014, 2015 t and d, they were,they were the broken ones.
So, but you focused so much onfinding a way to redeem him, finding
a way to give him peace and that.
Completely changed thenature of the battle.
It was no longer just, Hey, we'regoing to hit TMA until she dies.
(15:58):
It was, Hey, there are these structuresthat are in place that are empowering
her, and there are people who havebeen led astray by these lies.
How do we break down those chainsand those lies so that the, the
structure falls out from beneath her?
Yeah.
And you did so well, so well.
Oh, thank you.
Making that emotional, even when therewere failed roles, you played into those,
(16:21):
those stumbles and you kept failingforward and you know, rising over that
frustration so that when the final,what was the final role you had to make
in that sense?
It was a persuasion check.
It was a persuasion check to persuadeyour character, this PC character who
had turned secondary B B E G to Tiamat.
(16:42):
And I, I can't remember what theexact number was, but it was like
one above the DC It was just enough.
Yeah.
To change it.
You had told us the DC and it was, and soit changed the whole nature of that fight.
But turned him back to your
side for what?
Turned
him back to side andfinal right against her.
Yeah.
It was, it was powerful cuzwe were all in this together.
(17:02):
There was about six of us in that final.
I believe six in that final session.
And it, you know, it's thesemoments where like a roll of a
dice has six people just sobbing.
It's the power of d and d.
It's the power of this game thatwe've all grown to love, where these
things can just turn on a dime and youhave these deep emotional reactions.
(17:26):
But yes, I got one above the dc.
He turned good and wewon the day and it was
great.
Yeah.
And after we won the day, we, I remember.
We were kicked outta the buildingwe were in because it was late.
Yes.
We had gotten, it went long.
Of course it does.
And so we were just standingaround in a circle in the
dark the dark, just on campus.
Yeah.
(17:46):
Telling about the epilogue, like whathappens to our characters afterwards.
And at that point I wasn't,I was no longer in control.
I, I gave control over to theplayers like, Hey, what happens?
What is your happily ever after?
Yeah, and we kept going for anotherhour and a half just sobbing, telling
the ending of our character stories.
(18:08):
But it, you know, it's this, it'sjust this amazing thing like d and d
is, It can be such an emotional anda powerful experience when you've
built that camaraderie as a group.
And we were actually sayinggoodbye to some of those players.
(18:29):
Cause Yeah, we were
graduating, three of uswere graduating Transing.
Mm-hmm.
I had to teach new people how to play dand d the next semester, which, you know,
came with its own joys and challenges.
Yeah.
But, Yeah, it was, it was hard to saygoodbye to everybody and like the best
goodbye I could have given them was,let's do an awesome session where you get
to the heroes and find your own happily
(18:52):
ever actor.
Yep.
And it was, it was a great graduation
gift to go out on after that.
Once you graduated and I graduateda little later we missed.
This thing, we missed playing d and d.
But we had yeah.
Discovered role 20 before.
It was cool.
Yep.
We discovered Role 20 and Itaught myself how to do role 20.
(19:14):
And I remember I like had to beg ourfriends for like, Hey, if everyone pitches
in $5, I can, I can apply the book.
Most of us were, and to anyonelistening, most of us were in grad
school, so money was not a thing.
They were so
poor, even in undergrad school.
So
poor.
We were all very poor.
Yeah.
So
poor.
All I bought.
I, almost all of us.
Yeah.
I spent $20 on a pound of dice and Ijust like handed them out to people.
(19:38):
Mm-hmm.
This is all we have.
We got like a piece ofglass and we drew on it.
Yeah.
To make
maps.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We didn't even had no battle maps.
We.
It was a lot of theater ofthe mind, which was mm-hmm.
You know we
printed out the basic rulesthat were available and Yeah.
Yeah.
(19:58):
I think we all used up ourlibrary printing allowance
on that.
Yeah, we did, we did great.
We had one player's handbook, oneplayer's handbook, and that was one,
and we shared it.
We would read it and thenpass it on to the next one and
we'd read it and just, yeah.
And then we pass it to someoneelse and they wouldn't read it.
(20:18):
It happens.
Oh, we were so poor.
But yeah.
Oh, we loved it.
But after college, we wanted to connectwhile we were in grad school, and so
we started playing digitally online.
We weren't able to get the whole grouptogether because life and families.
But we had a few one shotsand we eventually did a
storm King Thunder campaign.
I got to teach myself role 20as as part of that, just as a
(20:41):
way to connect with friends.
And this was, you know, before 2020.
This was the before.
Yeah.
2016, I wanna say thousand
is when I graduated.
So yeah, like 17, 18, maybe 19.
Mm-hmm.
We were playing and I got my bachelor'sin psychology, started an MBA program, and
(21:02):
in the back of my head I was thinking, youknow, how could I do this professionally?
I had met some people who wereprofessional GMs and I, I had come to
you first, you and I remember, and Peterand Trevor, and I'm like, How could
I make this work as, as a business?
And I bounced some ideas off of you.
Few of them came to fruit,most of them didn't.
(21:23):
Mm-hmm.
And then I remember getting a,getting a Facebook message in
February of 2020 saying, Hey, Ithink I wanna start a, a company.
I, what do you think?
You know, we'd thrown around a few names.
You had explained kindof your business model.
I was like, that's awesome,that's really cool.
And eventually you were like, I thinkI'm gonna call it Dungeon Master Direct.
(21:46):
And I was like, that's awesome.
You know, let me know,you know what I can do.
That's great.
Then, you know, 2020 happens.
Yes.
Oh man.
And.
We are all online.
We're all at home.
Get another Facebook message.
Hey, do you wanna play?
And I am in
(22:06):
and I, yes, you already how touse to use those digital tools.
Haha.
Ladies and gentlemen, that was calledforeshadowing what we did earlier.
Yes, foreshadowing Divine InterventionCheck, OVS Gun Check, OVS D
20, whatever you wanna call it.
And so you built this entire businessand, and company around around playing d
(22:29):
and d and I got to be, you know, a frontrow audience member to I I, way back.
I got to see you developyour d and d style and now.
I get to be a front row audience memberto building the D M D brand and these
incredible events that you've been doing.
Going to Dragon Steel hosting theHoney Heist, the World Record, so,
(22:54):
It's been awesome kind of watchinga you go from the small group in
college, improv, you founded thislittle group, we all were a part of it.
And then moving into d andd and now here we all are.
Here we all are.
I've done, yeah, peopleall over the world.
But I will say it was such ablessing having you in those early
(23:17):
pro games that I was running.
Thank you.
Because, because I knew you and you knewme, and you knew how to bounce ideas off
of me, and I knew how to take your ideasand make them grow, and that gave me
a lot of confidence to do it and teachother players how to do it as well.
One of our players is now a dm.
You were just telling me about that.
Yeah,
yeah.
We played together on aDungeon Master Direct campaign.
(23:39):
It was the Storm Kings Thunderslash Wild Mount, which was.
Slash Tyranny
of
Dragons we matched slash tyranny ofdragons slash It was, it was wild.
But a player from that ended upapproaching me after we had finished the
campaign and said, Hey, I found this newt T RRP G that I think you would love.
And that TT RRP G is Victoriana.
(24:02):
It's by cubicle games.
It's, if you're a history nerd, goplay it right now cuz it's amazing.
And we've been playing that campaign.
With that system.
We are coming up on twoyears this month, so Wow.
You know, dungeon masterdirect changing in lives.
Yeah, I've got lineage of dmswho have learned from me and I, I
(24:25):
love seeing that, that makes me so
happy.
So important.
Yeah, it's been great.
The connections that, you know, wemake through Dungeon Master Direct,
the parties that you form, like yeah,we are all paying to be there, but we
also then be, I think that whole groupfrom that became really good friends.
We are all, we're now Facebook friends.
And we still talk.
That's when you know it's
(24:46):
serious.
That's when you know.
Right.
We're also old, so it's Facebook for us.
Yes.
We're elder millennials.
Yeah.
So it's been this wild andcrazy ride over enough about me.
Oh, enough about me.
I want to hear about you because youwent in a different direction after.
(25:09):
After, yeah.
And you're, you're living the dream.
You're teaching theater.
You Yeah.
Out of, we were all theaterkids from that improv group.
Yes.
But you were theist of them all.
I was, my motto in college was, I can'tI have rehearsal I or D and D or D and D.
Sometimes I would miss d andd for rehearsal, which was
(25:31):
a very sad part of my life.
But Yeah, so theater I was, like Isaid, I was kind of the Bboy Hawaii
equivalent of a theater minor.
The way they did their degree systemis a little strange, so it's hard
to kind of explain functionally.
I was getting a theater minor but I wasdoing a bunch of shows there, but I was
also doing this improv group on the side.
(25:52):
And they had asked me to start teachingimprov and then I started working in.
The teaching aspect, working everyweek, teaching improv classes helping
design the shows that we were doingperforming in some of those shows.
And it eventually led to thiswhole like, wait a minute.
Why am I putting all thistime into something that
I'm not gonna make a career?
(26:14):
So I ended up marrying thetwo things that were, was my.
Degree, strategic communicationsand theater, and I ended up
getting a, an MFA in Artsadministration, which is for anyone.
Who is confused by that term.
It is all the businessend of putting on a play.
(26:34):
All the theater.
You can't just do theater without, youknow, people running it behind the scenes.
So I ended up getting an MFAin that, which eventually led
directly into me working in.
The education departments of a fewdifferent theaters managing teaching
artists, becoming a teaching artistmyself, and then getting the opportunity
(26:56):
to then move into full-time education.
It all stems from this in improv group.
And so yeah, we, both of us havebuilt a career kind of out of the
thing that we love to do, but wasn'tnecessarily our main focus in university.
So, Which, you know, is wild cuz I, it'sa, it's, it's wild to think about cuz
(27:19):
it's not necessarily a thing that everyonehas the ability or opportunity to do.
Mm-hmm.
And yet we've been able to do thatand so, you know, We're very blessed,
we were able to take our passions and mixit with the practical skills that we have.
Mm-hmm.
Cause you definitely use practical skillsfrom your communication background.
Yeah.
I definitely use allthe psychology tricks.
(27:40):
Mm-hmm.
I have, mm-hmm.
What I tell people is I'm notqualified to be a therapist.
Right.
I don't have a, a master's, I don't havea doctorate, I just have a bachelor's.
So I know enough to be dangerous,but not enough to be helpful.
And I get to use that in d d allthe time and I, I loved my degree.
I wouldn't change it.
But at the same time, college wasso much more than just the degree
(28:01):
plan, just the classes that I took.
It was the friends that I made.
It was the relationships.
It was those stories that d d thatlook, look at, look at us now.
We're, we're on the podcast andthere are three people watching
this live who are interested.
Hey, O Hey
you three people out there.
We love you.
We love you so much.
And to anyone who may belistening in the future.
(28:25):
When you're in, if you're going to collegeor you're in college currently, like
it is what, you know, part of it, butit's really who you, those relationships
that you form the, the things outsideof class that you end up doing that
really end up shaping who you become.
Yes, your classes areincredibly important.
You should do the best you can withthat, but more than that, and both
(28:49):
of us are, are living examples of it.
It's who you end up associating with.
Who are your friends, who are your rideor dies in that college world, and that's
how you make that life for yourself.
That's how both of us werelike, yeah, wait, why?
Why aren't we doing whatwe love as a career?
(29:10):
Why shouldn't we go out there and do it?
And it was your encouragement at thebeginning who was like, maybe I have
something in this pro DM thing, maybe.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe.
Cause I didn't know if I was high qualityenough to, to charge for my games.
And so I had my friends from college,including you, write me reviews to just
give me an idea of what I have to offer.
(29:30):
And that was foundational.
Here we are figuring outlike, oh yeah, I, I'm not bad.
I'm not bad at this.
And here we all are.
I've said that a lot, this podcast, butit is kind of like this, this really
interesting retrospective looking backand realizing that who we were in college
and what we ended up doing in collegenot related to our classes, built these,
(29:55):
these dreams and these careers for us.
So college is great.
Yay.
Class is great, butit's not all about that.
So much.
Summon it all up.
Yeah.
And you're a
teacher now.
You have I am a teacher.
Yeah.
You have the great privilege andresponsibility to mold young minds to
train the next generation of theater kids.
(30:17):
How
has d d like Yeah.
So it has been interesting because whenI was in high school and I, I teach high
school and junior high theater, when Iwas that age, d and d wasn't a thing like.
It, it was, but it was kindof like the nerdy thing.
I had never heard of d andd until college, but I.
(30:38):
Because it's so much a part ofpop culture now through Stranger
Things and critical role Dimension20, insert any property here.
And there's been a d and d connection.
My kids know about it and so it.
For what?
For one thing.
It creates a really good connectionpoint to get to know my kids as kids
(31:00):
before actors and before students.
It's this wonderful connection point.
And then from there I'm able to thentie in the things that I'm teaching
in class about characterization,about objectives, about overcoming
obstacles, and it's, it's.
Interesting because then I can alwaysend it and go, okay, now when you're
in your next session, try these things.
(31:22):
See what happens.
You
give them homework to doin their d d sessions.
No, it's mostly like,Hey, you're doing that.
Why don't you try this?
I wouldn't, well, I was
gonna say, that's awesome.
You should do
that though.
I mean, a lot of it is, is connectedand we, we've talked about, you know,
especially with some of my students,we've talked about that connection
(31:43):
between Building a character for aperformance, being identical to building a
character for d and d, for any t t rrp G.
You have to know what makes thatcharacter tick in order to be believable
and how their actions are gonna go.
And building on that, you know, whenyou fail in in game, you gotta create
(32:04):
a character reason for it, you know?
And so what is driving thatcharacter to fail that role?
What is driving thatcharacter to win that role?
It's, it's been really fun to connectwith my students kind of on that.
It's not all that I do.
But whenever I can I bring in d and d?
(32:24):
Yeah.
What other kind of gamesare you involved in now?
So I am in a.
In Dungeons and Dragons,that's my ride or die.
Love it.
I am in, I DM a campaign with afew other teachers at my school.
I.
We are all incredibly busy.
So it's about every three months we gettogether and just go wild for a session.
(32:47):
I'm just the end of the D semester
or after
greeting is done.
Yep, yep.
And then we all get to kindalet loose a little bit.
I am in a Victoriana campaignthat I mentioned earlier.
And I am in a d and d campaign as well.
So I am currently inthree ongoing campaigns.
One is a DM.
And that's in addition to all ofthe plays that you are directing,
(33:09):
and let's talk about some of those.
Yeah,
yeah.
Yeah, I just finished the season with mystudents of a bunch of different plays.
Most recently we finished aproduction of Into the Woods.
As a side note if you follow me on TikTokor Instagram I ended up buying, I ended up
making just a really crazy purchase of aWizard staff, that's all d and d themed.
(33:34):
And that became our main, one ofour main props for into the woods.
So I pull it in wherever I can.
It's this very subtle thing.
The kid who ended up using that propknew exactly what was going on and just,
just loved that prop as much as possible.
Cuz it's a giant D 20 on top that wethen kind of just slightly covered.
So you couldn't see the numbers,but you could anyone who knew, they
(33:58):
knew what was going on and it wasthis fun little Easter egg for,
for audience members to, to go see.
Yeah, so I, I put on a seasonwith my students every year.
We're gearing up.
I'm in summer break, thank goodness,which is one of the reasons I was
actually available to, to talk
(34:18):
Busy.
You've been trying
find a date, we.
We have been trying for a while,but the summer is upon us.
I'm taking a bit of a break, soplanning for the upcoming season,
getting all of that ready to go.
It's been a lot of fun.
It's a lot of work, butit's, it's so worth it.
Kind of tying some of the stuffwe've been talking about together.
(34:40):
The reason I do.
Teaching.
And the reason I love teachingtheater is there's this incredible
moment when a kid gets it.
A kid steps outside their comfort zoneand they embody this character and there's
something that happens in their face.
And the first time I saw that wasteaching improv at Y U Hawaii.
(35:04):
And just, just having those moments andgoing, oh my gosh, this is, this, this
connection that we've made, this momentthat you've stepped out of your comfort
zone and you've done something incredible.
Then I'm, I'm, I get to dothat every day and it's, it's,
it's incredibly fulfilling.
(35:25):
I love that.
I love that so much.
And before we wrap up, wegotta Indeed, yeah, I do.
I get to see it in people's eyes.
See when they making death saves.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a, that's a real one.
You have a different dice for that one
now.
I do, I do.
I'll show it off here.
Speaking of dice that we useas dms to scare our players,
(35:48):
he introduced this one to me.
Yeah, it is.
Yep.
Mm-hmm.
So a black walnut case that has askull and says, memento Maori, this
D 20 is made out of human bone.
And I use it exclusively for death
saving threat.
If you're ever playing a DungeonMaster direct campaign with
(36:09):
Dax, and he pulls that out.
You done messed up.
This has saved so many people's.
I've wrote so many.
20.
It's saved and it's killed.
And one many as well.
Yes.
But enough about my dice.
Let's talk about this dye right here.
Those of you who can't seeit, it is it is orange and it
is gray, and the lettering is
(36:30):
deal.
It is from the original colors of dungeonMaster Direct, actually current as well.
Slightly current.
Slightly off, yeah.
I am a dice maker.
I, that became part of my pandemic hobbyis I We came a just a hoarder of dice
and I was like, I don't have enough andI don't have money, but I can buy resin.
(36:55):
And went a little ham,created my own molds.
And I am now a part-time dice maker.
I have I have a presenceon TikTok and Instagram.
I run a tiny little Etsy shop.
Yeah, so it's just on the sided and d erupted, a love of the
shiny click clock, math rocks.
(37:17):
I'm currently holding up a smallportion of my collection of
dice in a giant treasure chest.
What's the name of your company?
So
it's called Dyson isis, like theGod Dion isis, but Dyson isis.
You can find it on Instagram or TikTok.
We'd love to have you come join us.
I'm on a slight hiatus cuz ofthe summer vacation, but I hope
(37:40):
to start getting contact contentback up later this month in July.
So that is some fun stuffcoming down the pipeline.
Excellent.
Yeah.
One last thing I want to ask you about.
When's the next time we're gonna getto do something awesome together?
I don't.
It's our next big creative project.
Cameron.
I don't know.
We gotta do this.
(38:00):
We gotta plan this, we gotta do this.
I mean, I don't know about y'all to anyonelistening or watching, but if you wanna
see Dax in action, maybe an actual play.
I don't
know.
We will see.
I've done one.
Another,
maybe when you, when you're comingback up to Utah, let me know.
(38:21):
We'll find out.
Oh yeah.
Something fun to do.
There's so many things in thepipeline that I can't, I can't
talk about in the podcast yet,
but hopefully they all work out
and hopefully your dreamsare fulfilled as well.
You get to Yeah.
Build new minds.
Bring more people intothe theater, teach and
bring more people into d and d.
(38:41):
Yeah.
Yes.
Send them my way.
Right.
Any last things you wanna sayto our adoring three fans?
One, Hey, welcome again.
We're so happy that thethree of you are here.
I think kind of the message I'dlove to leave is you, you can go
(39:03):
far on what you know and what you.
What you study, but it's the relationshipsthat you make along the way that shape
you and that will shape your future.
You know, we we're the examples of that.
Thank you so much, Cameron.
Yeah.
To put in d and d terms.
Find your adventuring party.
Yes.
(39:23):
Find your party and go on an adventure.
Yeah.
Bye everyone.
Hello everybody.
I am back from our little hiatusand I am here with one of my
very best friends in the world.
This is Cameron Abaroa and we'vebeen friends for 10 years now.
Yeah, 10 years, officially.
10 years ago, we were studentsat BYU Hawaii and we just liked
(00:59):
telling jokes and having fun.
And those jokes became, projects becameentire, you know, experiences that we
had that now affect our careers today.
Yeah.
So before we get into thoseorigin stories, who are you?
Cam, Cameron Abaroa what's your story?
(01:20):
Yeah I am Cameron and I am a whole.
Plethora of things.
But my biggest thing is thatI am a full-time teacher.
I teach theater choir, stagecraft.
I do a lot of different thingswhile, while I'm working
for my school that I'm at.
I do a lot of different projects.
I am also a dice maker.
(01:41):
I make a whole plethora of R P g diceincluding D six and D 20 is the whole.
The whole gamut, and I'm justkind of a nerd who is really
obsessed with storytelling andit's all thanks to this guy
right there.
Oh no.
You were a nerd before I met you.
You were a nerd before I met.
(02:02):
True.
When I started a, a comedy improvclub in college, you were one of
the very first people we recruited.
You were just wandering around campuslooking at the different club signs.
Yeah, I remember that moment.
Exactly.
I am walking through the student union.
I had met you briefly in the cafeteriaof the university the day before.
(02:24):
Mm-hmm.
And you're like, you, I know you.
That's where all freshmenand sophomores meet.
And is
that the cafeteria?
It's very true.
Very true.
And you see me in the student union, youlike yell my name and I walk over and
you're like, yeah, we're doing improv.
And without missing a beat, I signed up.
I'm a theater kid.
I'm a theater kid.
And I, the university that wehad, didn't have a lot of theater.
So they were, I was like an improv troop.
(02:45):
Yeah.
I'm in.
Sign me up.
Here we go.
And here we are now 10 years.
We are now,
10 years later.
I loved teaching improvbeing part of improv things.
I loved having you on stage.
You're always one of our strongestperformers, but also someone who worked
really well with your scene partnersand helped them look, look awesome too.
It was so great having you.
(03:06):
Thank you.
Every time you were on stage, I'mlike, this is, this is gonna be and so
we taught we taught improv together.
We had to learn it.
Yes, we did.
We had to teach it.
We had to get better at it.
It
was this weird kind of chainof events and we taught improv
for our entire time there.
And yeah, I can say that teachingimprov in that troop is why I'm
(03:28):
actually teaching theater today.
It started this journey whereI'm now a full-time teacher.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Live in the dream.
Live the dream
man.
No, there is a, a dark side toour improv history, and that dark
side is Dungeons and Dragons.
(03:48):
Because I was a big d and d fan andI tried teaching my improv friends
how to play d and d and when itfirst started, it did not go well.
Why didn't go well, Cameron,
who Whohoo?
We were, it was 2014 and you werelike, Hey, my improv friends, I
(04:10):
know you're all nerds at heart.
Do you wanna play this gamecalled Dungeons and Dragons?
I, who was a theater kid, butnot really much of anything else.
I was like, this is cool.
What is it?
And we'd played a session of 3.5.
And with 3.5 did not quite match ourgroup's sensibilities our, our math.
(04:33):
But I gave you spreadsheets.
I gave you spreadsheets for everything.
Listen, I'm a creative.
Me and math
do not get along.
Oh, there was so much math in it.
There was so much math in it.
It was, it was wild.
But then, It was right around thattime that a certain new edition
came out.
Yes.
Fifth Edition came out that summerand we, we were playing like part
(04:58):
of the the What's the word for it?
The play test stuff.
And we, yes, before the books wereeven out, we were playing things as
they were being released to the public.
And fifth edition had such a a shiftin how, in how it was run, focusing
less on the math and the mechanics,and more on the storytelling.
And how did that change our
(05:19):
group?
I mean, immediately you had a group of.
Improv artists, storytellers whodidn't really latch on as much to the
math, the complex spell systems thatwas in 3.5, but really the more loose
I guess loose rules of five reallyallowed for that greater storytelling.
(05:39):
And so we all jumped in.
And immediately fell in love.
That first, those first few sessionsthat we played, it was, it was
night and day, just the atmosphereand the party in the room and.
You know, it, it started offo started me off on a 10 years
journey with Dungeons and Dragons.
(06:00):
I'm still playing to this day.
I'm still a huge nerd for d and dand that fifth edition really started
that.
Yeah.
Every time I, I run a game with newplayers, I talk about those early
sessions, how I got my improv friendsinto d and d and they were terrible at it.
Right.
Couldn't remember therules or the mechanics.
Yep.
Then we focused more on the story.
(06:21):
It was fundamental in shaping mystyle as a DM as well, because
I was with other performers.
We wanted to build on each other's ideas.
It was no longer me settingout a world and have forcing
other people to solve problems.
It was more of a collaborative.
Process.
It really was especially that first world.
(06:41):
That first world that we played inwas almost, it was semi home brew.
It was like Sword Coast, but our version.
And so you kind of allowedeach of us to kind of build our
own section of the world Yes.
Where our characters is coming from.
We can talk about the pages of backstoryI created for that first character.
(07:02):
Yes.
But so, so here,
here's the design philosophy behind it.
We slapped down a map ofthe Sword Coast and Yep.
Gotten realms and none ofus knew anything about it.
Absolutely nothing.
No, I was still pretty new to d and d.
So I didn't know any of the lord,I didn't know any of the history.
None of us did.
So I slapped on the map.
I'm like, all right, everybody.
Point to where you're from, and we allpointed to someplace on the map that
(07:27):
we thought would fit our character.
And like, okay, you're in chargeof coming up with what that culture
is like and what it's like there.
And so some people were, you know, moresimplistic and you were going with.
Other classical fantasy things.
You pointed to the highforest and knowing nothing.
Yep, I did.
Knowing nothing aboutthe forgotten realms.
You're like, I'm gonna writethe political intrigue and the
(07:48):
governmental system of high forest.
And you did.
You did.
I did
all to end up playing a very angsty
spy.
Yep.
And then when he died, youbrought in someone else from
the alien from that is what we
called it.
Yep.
It First few characterswere all branches from that.
But it was this interesting thing becausewe all had the opportunity to invent
(08:11):
this part of the world, and it really didbecome this huge collaborative effort.
And we had barely played like two orthree sessions, but building that world
together and then to get to play init with you obviously as our guide and
kind of the overarching like, Caretakerof that world was so incredible cuz
(08:34):
we got to really dive in and get messywith our character's backstories.
We didn't, we used the Sword Coast andthe forgotten realms as kind of a jumping
off point and then we all went wild with
it.
We went deep into it.
Yeah.
At that point we had so manypeople wanting to join and this
was before d d school, right?
(08:55):
Mm-hmm.
It was 2014, but peoplewere still trying to get in.
We had to split into two groups.
Yep.
And so our friend Trevor, Trevor,if you're listening, you're awesome.
We love you man.
We love man.
He would run a group on Saturdaysand I think I would run the
group on Sundays or vice versa.
So I got to be a player.
I got to be a player.
Yeah.
And that was awesome.
But yeah, and eventually some peopleleft after that semester cuz they
(09:18):
graduated or transferred schools.
So we combined it to one party again.
But we had even though the group waschanging and shifting, there was still
like this through line behind it, all ofthis we were running Tyranny of Dragons.
And if anyone's read Tyranny ofDragons, you know that it's a hot mess.
Absolute hot mess.
It's wild.
(09:39):
But so we had to make it our own.
We had to cut things out.
Yeah.
We had to streamline it.
And we started with lost minds ofFan delver, which is the perfect
opportunity for a new DM to learn.
And I learned so much from Lost
Minds.
It was, I got to be a front row audiencemember to watching you develop your
play style and your DM style and.
(10:01):
It was
pretty darn awesome.
It was.
It was.
Oh man.
So many feelings right now.
So many feelings.
Nostalgia.
Yeah.
Back then we were thinking, oh, D and D's.
Great.
Wouldn't it be great if we allhad, you know, fancy, high paying
jobs someday and we could justplay d and d on the weekends?
Well, did we know that theseextracurricular activities that
we were doing in between classesand on weekends, we're going to
(10:24):
define our careers in the future?
Yeah.
Very much so.
Yeah, I, I mean, neither of our degreesthat we ended up getting really pull
into what we do now in the terms, oh,mine does terms like mine does as well.
But it's not, you know, I didn't goto school to become a theater teacher.
(10:45):
You didn't go to school to becomea professional dungeon master.
But the skills that we learned inthese, I was a communications and I
had done Essentially what our school'sequivalent of a theater minor was.
And we had done that, and it allgets pulled in as the skill sets
that we've built that then allow usto then take these passions that we
had and build careers out of them.
(11:07):
And Dax will try and psychoanalyzeour characters from time to time.
No, I,
I didn't psychoanalyze them.
I wasn't a Freudian, itwas more of a behaviorist.
Speaking of behavioralpsychology, do you remember this?
So for those of you, anyone not watching?
Yeah.
I, my heart is starting topound because this is the first
(11:29):
dice that he he uses a dm.
It's a gold shiny dice.
It was the happy dice.
If he rolled that dice, itmeant good things were coming.
There was also another price.
This is like 50 cents.
This is worth about 50 cents.
Yeah, it's
just going glitter.
Priceless.
The memories we made withthat dice are priceless.
Now, before you describe what'scoming next, I'm show you, I just
(11:51):
wanna see what happens to your face.
Mm mm-hmm.
Yep.
I'm still having a full reactionto that and that what he's showing
to anyone listening out there is abright red D 20, and that was the.
Let's see how it goes.
Dice the, Hey, are youactually gonna die now?
(12:13):
Dice.
It was the, essentially the dark dice.
The bad dice.
Yes.
Whereas the gold shiny one waslike, oh, he's rolling that one.
We did something amazing.
Oh, he's rolling the red one.
Oh, we all gonna die.
And I never told the party what thedifferent dice meant, but I started,
they started noticing habits.
They started noticing when things weregetting more dangerous, when their
(12:36):
characters were more precariouslyclose to the edge of death.
The red dice would come out tothe point where people would
go quiet when I switched dice.
People would be talkingand laughing, eating pizza.
I had the gold dice out,switch the red dice.
Instant change, an
immediate change in in the atmosphere inthe room cuz we knew something bad was
about to happen.
(12:56):
I loved being a psychology major so much.
It, it
was the equivalent of when you walkinto a room in a video game and
the music changes, but you don'tknow why, but you're now scared cuz
it's always that like enemy music.
But you don't see the enemy yet.
Cameron was there.
He can attest.
These stories I tell are all true.
(13:17):
They are.
What are other things wediscovered while playing d and d?
Because we were figuringthings out, right?
I was new.
It really was.
It was.
I was very new.
All of us were new.
You were introducing us to d and d.
But we really, I think through thatprocess of just discovery, we didn't
have anyone gate keeping us so wecould just make mistakes, get messy.
(13:42):
All the Miss Frizzle stuff.
Yeah, and we, I think we alldeveloped our own, our own play style.
You developed your DM style.
And I think by the, the end of our timein college, we had built a very cohesive
group that was telling stories thatjust were emotional and life-changing.
(14:05):
I distinctly remember our last game incollege at least while I was in college.
Cause I had graduateda few semesters before.
You did?
Yeah.
Was that the end of the TMA arc?
It was the end of the TMA arc and.
It was a very emotional experiencefor every single person in the room.
Because we had built this, we had notonly built this world, but we had built
(14:27):
to our own individual's play styles.
We knew how everyone else operated,so we were flowing really well as
a, as a player team, as well as ateam of adventurers in the game.
And so it was this really.
Incredibly powerful session.
And then it was over and it wasour last session for a lot of us.
(14:50):
And it was really emotional.
Because we had built this like very,we, we knew how each person was gonna
play and so we knew when to stepforward and be like, okay, this is my
character's time to take the spotlight.
Okay, now it's not, wedidn't even have to say it.
We knew it cuz we had built theserelationships with each other for so long.
I remember
your character was the cleric,Josiah, was that his name?
(15:13):
Yes.
Wow.
Okay.
I remember I took notes.
But I remember your big thing wastrying to redeem rules who had fallen.
Yes, it was.
And there was a villain that I hadintroduced that was actually my character
when I explained he twisted a villain.
Yeah, it was wild.
Yes.
He came in as a villain in the, in thefinal act and everyone was terrified
(15:35):
of him because he was the Paladin.
And you don't mess with paladins and.
2014, 2015 t and d, they were,they were the broken ones.
So, but you focused so much onfinding a way to redeem him, finding
a way to give him peace and that.
Completely changed thenature of the battle.
It was no longer just, Hey, we'regoing to hit TMA until she dies.
(15:58):
It was, Hey, there are these structuresthat are in place that are empowering
her, and there are people who havebeen led astray by these lies.
How do we break down those chainsand those lies so that the, the
structure falls out from beneath her?
Yeah.
And you did so well, so well.
Oh, thank you.
Making that emotional, even when therewere failed roles, you played into those,
(16:21):
those stumbles and you kept failingforward and you know, rising over that
frustration so that when the final,what was the final role you had to make
in that sense?
It was a persuasion check.
It was a persuasion check to persuadeyour character, this PC character who
had turned secondary B B E G to Tiamat.
(16:42):
And I, I can't remember what theexact number was, but it was like
one above the DC It was just enough.
Yeah.
To change it.
You had told us the DC and it was, and soit changed the whole nature of that fight.
But turned him back to your
side for what?
Turned
him back to side andfinal right against her.
Yeah.
It was, it was powerful cuzwe were all in this together.
(17:02):
There was about six of us in that final.
I believe six in that final session.
And it, you know, it's thesemoments where like a roll of a
dice has six people just sobbing.
It's the power of d and d.
It's the power of this game thatwe've all grown to love, where these
things can just turn on a dime and youhave these deep emotional reactions.
(17:26):
But yes, I got one above the dc.
He turned good and wewon the day and it was
great.
Yeah.
And after we won the day, we, I remember.
We were kicked outta the buildingwe were in because it was late.
Yes.
We had gotten, it went long.
Of course it does.
And so we were just standingaround in a circle in the
dark the dark, just on campus.
Yeah.
(17:46):
Telling about the epilogue, like whathappens to our characters afterwards.
And at that point I wasn't,I was no longer in control.
I, I gave control over to theplayers like, Hey, what happens?
What is your happily ever after?
Yeah, and we kept going for anotherhour and a half just sobbing, telling
the ending of our character stories.
(18:08):
But it, you know, it's this, it'sjust this amazing thing like d and d
is, It can be such an emotional anda powerful experience when you've
built that camaraderie as a group.
And we were actually sayinggoodbye to some of those players.
(18:29):
Cause Yeah, we were
graduating, three of uswere graduating Transing.
Mm-hmm.
I had to teach new people how to play dand d the next semester, which, you know,
came with its own joys and challenges.
Yeah.
But, Yeah, it was, it was hard to saygoodbye to everybody and like the best
goodbye I could have given them was,let's do an awesome session where you get
to the heroes and find your own happily
(18:52):
ever actor.
Yep.
And it was, it was a great graduation
gift to go out on after that.
Once you graduated and I graduateda little later we missed.
This thing, we missed playing d and d.
But we had yeah.
Discovered role 20 before.
It was cool.
Yep.
We discovered Role 20 and Itaught myself how to do role 20.
(19:14):
And I remember I like had to beg ourfriends for like, Hey, if everyone pitches
in $5, I can, I can apply the book.
Most of us were, and to anyonelistening, most of us were in grad
school, so money was not a thing.
They were so
poor, even in undergrad school.
So
poor.
We were all very poor.
Yeah.
So
poor.
All I bought.
I, almost all of us.
Yeah.
I spent $20 on a pound of dice and Ijust like handed them out to people.
(19:38):
Mm-hmm.
This is all we have.
We got like a piece ofglass and we drew on it.
Yeah.
To make
maps.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We didn't even had no battle maps.
We.
It was a lot of theater ofthe mind, which was mm-hmm.
You know we
printed out the basic rulesthat were available and Yeah.
Yeah.
(19:58):
I think we all used up ourlibrary printing allowance
on that.
Yeah, we did, we did great.
We had one player's handbook, oneplayer's handbook, and that was one,
and we shared it.
We would read it and thenpass it on to the next one and
we'd read it and just, yeah.
And then we pass it to someoneelse and they wouldn't read it.
(20:18):
It happens.
Oh, we were so poor.
But yeah.
Oh, we loved it.
But after college, we wanted to connectwhile we were in grad school, and so
we started playing digitally online.
We weren't able to get the whole grouptogether because life and families.
But we had a few one shotsand we eventually did a
storm King Thunder campaign.
I got to teach myself role 20as as part of that, just as a
(20:41):
way to connect with friends.
And this was, you know, before 2020.
This was the before.
Yeah.
2016, I wanna say thousand
is when I graduated.
So yeah, like 17, 18, maybe 19.
Mm-hmm.
We were playing and I got my bachelor'sin psychology, started an MBA program, and
(21:02):
in the back of my head I was thinking, youknow, how could I do this professionally?
I had met some people who wereprofessional GMs and I, I had come to
you first, you and I remember, and Peterand Trevor, and I'm like, How could
I make this work as, as a business?
And I bounced some ideas off of you.
Few of them came to fruit,most of them didn't.
(21:23):
Mm-hmm.
And then I remember getting a,getting a Facebook message in
February of 2020 saying, Hey, Ithink I wanna start a, a company.
I, what do you think?
You know, we'd thrown around a few names.
You had explained kindof your business model.
I was like, that's awesome,that's really cool.
And eventually you were like, I thinkI'm gonna call it Dungeon Master Direct.
(21:46):
And I was like, that's awesome.
You know, let me know,you know what I can do.
That's great.
Then, you know, 2020 happens.
Yes.
Oh man.
And.
We are all online.
We're all at home.
Get another Facebook message.
Hey, do you wanna play?
And I am in
(22:06):
and I, yes, you already how touse to use those digital tools.
Haha.
Ladies and gentlemen, that was calledforeshadowing what we did earlier.
Yes, foreshadowing Divine InterventionCheck, OVS Gun Check, OVS D
20, whatever you wanna call it.
And so you built this entire businessand, and company around around playing d
(22:29):
and d and I got to be, you know, a frontrow audience member to I I, way back.
I got to see you developyour d and d style and now.
I get to be a front row audience memberto building the D M D brand and these
incredible events that you've been doing.
Going to Dragon Steel hosting theHoney Heist, the World Record, so,
(22:54):
It's been awesome kind of watchinga you go from the small group in
college, improv, you founded thislittle group, we all were a part of it.
And then moving into d andd and now here we all are.
Here we all are.
I've done, yeah, peopleall over the world.
But I will say it was such ablessing having you in those early
(23:17):
pro games that I was running.
Thank you.
Because, because I knew you and you knewme, and you knew how to bounce ideas off
of me, and I knew how to take your ideasand make them grow, and that gave me
a lot of confidence to do it and teachother players how to do it as well.
One of our players is now a dm.
You were just telling me about that.
Yeah,
yeah.
We played together on aDungeon Master Direct campaign.
(23:39):
It was the Storm Kings Thunderslash Wild Mount, which was.
Slash Tyranny
of
Dragons we matched slash tyranny ofdragons slash It was, it was wild.
But a player from that ended upapproaching me after we had finished the
campaign and said, Hey, I found this newt T RRP G that I think you would love.
And that TT RRP G is Victoriana.
(24:02):
It's by cubicle games.
It's, if you're a history nerd, goplay it right now cuz it's amazing.
And we've been playing that campaign.
With that system.
We are coming up on twoyears this month, so Wow.
You know, dungeon masterdirect changing in lives.
Yeah, I've got lineage of dmswho have learned from me and I, I
(24:25):
love seeing that, that makes me so
happy.
So important.
Yeah, it's been great.
The connections that, you know, wemake through Dungeon Master Direct,
the parties that you form, like yeah,we are all paying to be there, but we
also then be, I think that whole groupfrom that became really good friends.
We are all, we're now Facebook friends.
And we still talk.
That's when you know it's
(24:46):
serious.
That's when you know.
Right.
We're also old, so it's Facebook for us.
Yes.
We're elder millennials.
Yeah.
So it's been this wild andcrazy ride over enough about me.
Oh, enough about me.
I want to hear about you because youwent in a different direction after.
(25:09):
After, yeah.
And you're, you're living the dream.
You're teaching theater.
You Yeah.
Out of, we were all theaterkids from that improv group.
Yes.
But you were theist of them all.
I was, my motto in college was, I can'tI have rehearsal I or D and D or D and D.
Sometimes I would miss d andd for rehearsal, which was
(25:31):
a very sad part of my life.
But Yeah, so theater I was, like Isaid, I was kind of the Bboy Hawaii
equivalent of a theater minor.
The way they did their degree systemis a little strange, so it's hard
to kind of explain functionally.
I was getting a theater minor but I wasdoing a bunch of shows there, but I was
also doing this improv group on the side.
(25:52):
And they had asked me to start teachingimprov and then I started working in.
The teaching aspect, working everyweek, teaching improv classes helping
design the shows that we were doingperforming in some of those shows.
And it eventually led to thiswhole like, wait a minute.
Why am I putting all thistime into something that
I'm not gonna make a career?
(26:14):
So I ended up marrying thetwo things that were, was my.
Degree, strategic communicationsand theater, and I ended up
getting a, an MFA in Artsadministration, which is for anyone.
Who is confused by that term.
It is all the businessend of putting on a play.
(26:34):
All the theater.
You can't just do theater without, youknow, people running it behind the scenes.
So I ended up getting an MFAin that, which eventually led
directly into me working in.
The education departments of a fewdifferent theaters managing teaching
artists, becoming a teaching artistmyself, and then getting the opportunity
(26:56):
to then move into full-time education.
It all stems from this in improv group.
And so yeah, we, both of us havebuilt a career kind of out of the
thing that we love to do, but wasn'tnecessarily our main focus in university.
So, Which, you know, is wild cuz I, it'sa, it's, it's wild to think about cuz
(27:19):
it's not necessarily a thing that everyonehas the ability or opportunity to do.
Mm-hmm.
And yet we've been able to do thatand so, you know, We're very blessed,
we were able to take our passions and mixit with the practical skills that we have.
Mm-hmm.
Cause you definitely use practical skillsfrom your communication background.
Yeah.
I definitely use allthe psychology tricks.
(27:40):
Mm-hmm.
I have, mm-hmm.
What I tell people is I'm notqualified to be a therapist.
Right.
I don't have a, a master's, I don't havea doctorate, I just have a bachelor's.
So I know enough to be dangerous,but not enough to be helpful.
And I get to use that in d d allthe time and I, I loved my degree.
I wouldn't change it.
But at the same time, college wasso much more than just the degree
(28:01):
plan, just the classes that I took.
It was the friends that I made.
It was the relationships.
It was those stories that d d thatlook, look at, look at us now.
We're, we're on the podcast andthere are three people watching
this live who are interested.
Hey, O Hey
you three people out there.
We love you.
We love you so much.
And to anyone who may belistening in the future.
(28:25):
When you're in, if you're going to collegeor you're in college currently, like
it is what, you know, part of it, butit's really who you, those relationships
that you form the, the things outsideof class that you end up doing that
really end up shaping who you become.
Yes, your classes areincredibly important.
You should do the best you can withthat, but more than that, and both
(28:49):
of us are, are living examples of it.
It's who you end up associating with.
Who are your friends, who are your rideor dies in that college world, and that's
how you make that life for yourself.
That's how both of us werelike, yeah, wait, why?
Why aren't we doing whatwe love as a career?
(29:10):
Why shouldn't we go out there and do it?
And it was your encouragement at thebeginning who was like, maybe I have
something in this pro DM thing, maybe.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe.
Cause I didn't know if I was high qualityenough to, to charge for my games.
And so I had my friends from college,including you, write me reviews to just
give me an idea of what I have to offer.
(29:30):
And that was foundational.
Here we are figuring outlike, oh yeah, I, I'm not bad.
I'm not bad at this.
And here we all are.
I've said that a lot, this podcast, butit is kind of like this, this really
interesting retrospective looking backand realizing that who we were in college
and what we ended up doing in collegenot related to our classes, built these,
(29:55):
these dreams and these careers for us.
So college is great.
Yay.
Class is great, butit's not all about that.
So much.
Summon it all up.
Yeah.
And you're a
teacher now.
You have I am a teacher.
Yeah.
You have the great privilege andresponsibility to mold young minds to
train the next generation of theater kids.
(30:17):
How
has d d like Yeah.
So it has been interesting because whenI was in high school and I, I teach high
school and junior high theater, when Iwas that age, d and d wasn't a thing like.
It, it was, but it was kindof like the nerdy thing.
I had never heard of d andd until college, but I.
(30:38):
Because it's so much a part ofpop culture now through Stranger
Things and critical role Dimension20, insert any property here.
And there's been a d and d connection.
My kids know about it and so it.
For what?
For one thing.
It creates a really good connectionpoint to get to know my kids as kids
(31:00):
before actors and before students.
It's this wonderful connection point.
And then from there I'm able to thentie in the things that I'm teaching
in class about characterization,about objectives, about overcoming
obstacles, and it's, it's.
Interesting because then I can alwaysend it and go, okay, now when you're
in your next session, try these things.
(31:22):
See what happens.
You
give them homework to doin their d d sessions.
No, it's mostly like,Hey, you're doing that.
Why don't you try this?
I wouldn't, well, I was
gonna say, that's awesome.
You should do
that though.
I mean, a lot of it is, is connectedand we, we've talked about, you know,
especially with some of my students,we've talked about that connection
(31:43):
between Building a character for aperformance, being identical to building a
character for d and d, for any t t rrp G.
You have to know what makes thatcharacter tick in order to be believable
and how their actions are gonna go.
And building on that, you know, whenyou fail in in game, you gotta create
(32:04):
a character reason for it, you know?
And so what is driving thatcharacter to fail that role?
What is driving thatcharacter to win that role?
It's, it's been really fun to connectwith my students kind of on that.
It's not all that I do.
But whenever I can I bring in d and d?
(32:24):
Yeah.
What other kind of gamesare you involved in now?
So I am in a.
In Dungeons and Dragons,that's my ride or die.
Love it.
I am in, I DM a campaign with afew other teachers at my school.
I.
We are all incredibly busy.
So it's about every three months we gettogether and just go wild for a session.
(32:47):
I'm just the end of the D semester
or after
greeting is done.
Yep, yep.
And then we all get to kindalet loose a little bit.
I am in a Victoriana campaignthat I mentioned earlier.
And I am in a d and d campaign as well.
So I am currently inthree ongoing campaigns.
One is a DM.
And that's in addition to all ofthe plays that you are directing,
(33:09):
and let's talk about some of those.
Yeah,
yeah.
Yeah, I just finished the season with mystudents of a bunch of different plays.
Most recently we finished aproduction of Into the Woods.
As a side note if you follow me on TikTokor Instagram I ended up buying, I ended up
making just a really crazy purchase of aWizard staff, that's all d and d themed.
(33:34):
And that became our main, one ofour main props for into the woods.
So I pull it in wherever I can.
It's this very subtle thing.
The kid who ended up using that propknew exactly what was going on and just,
just loved that prop as much as possible.
Cuz it's a giant D 20 on top that wethen kind of just slightly covered.
So you couldn't see the numbers,but you could anyone who knew, they
(33:58):
knew what was going on and it wasthis fun little Easter egg for,
for audience members to, to go see.
Yeah, so I, I put on a seasonwith my students every year.
We're gearing up.
I'm in summer break, thank goodness,which is one of the reasons I was
actually available to, to talk
(34:18):
Busy.
You've been trying
find a date, we.
We have been trying for a while,but the summer is upon us.
I'm taking a bit of a break, soplanning for the upcoming season,
getting all of that ready to go.
It's been a lot of fun.
It's a lot of work, butit's, it's so worth it.
Kind of tying some of the stuffwe've been talking about together.
(34:40):
The reason I do.
Teaching.
And the reason I love teachingtheater is there's this incredible
moment when a kid gets it.
A kid steps outside their comfort zoneand they embody this character and there's
something that happens in their face.
And the first time I saw that wasteaching improv at Y U Hawaii.
(35:04):
And just, just having those moments andgoing, oh my gosh, this is, this, this
connection that we've made, this momentthat you've stepped out of your comfort
zone and you've done something incredible.
Then I'm, I'm, I get to dothat every day and it's, it's,
it's incredibly fulfilling.
(35:25):
I love that.
I love that so much.
And before we wrap up, wegotta Indeed, yeah, I do.
I get to see it in people's eyes.
See when they making death saves.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a, that's a real one.
You have a different dice for that one
now.
I do, I do.
I'll show it off here.
Speaking of dice that we useas dms to scare our players,
(35:48):
he introduced this one to me.
Yeah, it is.
Yep.
Mm-hmm.
So a black walnut case that has askull and says, memento Maori, this
D 20 is made out of human bone.
And I use it exclusively for death
saving threat.
If you're ever playing a DungeonMaster direct campaign with
(36:09):
Dax, and he pulls that out.
You done messed up.
This has saved so many people's.
I've wrote so many.
20.
It's saved and it's killed.
And one many as well.
Yes.
But enough about my dice.
Let's talk about this dye right here.
Those of you who can't seeit, it is it is orange and it
is gray, and the lettering is
(36:30):
deal.
It is from the original colors of dungeonMaster Direct, actually current as well.
Slightly current.
Slightly off, yeah.
I am a dice maker.
I, that became part of my pandemic hobbyis I We came a just a hoarder of dice
and I was like, I don't have enough andI don't have money, but I can buy resin.
(36:55):
And went a little ham,created my own molds.
And I am now a part-time dice maker.
I have I have a presenceon TikTok and Instagram.
I run a tiny little Etsy shop.
Yeah, so it's just on the sided and d erupted, a love of the
shiny click clock, math rocks.
(37:17):
I'm currently holding up a smallportion of my collection of
dice in a giant treasure chest.
What's the name of your company?
So
it's called Dyson isis, like theGod Dion isis, but Dyson isis.
You can find it on Instagram or TikTok.
We'd love to have you come join us.
I'm on a slight hiatus cuz ofthe summer vacation, but I hope
(37:40):
to start getting contact contentback up later this month in July.
So that is some fun stuffcoming down the pipeline.
Excellent.
Yeah.
One last thing I want to ask you about.
When's the next time we're gonna getto do something awesome together?
I don't.
It's our next big creative project.
Cameron.
I don't know.
We gotta do this.
(38:00):
We gotta plan this, we gotta do this.
I mean, I don't know about y'all to anyonelistening or watching, but if you wanna
see Dax in action, maybe an actual play.
I don't
know.
We will see.
I've done one.
Another,
maybe when you, when you're comingback up to Utah, let me know.
(38:21):
We'll find out.
Oh yeah.
Something fun to do.
There's so many things in thepipeline that I can't, I can't
talk about in the podcast yet,
but hopefully they all work out
and hopefully your dreamsare fulfilled as well.
You get to Yeah.
Build new minds.
Bring more people intothe theater, teach and
bring more people into d and d.
(38:41):
Yeah.
Yes.
Send them my way.
Right.
Any last things you wanna sayto our adoring three fans?
One, Hey, welcome again.
We're so happy that thethree of you are here.
I think kind of the message I'dlove to leave is you, you can go
(39:03):
far on what you know and what you.
What you study, but it's the relationshipsthat you make along the way that shape
you and that will shape your future.
You know, we we're the examples of that.
Thank you so much, Cameron.
Yeah.
To put in d and d terms.
Find your adventuring party.
Yes.
(39:23):
Find your party and go on an adventure.
Yeah.
Bye everyone.
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