June 24, 2024 • 48 mins
In this episode, Dungeon Master Jason Portizo hosts a solo session with special guest DM Tony from the D&D 404 podcast. They discuss various aspects of running a successful D&D podcast, emphasizing the importance of consistent quality and the significant amount of work involved. Tony shares insights into his DMing style, particularly how he designs engaging boss fights with multiple phases and tailors games to player preferences. They also talk about the importance of player synergy and the evolving nature of storytelling in their campaigns. Tune in to learn how to elevate your D&D game and hear behind-the-scenes stories from both hosts.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:20):
The Low Aid Adventurers, the podcastfor role players and game masters that help
level up your game. I'm yourdungeon master, Jason Portiso, and today
I am joined by none of myco hosts. We are not recording it
on a normal day and they've gotlies and stuff to do and I don't,
so I was able to record withoutthem. So Joe, Jim,
I'll see you guys on Wednesday whenwe record again. But today I do
(00:41):
have a special guest. I've mentionedhim on the show a couple of times
before, not only as being anotherpodcast that we're friends with, but a
show that I have guessed on afew times. And just to prove that
we actually are really truly friends,I came up on the show. So
from d M D four four I'vegot d M Tony on the show.
Tony, what's going on? Man? Hello? DM Tony. Got to
(01:02):
give him the signature, GI himthe signature. How are you doing?
Thanks for having me? You're comingon my show? You were you were
due? Is your return? Yeah? After having you? Wait, we
got a couple of adventures with you. It's more crucial ones too that I
can talk about now. Oh yes, I gotta see how the Aftermath turned
out on that because I have notmade it that far because I am a
bad fan. It's so good,like hundreds of episodes. It's totally fun.
(01:23):
It's a while, so quick background, so we'll talk about we'll talk
about your show in a second.But so I met Tony through one of
the local Facebook groups. I waslooking for people to just come onto.
We were doing Commercions and Dragons atthe time. I was looking for some
guests to come on and tell ustheir their horror stories. And He's like,
nope, I'm coming on and tellinga wholesome story. And we were
like, we didn't think people hadthose anymore. We happily had him on
(01:47):
the show. We had him recordin person with us over at our friendly
local game store, and it's andwe've been DMan at the same store since
then. It's a lot of fun. Since Amy sat me on, not
only two guests play, but theguest DM on the D and D four
or four. So let's let's kindof introduce people to what is What is
D and D four or four?Yes, DND four four is an actual
(02:09):
play podcast that I do with threeof my other friends. We are I'm
a long time player of D andD. I've been playing since I was
about thirteen, on and off throughoutcollege and high school, and they are
all first time players, which issomething that we kind of like leaned into,
especially during the beginning, and evennow it we're up to like episode
(02:30):
one oh three by the time thisairs, we still explain uncommon rules and
such so that everybody, whether they'reexperienced or new, know what's going on.
I think that's something that actual playshows should do. If they're not
already doing it, they really shouldbe reminding people, even if they even
if their veteran players, just remindthem of we have this rule work.
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I look up you know, Irelook up spells. I've casted myself through
my own monsters, and I forgetwhat things do all the time, and
we're constantly fact you should. Welook up rules for mechanics that we use
often. I had a whole characterbuilt around like stretching the limits of grappling,
(03:12):
and we still look up grapple checksevery time they come up. We
just learned around episode ninety nine howconcentration really works. I don't know,
and we have a warlock that usesonly concentration spells that we still learn the
nuances of concentration. I gotta ask, what was the most recent thing you
learned about concentration? Oh, ifyou ready as spell, it's a concentration
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check and if you get knocked onthe head or take enough damage, you
can lose that spell slot if you'recast level that. We did an episode.
I don't know the episode number offtop of my head, but we
did an episode recently of rules thatget overlooked and this and the that's one
of things we brought up. Andeven Jim, who has been playing since
day one for a blue Box earlyedition like like first edition D and D,
(04:02):
when I said that, he's like, wait what, so like it's
this, this is this is notlike you should be looking at your rules
and this is where it shows likethis, this is why like an actual
place show like like yours and adiscussion show like mine, like like not
only can we coexist, we shouldbe like we should be doing stuff like
this more often. Yeah, Ilistened to well yours like Corimudges and Dragons
(04:24):
when you were doing that a lot, and when you started this show back
up or instance, the camp tripto your List episode that you did I
have some words and comments, butwe won't get into that now. But
I love that and I love theapp recommendations because those things, yeah,
help players out im mensely. Yeah, I was and proud to put that
episode out with. I'm not goingto shout out this other episode other show
(04:45):
that I used to listen to,but they used to use do deep dives
on very specific topics. I'm like, oh, I'm running that monster in
like a week or two. Iwant to know everything about it. Cool,
So we're gonna by doing more deepdives now too. That is something
that that actually Joe insisted on thatfrom before we started recording, even episode
one. And you want to dodeep dives. Dives are great, and
we kind of think more of them. You know. The the amount of
(05:10):
time that we have allowed to ourselvesto do the research for all these episodes
doesn't let us do as deep ofa dive as I think people want to
deserve. It's just too much tocomment on. And yeah, and it's
just like, you know, it'sjust an amount of research that like,
it's just it's just it's time.We all got jobs, we all got
stuff, you know, we havefamilies. It's it's it's hard, man.
(05:32):
So what we end up doing Ikind of just kind of rebranded them
a little bit when they're a littleless deep dives and a little more elementary
school book reports. Now that's amazing, and I think and they're they're just
a little a little more fun,more knowledge for pea sized brain. You
still you still learn a lot,and if you want to continue learning,
you can go down to your locallibrary. If you can make that a
pop out book, maybe I will. It's so oh, that's a million
(05:57):
dollar children's book. Idea. Friend, we just we just cut this out.
We're gonna we're gonna talk about this, all right, So tell me
about so that that's like the thethirty thousand for a view of D and
D four or four. So whatwhat do you want to tell us about?
Like what's going on with the storyof the show, or or even
(06:18):
just like what sets it apart fromfrom other from other actual plays? Give
me, give me, give methe pitch. I'm gonna give you that
elevated pitch. I'm gonna try tobe as broad and specific as possible.
One it's an epic style campaign witha big, bad, evil guy that
doesn't really show up until about inthe middle of the campaign. However,
he affects things around him constantly,and the further the adventures go, it's
(06:41):
it's just like you gotta keep diggingdance. It's like always conspiracy and the
the show is going on about overone hundred episodes. I theorize that we're
gonna be about one hundred and sixtyif we were to finish it. I
am trying to. We are ina late game of that and starting to
lay in the plane. Yes,so we're starting to wrap up some loops
(07:03):
ends, We're trying to bring backsome of those characters that may have got
lost in the ether. And thebiggest pull of our show, I think
is that it's the highest quality thatwe can possibly make it and we will
not drop an episode unless it's perfectto the best of our ability. So
we do sound effects. We makesure that it's not just like generic slashing
(07:25):
or hacking. It's actual sound effectsthat relay to what the characters are doing.
And we have starting on episode thirteen, we had like generic scores.
Dan has made all the scores.Danis one of white players, has made
all the scores for each episode,and every episode is unique scoring to it.
Quite a couple of revisits from crowdfavorites like downtime activities and such.
(07:47):
But it's a huge epic campaign startingin one city, going all the way
over the ocean and then coming backand these are really starting up. Yeah,
I mean I got into the team, like I'm so very very early
into it. But the everything fromthe like I said there, the music,
(08:07):
sound effects, the general editing,and this is something that after we
met, after you were on myshow, but we got into talking about
podcast editing and I was trying toskee if there was anything I can do
to help you. Guys, thisis what I do for a living,
and I listen to it, I'mlike, no, they got it.
We want to hire editors to saveour own time because it does a lot
of time. We lose sleep editingthis stuff and you you edit full time.
(08:31):
And we had like had conversations withyou and we had broke the subject.
Yeah, and just for a fulltransparency, The reason why we decided
to not go through not because wewant to not see you succeed, Jason.
We love to have you on theteam. We had bad experiences with
colleagues and friends that have tried tohelp us, and it always ruins that
friendship if it doesn't pan out.And I did not want to put that
(08:56):
between us, because I'd rather stayfriends with you, you know, like
you have your own editing job andlike you edit your own show and other
people shows, and then like whathappens if we like ours falls on the
back burner, not just because lifehappens. And then it's like, well,
we prought ourselves on being consistent andlike, you know, that's why
we don't work with like friends.Yeah, totally fine, Starl. My
(09:18):
rent is still getting paid. Man, you're you're good. I was great
to hear what. I would havebeen very happy to have my name on
the on the roster, but butI'm happy being a listener if that's all
I ever got to do. HelloAdventurers, just stepping in here to remind
you guys that we're actively looking forsubmissions for our Hello DMS episode that gets
recorded every month. Send us yourburning D and D questions to Helloadventurers podcast
(09:41):
at gmail dot com, or sendus a voicemail by visiting Hello Adventurers podcast
dot com slash voice. Don't forgetto begin your message with Hello, DMS.
You can't wait to get your questionsto talk about them on the show.
Send us your questions today. That'sHello Adventurers Podcast at gmail dot com,
poorly the voice at Tolowadventurers podcast dotcom slash voice. Now let's get
(10:05):
back to the show. So onehuge thing I want to get into today
with like, So let's talk alittle bit first about your general dming style.
And I mentioned that one of theepisodes and actually even just you know,
five minutes ago. So you andI are are pretty local to each
other and we have the same friendlylocal game stoes. I think it's about
(10:28):
five minutes in your house, abouttwenty from mine. So we both are
on the roster of DMS to runone shots there. Yes, and you've
sat in on a couple of mine. I've sat in on a couple of
yours when I get the time too. And every time I play in one
of your games, I'm like,I need to go home and study.
I always feel like I'm phoning itin every time that I play in one
(10:50):
of your games. And that isthat, And I mean that entirely as
a comment. It's I'll be I'llbe honest. Most of those Local Games
is straight up play testing from andI try to make it as fun as
possible. But some of those encountersI actually give to my players on a
higher scale or to see if themonster's just interesting to people. So it's
like a you know, it benefitsme at the same time other than just
getting a couple of bucks. Butyeah, and but when it comes down
(11:13):
to DM style, I gotta reallygive it to the players. So we
got Dan, Jared and Alec andit Dan plays a ranger, he's a
mini tour minas Pela Walker. Wegot Jared who plays almost Vannin who's like
the angry rage warlock who just wantsrevenge. And we have Alec who plays
(11:35):
Drove the Ashbourne who has a crazystory arc coming up no spoilers, however,
he was one like I just wantto kill monsters because he's got to
always get that one guy that doesn'twant to play the and he's like,
I just want to be the coolmonster hunter. And I leaned into that
as hard as possible. And that'sa totally fine play style. That's that's
something we can talk about too,and it's there. It's their quick quips
(11:56):
and the way we're able to speakto each other because in any friend group,
like there's boundaries. We kind ofdestroy each other's boundaries on a daily
basis, with the exception of likea few topics, because we're so close
in that way that if I saysomething not necessarily mean but like it's just
he like, Dan can take that, do a yes end and calm and
(12:18):
hit it right back on. Youcan turn it on me very easily.
And Dan's really good where if I'mlike stuck, I'm like, I don't
know how to nudge you guys inthe right direction. The three of them
will just start role playing themselves.They kind of see me struggling a little
bit and push the narrative forward,whether it's the wrong or right choice,
and they are fantastic I do.It's really all about the synergy. And
(12:39):
you got people who like have neverhad anything played before. No, So
Jared is huge on board games,Okay. Alec is a really big fantasy
nerd, which we didn't expect becauseif you've met Alec for the first time,
you think he's like, oh,it's up, Brad, I play
Gulf and drink beers and like tohang out California, And he's like the
smartest person I ever met? Wouldyou really talk to him? And Dan
(13:00):
is kind of like me. Wehave like the same interest that we all
play games, and we did twitchstreams, so personality kind of rubs off
there a little bit, and maybewe have a little bit of easier time
talking into a microphone from micro streaming. But because when I heard that these
were like first time players, Ithink, like in your first episode or
so, I think you even madea point to say that these are first
time players. Yes, and thenthey come out with like already knowing how
(13:22):
to role play. So we dida lot of dry runs. Okay,
yeah, we did about four orfive dry runs I want to say four.
One where it's like I gave themcharacters they have they didn't know what
they wanted to play at, gavethem eric a deep beyond characters. Yeah.
The second time, I let themmake characters and now it was like
a two part session. And thenI did a boss fight and I'm like,
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okay, so here's where you wantto like kind of talk to the
monster. It's not really story changing, but like you can have fun with
him on your turns. And Ireally stress free actions because free actions is
where you get through a lot ofthe role play. I feel they don't
really change the tide of anything.M Yeah, it was just and even
even that, just like a coupleof sessions under the bellt's like they really
(14:03):
like dove fully into the role playpart of it. That stuff that I
that I see a lot of playerswho have been playing for years just like
you know, it's it's it's ait's a combination of you know that you
need a certain type of player wherethat is within their comfort zone. This
is something we talked about on theshow before also with like levels of embodying
the character and you know, andthey go you know, full in first
(14:26):
person, throwing on the voice andeverything, where like, you know,
players who are not being recorded forthe masses might not be comfortable with that
even at their own table with theirown friends, and they'll they'll role play
more than third person and and notyou know, just speak with their own
voice and and that's and that's finetoo, but like, but for them
to go from never playing to likea couple of quick one shots and adore
(14:48):
two shot a little bit of coachingand then just like coming out like with
a podcast level of role playing behind. I think it really surprised me the
first time I heard when you wereclaiming that these were first time players.
I'm like, they they've done stuffbefore. We so, like I said,
if you're starting a podcast, andI hope you do, like I
(15:09):
don't want people to be discouraged tonot start one because one sounds great.
Hours didn't start great when we firststarted in our in our perspective, our
first couple of sessions were five hourslong. For one episode, it's about
an hour and a half because wecut down the fluff. There's a lot
of oh hey, like this ishow that spell works, and then a
(15:30):
lot of it was theater of mind, which I learned that Jared isn't necessarily
the best with the theater of themind. So that's where I started incorporating
maps to hat to his style ofplay. And we don't like some people
might call it cheating or like fluffingthe episode. We everything's real reactions and
it's completely open world only during likespecific boss fights. Do I a little
(15:54):
railroad in air can make it moreinteresting, but all the choices and outcomes
are on them and we just removethe fluff from the episode. If they're
like if they're asking how eldritch blastworks and he ends up shooting his crossbow.
We don't need any of that elastdialogue. It's it doesn't lead anywhere,
and anybody who's listening is going toget bored, you feel, I
(16:15):
remove that editing wise, I thinkthat should be expected and even appreciated to
get the stuff that, you know, just kind of get to the game
itself. And even like the reallyhigh level actual play shows, I'm thinking
that Pod Critical Role things like that, they cut all that stuff out too.
Sure, Critical Role Critical started asa live stream and they kind of
keep true to that live in personfeel. But as they progressed as not
(16:37):
only gamers and performers, but youknow that's the show progressive popularity, then
they can kind of, you know, they naturally cut them. They don't
need to do that anymore kind ofclos you know. But on that Podmurph,
it's pretty open about like the stuffthat he cuts and doesn't cut,
and like he'll get rid of themrolling dice just to get just to shave
off a couple of seconds here andthere. Dan yells at me, but
I do it all the time.He just run, He just throws metal
(17:00):
Dice, I'm talking about you.Then he throws Metal Dice on a microphone.
It sounds clanky and horrible and earshattering. He's like, it feels
good. I'm like, no,no, Metal Dice. I don't know.
But you know, Plastic Dice.I I just love that loft,
that clackety clack sound. And you'regonna and you're gonna find a subsection of
listeners that will agree and some thatthat love you. Soak it out.
(17:22):
Those use Plastic Dice and other othershows that I've listened to. There's another
one that I listened to. Itwas called Bombarded It is it is finished.
Now you know that show. I'veseen it. I haven't listened to
it. Actually, the the DMfrom that show is the one who composed
the music for this podcast. Ohthat's all shot A big shot out to
Nick s Burrier. Well the biggerones too, right I. One thing
(17:47):
with podcasting is like I don't getto see anyone else's numbers. Yeah,
you know, you can. Youcan track your own numbers, but you
can't track someone else's numbers. Solike, as far as like you know,
they didn't have much of like anInstagram presence, but like not podcasts
even bother with Instagram, so likeit's it's very hard to judge, you
know, were they one of thebigger ones. But what I can say
(18:07):
is I enjoyed it very much andthat means something to me. But I
just go based off Spotify ratings.I'm like, oh, let's see how
they do. And sure, Ithink Spotify ratings is huge, sure,
or even like any any podcast platform. But I bring them up because they
made a point, even in theearly episodes, to leave the dice rolling
in and then also speak out loudwhat their modifiers were, so players following
(18:27):
along, especially new players following along, can see like it's like, okay,
well they rolled a twenty side,diye, how did they roll twenty
eight? So stuff like that.We I was doing that at first,
and I started getting rid of everythingbecause now everyone's like level fourteen about the
h level fifteen. Now you're gonnaget to that end game where like everyone
has seven attacks bonus actions and theirpresence stops them from doing other things,
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and even at lower levels, likein the games that I'm running at the
Breweries now, one of my pregenerated characters is a is a fay uh
is it they touched one of theof the ranger subclasses. Oh whatever it
is, but right, but theyadd on like another D four on top
of all their attacks. Plus they'recasting hunters mark. So like if I
(19:14):
made them do that every time,it's okay. Well to it's the D
eight for the bow, and thenthe D four for the for the fay
thing, and then the D sixfor the for the tunters mark. It's
like, we don't, we don'tlike got three hours in this game.
But just like moving, they wanderer. They wanderer. That's that I that
I didn't. I knew it,knew it's something, but uh, they
wonder at low levels anyway. Soyou mentioned, you know how much you're
(19:40):
cutting out of the show. Yourearly episodes were five hours getting cut down
to one and a half. Let'sstop at the sheer daunting amount of work
that it takes to make a successfulactual play show. I feel like this
is a huge misconception that a lotof new players have, and I'm coming
at this from from two directions.One, they feel like making the podcast
(20:03):
is easy, because it sounds likeit was easy if it was edited well.
And and the you know, thefirst thought is Okay, we're going
to make our own live stream,our own podcast. Then we're going to
make the millions of dollars like MyCritical Role does. And then they get
on Twitch and they see there's athousand other people doing it and out of
maybe three or four are watchable andthere's no offense to them. I'm I'm
(20:25):
glad they're playing games. I'm gladthey're having fun. But like the IF
I IF, I call it adelusion that I feel like that's being too
harsh, but the the the misconstruedidea that it's easy, but also at
the same time feeling like the showis not edited at all and that your
game is just naturally that good.And this was actually called the Matt Mercer
(20:45):
effect for a while because he wasoperating on such a high level that people
expected their game to be at thatlevel naturally. And then when they started
playing for the first time and theirgame wasn't that good despite them not putting
in their effort as the player,they get turned off of the hobby.
So let let's talk real quick aboutjust tell me about the just the mountain
(21:08):
of work that goes from getting theepisode even before recording, then recording the
editing, then getting it out there, any people to understand how much you're
actually doing when we started this.It's very important and this is the most
important thing I could tell you,and I have nothing to do with d
(21:29):
D. You need to find peoplewho want it as much as you,
and you need to be consistent.If you are not consistent, I don't
think it'll happen. And if that'sonce a month, that's great, twice
a month, that's that's still great. It's just you need to be consistent
in your work, and the qualityof each episode needs to be consistent getting
(21:49):
gradually better. Sure, everything needsto be the same level of quality overall.
And so let's just start from thebottom up. What we have weekly
meetings and at this point in agame, we've been doing this for about
two and a half years. Weeach have roles. Dan and I are
the editors. We edit videos whenwe get a chance to do videos.
(22:10):
We edit the assembly cut, whichis what you actually hear when we play,
and then I do all the soundeffects and Dan does all the scoring,
and everything is from scratch. Jaredtakes care of the finances and we
had to recently just do all ourtax stuff and the amount of work he
did on his end just to goto the bank and talk to people astronomical.
But that's like if you're successful.But these are things you need to
(22:33):
think about once you've got your startgetting ads on your show and a little
bit of money comes through. Andthen Alex is on marketing Patreon as well
too, and like yes, withwithout getting into given away the given way
too much, Like you've got agood amount of actual let's just talk like
just followers on Patreon. Forget whatthey're paying, but like you know,
it's I haven't looked at it,and that is public information. But it's
(22:55):
like, you've got a good amountof followers on patreons. So we have
about one hundred to over one hundredpatrons right now. Record it's a round
about one hundred lest that look,yeah, some of those are free,
but majority of them do bad.You that cash money, that greed and
you have to understand, like allthis money that we get, which is
not a substantial I realized how thatjust sounded. It's not a lot,
but it all goes back into theshow. We want to make art,
(23:18):
if we want to make ds,you have to advertise if you want people
to listen, and we tackle everytype of ED avenue we can take of,
like Spotify music, Podbean, ads, Instagram post, Facebook post,
reddit post boosting those and it doesn'tseem like it does a lot, but
it's just repetition. And so weget together, go back to my main
(23:40):
point. We get together and wedecide what we're gonna play, and normally
we play once a week, whichis already a huge shut of the curve
for most DD groups podcast aside,we play once a week and we record
for two hours. We keep trackand like, hey, we're getting towards
the end of the episode, I'mgonna stop building things up, or if
I feel like nothing has really happenedor they haven't progressed, I'll start pushing
(24:04):
things along through my dming style.And we stop recording around two hours,
and then we edit from the twohours and we usually get about an hour
and a half episode out of thatbecause now we're fully in it. We're
also in all different time zones andand I live on the East Coast,
Jared lives Central, and we'll workI'm not gonna say his jobs, but
(24:27):
it's pretty important. Alec is inHawaii right now for the summer, and
that's six hours behind us, Andyesterday we did two recordings back to back
because he can't record as much becauseof the work he's doing, so now
we're doubling up, and that's probablywhy I don't feel the best. They
got like no sleep, there's nothere's no video. But I got a
(24:48):
little blanket on me, like abushka, and I'm trying to keep warm in
the summer. You get your headright now. It is eighty something agrees
up there right now. You gottaa blanket. I'm so cold. That's
a fever. That's what that is. Probably from when we were doing when
this show was coming in the Dragons, we our co host Josie was in
England for school and that was fivehours ahead of us, So like us
(25:10):
recording at like noon, put heron like five pm, and then being
with him being six hours earlier,you gotta be recording in the middle of
the night pretty much. Although Iwould always want to be the one that's
in the earlier time zone, notthe ones after, because that's dan Alec
was playing in Hawaii. It's liketen in them the morning for him.
We're done with two episodes. It'slike five o'clock and it's one am for
(25:33):
us. Yes, yeah, wewere. We were very fortunate that,
you know, Jim being retired,myself working as a as a concert engineer
where I work nights, our afternoonswere wide open so we can catch Josy
after dinner. And it just kindof worked out as often as we needed
it to until until it didn't.And that's why this show is. That
was what it is now if everyonehas the understanding that this comes first within
(25:55):
reason sure, and that's where theconsistency part I was talking about. People
miss episodes all the time. Wedo it. We take holidays off on
purpose so we can catch up onour backlog. We take the big eight
holidays and we take two weeks offduring Christmas time for Christmas and New Years,
and it's just so like we cancatch up and don't get editing fatigue.
(26:17):
One episode takes about eight to tenhours to edit from start to finish.
That's two hours of recording here.Yeah, and with the show,
with the with the amount of productionthat goes into it, and you're adding
on a lot more, it's avery different kind of edit then this show
takes and like you know, onthis on the surface level from the from
the We'll take the that was athirty thousand foot view, Let's take the
(26:38):
sixty thousand foot view for a second. From sixty thousand feet. You and
I are both D and D podcasters, And the video on the show with
his big finger quotes there and likethe Not only is the final result very
different, but the amount of workthat goes in it is very different too,
which is one of the reasons whyI do a show like this one.
This fits in, this fits inmy lifestyle right now, and it's
(27:00):
a similar editing techniques as most ofmy clients. And you know, and
if a show like yours came tome right now and needed the type of
editing that you need, not notthat what not the part of it that
we were talking about me potentially doingfor you guys, but the whole thing.
I tell them. That's why we'relike, I think, if we
do get an editor in the future, we're just going to get an assembly
editor, and we're still going todo the score on sound effects and probably
(27:22):
chop it up even more. Justa vocal of work is done with the
assembly cut. Yeah, and that'sthat that's going to change from the show
to show what your particular workflow is. But I've seen I think we talked
about what you were what your generalworkflow is, and I would agree with
most of it, but obviously it'sworking on the show that the show sounds
great. Man. So one hugething I wanted to talk about with you
(27:49):
is your dming style. So I'veI've sat with you at at a public
game, I listened to your podcastthat we have not done a home game
together, which might be starting onesoon. If you want to come over,
don't you tease me? Pretty much? The second we're done with this
interview, I got people from workcoming over and we're going to start our
sessions. We're doing a session.I'm going to take them through tales of
(28:12):
the Yawning Portal. I want toplay that. I want to Dad,
you don't live far by coming onover. But so I want to hear
your your thoughts on how to changeup your DM style between doing a home
game versus a public game versus agame that is meant to be listening to
from an outsider like a podcast.Do not compare yourself to other people,
(28:37):
like especially the Big Three Matbers,Brandley Mulligan and Murphy. All those people
do not try to copy them.You can use them as inspiration, sure,
and I think early on I probablyuse Randomlee Mulligan as inspiration, as
a lot of people do. Andthe inspiration I took for him was mimicking
weapons sound effects like pushing swat,and that helped my players really get into
it, you know, trying topaint the image as best as I can
(29:00):
in their head. Talk to yourplayers. That's it's it's astounding. Like
you just go on Reddit and youcan see like these horror like not horror
stories, but all these suggestion pages. How do I talk to my players
to do my players aren't doing aB and C I set up plot hooks
to not fighting, then they don'tseem to have an interest in my big
(29:21):
talk to them, ask them whatthey're into. They might give you big
dms to copy, but like askthem if they're like more into role play,
do they want to do combat?Maybe you got to shorten your combat
a lot, you know, takeoff twenty help points for some of those
bigger monsters, keep the keep itflowing. Nothing kills a session like combat.
And if you get feedback and yourplayers will give it to you keep
(29:45):
asking, they will give it toyou, and he might hurt your feelings
a little bit. May have hadthat happen. But if I hurt your
feelings a little bit, You're hurt. There's right back next session. Can
neither confirm nor deny, Jason,I accept. I accept your criticism and
that that magic armor just doesn't fityou anymore. Man. You will put
on a few pounds in between sessionsthere. But ye talk to you players
(30:07):
and see what they want. Youknow, like we're a group of four
friends that we have great synergy.We also have the perfect amount of people.
I think for an audio podcast,I think maybe five people might be
pushing it. That's the most thatwould go. And it just keeps.
Everyone's going to have a turn andhave a moment and I feel like they're
being heard. And then your DMstyle will just shine through it because you're
(30:30):
trying to make them have a typeof dmu are will really come out.
So that I I'm one hundred thousandpercent on board with all that. For
all three of those situations, doyou change up anything when the audience,
well, when you're trying to caterto the players and in like a Homer
Store, game or something where you'retrying to cater to the audience. I've
(30:53):
never cater to change you at all. Never I sometimes we don't. We
don't get negative commentat We got onecomment on YouTube that just said gay whatever.
Sure it's probably whatever, but wedon't get negative comments. Welcome to
Yeah. Also it was like wemade it boys also everybody. I'll take
that as a compliment. But wedo not. And I say, because
(31:18):
I had people like personally private DMme, I do not cater to people's
ideas or anything. We have Patreonmbcs and we'll talk about that in a
second. But I do not caterand I ignore them, not because I
think I'm better than him. Iwant the story to come for me naturally,
and I know I have a goodsense of what my players like,
and if they're not receptive, thenthe session goes stale, and then I
(31:41):
change it up. I change itup specifically for them. They're having fun.
I'm having fun. If we're allhaving fun, people listening are having
fun, that's not a shot ataudience at all. That's great, And
I think they're they're tuning in becausethe story is good and because the players
are good. Because everything is everythingthey're they're turning into a show, but
(32:01):
it's it's essentially it's a show.You're they're they're tuning in because the show
is good, and like you know, you're if you're watching. I honestually,
it took me it forever and Ikind of forgot that existed for a
while, but I just went backand finished Fox Makina and like, you
know, that is just as muchof a show as any of the actual
play shows are. Yeah, andyou know they're they're not catering to me
(32:22):
specifically, They're they're they're trying tomake a good show, make good story.
I definitely think Matt Mercer, notthat he has ghostwriters, I don't
want to say that, but whenyou have that many people, you definitely
like I think people prefer a beholderover some ghosts. You know. That's
when like I feel like maybe Iwould be like eyebrow, eyebrow. Well
(32:43):
we have even said on this showand then, and I think Jim was
the one who kind of put itthis way, where like Critical Role is
no longer an actual play show,it is a it is a basically what
is essentially a television show, anaudio only television show built around a loose
D and D show, you think, so it's it. It is a
show first more than it is aD and D campaign. Yeah, I
(33:07):
don't think they. I mean Idon't really watch them now. I don't
season three dollars people want a fanof. But I think they still,
you know, do what they do. You know, I don't think he
coerces them to like, hey,you should go down this specific alleyy,
And that's that's not that's not whatwhat we what we think is happening is
just like the the end result isway more. It's way more based on
(33:29):
being a piece of entertainment, notscha okay, based on being accurate,
you know, recording of a Dand D game. You know, I
could definitely see, like the guyin the microphone, like we're losing viewers,
we're losing viewers, show something inthere and then he might just throw
something and I could see him doingthat. I don't talk about the the
the the the edited and recorded shownot as much. Lesseram where like you
(33:50):
know, if the if they've gotthey are they are no longer just a
loose collection of eight or nine friends. They are now in an entire corporation.
They are, They're an unity,They're they're literally any tam And company,
especially now they're putting out things likeFox Machina. They're they're an entertainment
company. You always get the commentlike, oh, I wish I could
play at match table. I wishI could play at Brandon's table. I
don't. I don't think I wouldbe a good player or DM. If
(34:13):
I was playing, It's like walkingout to an elevator full of girls.
I do not think it would goover well at all. I'd be too
scared. Sure, but like it'sjust like it just it just comes down
to synergy. And like if Idon't have synergy, maybe Brennan could probably
lean into the skid because he doesa lot of improv comedy. Sure,
Like if I played a critical role, I got my big chance, I
(34:35):
would take it because I'd be dumb. But I do not think I would.
Yeah, he played performed good atall. And let's not forget their
critical role started because they already hada home game. Yeah, and like
you know, they're all voice actors. How do you think they met each
other? You know, you know, Brennan, these were all people from
former college humor and current dropout inthat thought, that's his wife and like
(34:57):
and Jake is technically his boss.Like, oh, big man, it's
got a wife. What do youthink you better than us? Until next
year? Yeah, I got afiance party half screw you. Sure I'll
take it. But like these peoplewho have a long standing rapport with each
other and they know exactly how toget a good game out of each other.
So let's talk about it's not aboutme for a while. I've been
(35:22):
I've been on your show a fewtimes now and it's a blast, and
I love every time you invite me. So we I put a link to
the episode that I played on whichI think I stretched into a two shot.
It was a it was the prequelepisode. Yes, yes, I
got cutting episode seventy five, seventysix. If you go to a firm,
(35:43):
Yeah, so I have a littlecollection like one of those like like
link tree type websites on a biolinkfor all my dming stuff. And so
if you go to bio bio dotlink slash Jason, the DM games that
I'm games that I'm dming coming upare on there. You can and register
for them there. Links to thepodcast stuff will be there and then I
have I have a link to thatepisode on there as well. I'll put
(36:05):
them. I'll put in the shownotes here too, but yeah, tons
of fun. I feel like Ishould have already known it was going to
be an evil campaign, but Iwent, I went. I went pretty
evil on that. I think Iwas like pretty upfront, like, hey,
you guys are gonna play bad guys. The aha moment for the four
Dan and Jared was that your yoursquad captain was at o Ram, who
(36:28):
was a bad guy. They'd beenfighting for several episodes, so they wanted
to do like I think Jared textme, he goes, I'm about to
do a paradox right now because ittakes place before, and I was like,
no, do don't care. Ithink my thing was like because my
character was supposed to be like thenew recruit and didn't really know what was
going on, I didn't really knowwhat direction I was going to go in,
and I think I think it playedthat pretty naturally. Your sessions are
(36:52):
a great point of schedule conflicts becausewe didn't have an episode ready and Alec
could not record. It was actuallyhe was a part of the world that
didn't have Internet for about a solidmonth, so we needed to come up
and play stuff. And I didn'twant to just do one shots. I
wanted to keep the movie, thestory moving, so like we brough,
you wanted to it as a prequel, and now there are callbacks to that
(37:15):
moment that you played it. That'swhat I want to talk about, yes,
because I didn't get that far yetand I needed to know what happened,
so we could do a couple ofspoilers. If the diehard listeners of
my show are listening to this now, they probably already know what happened.
So you were a late song wizardand you had it familiar black dragon named
(37:36):
Timbat, and you were working witheight Aram pseudo dragon, pseudo dragon right
and you the three of you weresent to look out for a disturbance,
to stop a disturbance at one ofthe farms in a farm stead's basements.
It turns out to be this massiveblood shard, which won't go into it,
but it's a major plot hook forthe campaign. The blood sharts,
(37:57):
even like are super early episodes,like they come up yes, they come
up home immediately. The whole wholecampaign is this is the driven factor and
long story short, a giant monster, a giant demon is summoned from it
and essentially destroys the farmstead. Butyou were also like robbing the house at
the same time, because they hadcalled all the dwarves had called for help.
(38:20):
They were the farmers were dwarves.And then you guys just sort of
ransacking it because ad Orem gave youthe like the go ahead. And the
big moment at the end is thatyou met a dwarf and child named Warwick,
and he had a hammer in abag that he was hiding a false
panel, and because you decided tospare him, you had like this moment
(38:43):
of good. You decided to sparehim and you let him just hide under
the floorboard, and then you guysblew up the house. The result of
that is that now he's been likethis tropical island and he's learning how to
be a blacksmith from the god ofcrafting himself. And that's like a whole
other big story hook that I'm notgoing to get into. But he's learning
how to craft, and he hashis helmet on and he's a very specific
(39:06):
dwarved helmet on it, and hecan't hear he's deaf because when you guys
blew up the house hurt his ears. So I wanted to add like a
little like a pool, like,how are they going to talk to a
dwarf deaf dwarf? I think isfun role play. Yeah, it turns
out he's the key for a greaterstory plot because you gave him that hammer.
(39:27):
Those are legendary crafting hammers that theyneed to basically create weapons to attempt
to fight the big bad guy.And he's learning from the god of crafting
to harness those hammers because they're very, really strong. And when they fought
ador Ram, Tim Bat had teamedup with him and kind of kicked you
to the rocks because you saw thatyou were being good and it wanted to
(39:49):
be with ator Ram, who waslike, no, I want to hell,
I want to steal, I wantto blow shit up. They kicked
you to the curb. Your characterhasn't made an appearance yet since that moment.
If I did, I think Iwould just have you back. Yeah,
I would be like happily shoveled.Happily. Yeah. I think the
character more of a true neutral direction. So I think if Tim Batt,
if Tim has that much of abastard then maybe yeah, oh he was
(40:14):
a baschtlory and that boss fight wasso much fun. That was great.
Oh man, this is uh wherewe're kind of hitting the amount of time
that I wanted to I wanted towrap up, but we touched briefly on
this is one of the things Iwanted to get into when I asked you
about your dming style that boss fight. And again, if you haven't heard
the episode, go check out theepisode. The boss fight was just in
(40:36):
in these like layers and layers andlike, you know, we see you
see this in like j RPGs allthe time where the boss has different forms
and and and different different what's sortof looking for fass, Yeah, theasis
is actually, well, the bosshas different phases, and like this is
something even at the game store gamesthat I played with you, this is
something you're you seem to be reallygood at, and like, this is
(40:59):
something this is what I need tolike go study when we're done talking today,
because like it's such a it justreally changes the whole dynamic of the
battle, and that's something I needto be bringing to my players. Can
you teach me very quickly how todo this and let's let's give the listeners
some value. Today. There's quickand dirty, which is the oh shit,
(41:19):
they're killing it too quick. I'mgonna add a phase two. You
just add more health and he makethem look a little different, or have
the phase be a part of thestory to tell a key moment through its
actions rather than you describing what itdoes or just giving any asswer to a
player. Well, that specific bosswas based off a mosquito. He had
this tall, lanky demon. Heimpaled a guy and drank his blood and
(41:42):
he like or he blowed it upand he was like now twice as strong,
and it was showing. And whatthat was shown was that, oh,
there are powerful monsters inside these stonesthat can get stronger when they feast
on people. And then when youguys actually kill them floated, which was
pretty cool. Everyone took some damage, I think, so one of the
characters died, one of the players, I think Jared's character died. Who
(42:06):
lost the hand, which was no, he was he was me and he
lost an arm. Yeah, humandie, but like but losing the arm
and like and now not only wasthe combat itself in multiple phases, but
then like you kind of ended iton, like circling the camera to each
one of us and forcing us eachto make like a big decision. Yeah,
(42:28):
it was such a cool way toend it, so like he had
to choose whether or not he like, no, it's like this, this
this curse is crawling up your arm. What do you tell everyone? They
just like take the arm, getrid of that. I learned from paid
games where we run games at thelocal shop, that people won't come back
if they don't feel heard or uniquein the story. You got one shot
(42:50):
to attended, You got one shotto keep their interest, and you want
to make sure that everyone has thatdefining hero moment, and if you don't
give it to them, that meansyou don't like them. Really who I'm
talking about? Not to throw anyoneon the bus. I have a DM
there in a while because my schedulehas been so crazy. There's a few
players I can move it out despiteconversations happening. And that's just that's just
(43:14):
true for the general public, whichis who just who we are dming to.
You know, it's just the generalpublic. About three quarters of them
can just go away. I hateto be mean, hate to hate to
throw that out there, but plusyou just got to be honest and you'll
have a better time. Yeah,And then this and this goes into my
other question before, which is whatdo you do when you're dming for the
(43:34):
public, and like it's it seemsthat you're kind of like taking the same
general ideas of like making sure everyonegets through spotlight moment, and it just
manifests in different ways where like onthe podcast, this this now becomes like
a story moment, or at leastlike a soliloquy type of moment where that
point where that character gets to shineas an actor, versus a home game
where it's just like no, wherewe want to tell the best word we
(43:54):
possibly can. It's just for usversus a public game. We want that
player to feel like, well,they paid to play, they want to
make sure that they got their money'sworth, and you give them their spotlight
moment for that, which is easierwhen you have three or four players signed
up and not eight like I getmost of the time. I had them
a game once with ten people.It was super fun, but not everyone
(44:15):
got their moment. No, pooplethat were a little abrasive definitely did not
get their moment unless they got eatenby the dragon. That was the fun
one. I've got that, likeI get it with like like whole families
will come like three like three orfour time and and and the trick there,
give the kid the spotlight moment andlet the parents watch the kid shine.
And then that's that's two players youdon't have to worry about. I'm
(44:37):
super proud. I'm super brad.But when they play like they they'll let
you know just by playing that they'remore into RP. They want to have
that cool, cool the ground momentwhere they chop off something ahead of something.
It's pretty easy when you're just likewhen I come in by the character,
like you get that one kid who'slike I just want to cause chaos
and steal everything. Okay, stealstuff. It's gonna be cursed, but
(44:59):
steal stuf. Have that moment.You know. My biggest thing is I
have a a pawn shop. Magicshop. That is half the items aren't
even magical. He just says they'remagical and just a fifty to fifty shot.
That is it anything? Or ifyou did try to buy a bag
of holding, they got to rolleighteen or higher. Otherwise it's a bag
of the val ring. Yep,you know I think that that was my
that was one of the games Iplayed. I'm like, you know,
(45:20):
I'm just gonna do a detech magic. You're like, you're like everything's cursed,
Like it's so bad. All right, Tony, this this is this
is the time I had set asidefor us. Man, I want to
keep talking about this. I'll absolutelyhave it back on it. Maybe I
want to bring you on just kindof like introduce, you know, our
current listeners to who you are,what you do, what your show is
about. And I definitely want toget you back in and we'll go a
(45:43):
little bit more into some of thethings that make you a unique DM,
and we'll bring on other other dmsto maybe some other shows, maybe just
maybe just some locals that I thinkare great. You would love Dan honestly,
or you talk to him and hisDM styles absolutely crazy, great voices
too, really big on voice actingfor him. Awesome. And but thank
you for having me on. It'sit's blessed. I would love to come
(46:05):
up here and just talk about topicsand please and and if you're coming here
to listen for me, for myfor my discord and stuff in my part
of Spotify. Here's another show youcan listen to when you're waiting for our
show. They come out what everyMonday and Friday or every Monday? Right
now we are we're just gonna doevery Monday for a while maybe and maybe
maybe in definitely what do you maybeat least for now perfect We air on
(46:27):
Tuesday, So when you're getting readyto tackle the shittiest day of the week,
now you got something to listen to. Whether I'm here or not,
These guys a shot. It's you'regonna learn a lot. And for those
who ask for DM tips, that'syour man, that's this is this is
what we do on the show.We want to make our tagline is we
want to make your game better andeverything from our experience, we want to
make sure that you are learning alongwith us. And then Tony is a
(46:50):
is a great example of what doyou do when you already learned it and
now we got to implement it.So I learned in voting school. Is
we have a ton to learn fromyou from on futup. So it's hopefully
we'll figure out times to bring itback in because I definitely want to go
more into like we'll do a wholeepisode on like how to build a monster
and phasis and that kind of thing. That's something I really want to learn
myself. So give us a giveus a plug for em D four four
(47:14):
and they'll they'll they'll take this out. Check out D and D four four.
We're available on all podcasts and platforms. You can also go to D
and D four four dot com,dn D four for dot c A D
four four pod dot com. Weare cleaning all the websites. As a
matter of fact, we've been soaggressive on having different websites that did you
(47:35):
know that A D and D fourfour is a military licensing Canada and we're
more searchable than a military licensing Canada. That's right. That's how good the
adventures. If you want to haveyour stomach filled of butterflies, go on
an epic adventure and D D fourfour is a show for you, and
you can learn from Jason for thestuff we don't cover. Awesome, man,
Tony, thank you seriously much forcoming on. I love having me
(47:55):
on the show. We'll do itagain, man, absolutely, goodbye everybody,
Goodbye Adventures.
The Low Aid Adventurers, the podcastfor role players and game masters that help
level up your game. I'm yourdungeon master, Jason Portiso, and today
I am joined by none of myco hosts. We are not recording it
on a normal day and they've gotlies and stuff to do and I don't,
so I was able to record withoutthem. So Joe, Jim,
I'll see you guys on Wednesday whenwe record again. But today I do
(00:41):
have a special guest. I've mentionedhim on the show a couple of times
before, not only as being anotherpodcast that we're friends with, but a
show that I have guessed on afew times. And just to prove that
we actually are really truly friends,I came up on the show. So
from d M D four four I'vegot d M Tony on the show.
Tony, what's going on? Man? Hello? DM Tony. Got to
(01:02):
give him the signature, GI himthe signature. How are you doing?
Thanks for having me? You're comingon my show? You were you were
due? Is your return? Yeah? After having you? Wait, we
got a couple of adventures with you. It's more crucial ones too that I
can talk about now. Oh yes, I gotta see how the Aftermath turned
out on that because I have notmade it that far because I am a
bad fan. It's so good,like hundreds of episodes. It's totally fun.
(01:23):
It's a while, so quick background, so we'll talk about we'll talk
about your show in a second.But so I met Tony through one of
the local Facebook groups. I waslooking for people to just come onto.
We were doing Commercions and Dragons atthe time. I was looking for some
guests to come on and tell ustheir their horror stories. And He's like,
nope, I'm coming on and tellinga wholesome story. And we were
like, we didn't think people hadthose anymore. We happily had him on
(01:47):
the show. We had him recordin person with us over at our friendly
local game store, and it's andwe've been DMan at the same store since
then. It's a lot of fun. Since Amy sat me on, not
only two guests play, but theguest DM on the D and D four
or four. So let's let's kindof introduce people to what is What is
D and D four or four?Yes, DND four four is an actual
(02:09):
play podcast that I do with threeof my other friends. We are I'm
a long time player of D andD. I've been playing since I was
about thirteen, on and off throughoutcollege and high school, and they are
all first time players, which issomething that we kind of like leaned into,
especially during the beginning, and evennow it we're up to like episode
(02:30):
one oh three by the time thisairs, we still explain uncommon rules and
such so that everybody, whether they'reexperienced or new, know what's going on.
I think that's something that actual playshows should do. If they're not
already doing it, they really shouldbe reminding people, even if they even
if their veteran players, just remindthem of we have this rule work.
(02:50):
I look up you know, Irelook up spells. I've casted myself through
my own monsters, and I forgetwhat things do all the time, and
we're constantly fact you should. Welook up rules for mechanics that we use
often. I had a whole characterbuilt around like stretching the limits of grappling,
(03:12):
and we still look up grapple checksevery time they come up. We
just learned around episode ninety nine howconcentration really works. I don't know,
and we have a warlock that usesonly concentration spells that we still learn the
nuances of concentration. I gotta ask, what was the most recent thing you
learned about concentration? Oh, ifyou ready as spell, it's a concentration
(03:37):
check and if you get knocked onthe head or take enough damage, you
can lose that spell slot if you'recast level that. We did an episode.
I don't know the episode number offtop of my head, but we
did an episode recently of rules thatget overlooked and this and the that's one
of things we brought up. Andeven Jim, who has been playing since
day one for a blue Box earlyedition like like first edition D and D,
(04:02):
when I said that, he's like, wait what, so like it's
this, this is this is notlike you should be looking at your rules
and this is where it shows likethis, this is why like an actual
place show like like yours and adiscussion show like mine, like like not
only can we coexist, we shouldbe like we should be doing stuff like
this more often. Yeah, Ilistened to well yours like Corimudges and Dragons
(04:24):
when you were doing that a lot, and when you started this show back
up or instance, the camp tripto your List episode that you did I
have some words and comments, butwe won't get into that now. But
I love that and I love theapp recommendations because those things, yeah,
help players out im mensely. Yeah, I was and proud to put that
episode out with. I'm not goingto shout out this other episode other show
(04:45):
that I used to listen to,but they used to use do deep dives
on very specific topics. I'm like, oh, I'm running that monster in
like a week or two. Iwant to know everything about it. Cool,
So we're gonna by doing more deepdives now too. That is something
that that actually Joe insisted on thatfrom before we started recording, even episode
one. And you want to dodeep dives. Dives are great, and
we kind of think more of them. You know. The the amount of
(05:10):
time that we have allowed to ourselvesto do the research for all these episodes
doesn't let us do as deep ofa dive as I think people want to
deserve. It's just too much tocomment on. And yeah, and it's
just like, you know, it'sjust an amount of research that like,
it's just it's just it's time.We all got jobs, we all got
stuff, you know, we havefamilies. It's it's it's hard, man.
(05:32):
So what we end up doing Ikind of just kind of rebranded them
a little bit when they're a littleless deep dives and a little more elementary
school book reports. Now that's amazing, and I think and they're they're just
a little a little more fun,more knowledge for pea sized brain. You
still you still learn a lot,and if you want to continue learning,
you can go down to your locallibrary. If you can make that a
pop out book, maybe I will. It's so oh, that's a million
(05:57):
dollar children's book. Idea. Friend, we just we just cut this out.
We're gonna we're gonna talk about this, all right, So tell me
about so that that's like the thethirty thousand for a view of D and
D four or four. So whatwhat do you want to tell us about?
Like what's going on with the storyof the show, or or even
(06:18):
just like what sets it apart fromfrom other from other actual plays? Give
me, give me, give methe pitch. I'm gonna give you that
elevated pitch. I'm gonna try tobe as broad and specific as possible.
One it's an epic style campaign witha big, bad, evil guy that
doesn't really show up until about inthe middle of the campaign. However,
he affects things around him constantly,and the further the adventures go, it's
(06:41):
it's just like you gotta keep diggingdance. It's like always conspiracy and the
the show is going on about overone hundred episodes. I theorize that we're
gonna be about one hundred and sixtyif we were to finish it. I
am trying to. We are ina late game of that and starting to
lay in the plane. Yes,so we're starting to wrap up some loops
(07:03):
ends, We're trying to bring backsome of those characters that may have got
lost in the ether. And thebiggest pull of our show, I think
is that it's the highest quality thatwe can possibly make it and we will
not drop an episode unless it's perfectto the best of our ability. So
we do sound effects. We makesure that it's not just like generic slashing
(07:25):
or hacking. It's actual sound effectsthat relay to what the characters are doing.
And we have starting on episode thirteen, we had like generic scores.
Dan has made all the scores.Danis one of white players, has made
all the scores for each episode,and every episode is unique scoring to it.
Quite a couple of revisits from crowdfavorites like downtime activities and such.
(07:47):
But it's a huge epic campaign startingin one city, going all the way
over the ocean and then coming backand these are really starting up. Yeah,
I mean I got into the team, like I'm so very very early
into it. But the everything fromthe like I said there, the music,
(08:07):
sound effects, the general editing,and this is something that after we
met, after you were on myshow, but we got into talking about
podcast editing and I was trying toskee if there was anything I can do
to help you. Guys, thisis what I do for a living,
and I listen to it, I'mlike, no, they got it.
We want to hire editors to saveour own time because it does a lot
of time. We lose sleep editingthis stuff and you you edit full time.
(08:31):
And we had like had conversations withyou and we had broke the subject.
Yeah, and just for a fulltransparency, The reason why we decided
to not go through not because wewant to not see you succeed, Jason.
We love to have you on theteam. We had bad experiences with
colleagues and friends that have tried tohelp us, and it always ruins that
friendship if it doesn't pan out.And I did not want to put that
(08:56):
between us, because I'd rather stayfriends with you, you know, like
you have your own editing job andlike you edit your own show and other
people shows, and then like whathappens if we like ours falls on the
back burner, not just because lifehappens. And then it's like, well,
we prought ourselves on being consistent andlike, you know, that's why
we don't work with like friends.Yeah, totally fine, Starl. My
(09:18):
rent is still getting paid. Man, you're you're good. I was great
to hear what. I would havebeen very happy to have my name on
the on the roster, but butI'm happy being a listener if that's all
I ever got to do. HelloAdventurers, just stepping in here to remind
you guys that we're actively looking forsubmissions for our Hello DMS episode that gets
recorded every month. Send us yourburning D and D questions to Helloadventurers podcast
(09:41):
at gmail dot com, or sendus a voicemail by visiting Hello Adventurers podcast
dot com slash voice. Don't forgetto begin your message with Hello, DMS.
You can't wait to get your questionsto talk about them on the show.
Send us your questions today. That'sHello Adventurers Podcast at gmail dot com,
poorly the voice at Tolowadventurers podcast dotcom slash voice. Now let's get
(10:05):
back to the show. So onehuge thing I want to get into today
with like, So let's talk alittle bit first about your general dming style.
And I mentioned that one of theepisodes and actually even just you know,
five minutes ago. So you andI are are pretty local to each
other and we have the same friendlylocal game stoes. I think it's about
(10:28):
five minutes in your house, abouttwenty from mine. So we both are
on the roster of DMS to runone shots there. Yes, and you've
sat in on a couple of mine. I've sat in on a couple of
yours when I get the time too. And every time I play in one
of your games, I'm like,I need to go home and study.
I always feel like I'm phoning itin every time that I play in one
(10:50):
of your games. And that isthat, And I mean that entirely as
a comment. It's I'll be I'llbe honest. Most of those Local Games
is straight up play testing from andI try to make it as fun as
possible. But some of those encountersI actually give to my players on a
higher scale or to see if themonster's just interesting to people. So it's
like a you know, it benefitsme at the same time other than just
getting a couple of bucks. Butyeah, and but when it comes down
(11:13):
to DM style, I gotta reallygive it to the players. So we
got Dan, Jared and Alec andit Dan plays a ranger, he's a
mini tour minas Pela Walker. Wegot Jared who plays almost Vannin who's like
the angry rage warlock who just wantsrevenge. And we have Alec who plays
(11:35):
Drove the Ashbourne who has a crazystory arc coming up no spoilers, however,
he was one like I just wantto kill monsters because he's got to
always get that one guy that doesn'twant to play the and he's like,
I just want to be the coolmonster hunter. And I leaned into that
as hard as possible. And that'sa totally fine play style. That's that's
something we can talk about too,and it's there. It's their quick quips
(11:56):
and the way we're able to speakto each other because in any friend group,
like there's boundaries. We kind ofdestroy each other's boundaries on a daily
basis, with the exception of likea few topics, because we're so close
in that way that if I saysomething not necessarily mean but like it's just
he like, Dan can take that, do a yes end and calm and
(12:18):
hit it right back on. Youcan turn it on me very easily.
And Dan's really good where if I'mlike stuck, I'm like, I don't
know how to nudge you guys inthe right direction. The three of them
will just start role playing themselves.They kind of see me struggling a little
bit and push the narrative forward,whether it's the wrong or right choice,
and they are fantastic I do.It's really all about the synergy. And
(12:39):
you got people who like have neverhad anything played before. No, So
Jared is huge on board games,Okay. Alec is a really big fantasy
nerd, which we didn't expect becauseif you've met Alec for the first time,
you think he's like, oh,it's up, Brad, I play
Gulf and drink beers and like tohang out California, And he's like the
smartest person I ever met? Wouldyou really talk to him? And Dan
(13:00):
is kind of like me. Wehave like the same interest that we all
play games, and we did twitchstreams, so personality kind of rubs off
there a little bit, and maybewe have a little bit of easier time
talking into a microphone from micro streaming. But because when I heard that these
were like first time players, Ithink, like in your first episode or
so, I think you even madea point to say that these are first
time players. Yes, and thenthey come out with like already knowing how
(13:22):
to role play. So we dida lot of dry runs. Okay,
yeah, we did about four orfive dry runs I want to say four.
One where it's like I gave themcharacters they have they didn't know what
they wanted to play at, gavethem eric a deep beyond characters. Yeah.
The second time, I let themmake characters and now it was like
a two part session. And thenI did a boss fight and I'm like,
(13:43):
okay, so here's where you wantto like kind of talk to the
monster. It's not really story changing, but like you can have fun with
him on your turns. And Ireally stress free actions because free actions is
where you get through a lot ofthe role play. I feel they don't
really change the tide of anything.M Yeah, it was just and even
even that, just like a coupleof sessions under the bellt's like they really
(14:03):
like dove fully into the role playpart of it. That stuff that I
that I see a lot of playerswho have been playing for years just like
you know, it's it's it's ait's a combination of you know that you
need a certain type of player wherethat is within their comfort zone. This
is something we talked about on theshow before also with like levels of embodying
the character and you know, andthey go you know, full in first
(14:26):
person, throwing on the voice andeverything, where like, you know,
players who are not being recorded forthe masses might not be comfortable with that
even at their own table with theirown friends, and they'll they'll role play
more than third person and and notyou know, just speak with their own
voice and and that's and that's finetoo, but like, but for them
to go from never playing to likea couple of quick one shots and adore
(14:48):
two shot a little bit of coachingand then just like coming out like with
a podcast level of role playing behind. I think it really surprised me the
first time I heard when you wereclaiming that these were first time players.
I'm like, they they've done stuffbefore. We so, like I said,
if you're starting a podcast, andI hope you do, like I
(15:09):
don't want people to be discouraged tonot start one because one sounds great.
Hours didn't start great when we firststarted in our in our perspective, our
first couple of sessions were five hourslong. For one episode, it's about
an hour and a half because wecut down the fluff. There's a lot
of oh hey, like this ishow that spell works, and then a
(15:30):
lot of it was theater of mind, which I learned that Jared isn't necessarily
the best with the theater of themind. So that's where I started incorporating
maps to hat to his style ofplay. And we don't like some people
might call it cheating or like fluffingthe episode. We everything's real reactions and
it's completely open world only during likespecific boss fights. Do I a little
(15:54):
railroad in air can make it moreinteresting, but all the choices and outcomes
are on them and we just removethe fluff from the episode. If they're
like if they're asking how eldritch blastworks and he ends up shooting his crossbow.
We don't need any of that elastdialogue. It's it doesn't lead anywhere,
and anybody who's listening is going toget bored, you feel, I
(16:15):
remove that editing wise, I thinkthat should be expected and even appreciated to
get the stuff that, you know, just kind of get to the game
itself. And even like the reallyhigh level actual play shows, I'm thinking
that Pod Critical Role things like that, they cut all that stuff out too.
Sure, Critical Role Critical started asa live stream and they kind of
keep true to that live in personfeel. But as they progressed as not
(16:37):
only gamers and performers, but youknow that's the show progressive popularity, then
they can kind of, you know, they naturally cut them. They don't
need to do that anymore kind ofclos you know. But on that Podmurph,
it's pretty open about like the stuffthat he cuts and doesn't cut,
and like he'll get rid of themrolling dice just to get just to shave
off a couple of seconds here andthere. Dan yells at me, but
I do it all the time.He just run, He just throws metal
(17:00):
Dice, I'm talking about you.Then he throws Metal Dice on a microphone.
It sounds clanky and horrible and earshattering. He's like, it feels
good. I'm like, no,no, Metal Dice. I don't know.
But you know, Plastic Dice.I I just love that loft,
that clackety clack sound. And you'regonna and you're gonna find a subsection of
listeners that will agree and some thatthat love you. Soak it out.
(17:22):
Those use Plastic Dice and other othershows that I've listened to. There's another
one that I listened to. Itwas called Bombarded It is it is finished.
Now you know that show. I'veseen it. I haven't listened to
it. Actually, the the DMfrom that show is the one who composed
the music for this podcast. Ohthat's all shot A big shot out to
Nick s Burrier. Well the biggerones too, right I. One thing
(17:47):
with podcasting is like I don't getto see anyone else's numbers. Yeah,
you know, you can. Youcan track your own numbers, but you
can't track someone else's numbers. Solike, as far as like you know,
they didn't have much of like anInstagram presence, but like not podcasts
even bother with Instagram, so likeit's it's very hard to judge, you
know, were they one of thebigger ones. But what I can say
(18:07):
is I enjoyed it very much andthat means something to me. But I
just go based off Spotify ratings.I'm like, oh, let's see how
they do. And sure, Ithink Spotify ratings is huge, sure,
or even like any any podcast platform. But I bring them up because they
made a point, even in theearly episodes, to leave the dice rolling
in and then also speak out loudwhat their modifiers were, so players following
(18:27):
along, especially new players following along, can see like it's like, okay,
well they rolled a twenty side,diye, how did they roll twenty
eight? So stuff like that.We I was doing that at first,
and I started getting rid of everythingbecause now everyone's like level fourteen about the
h level fifteen. Now you're gonnaget to that end game where like everyone
has seven attacks bonus actions and theirpresence stops them from doing other things,
(18:51):
and even at lower levels, likein the games that I'm running at the
Breweries now, one of my pregenerated characters is a is a fay uh
is it they touched one of theof the ranger subclasses. Oh whatever it
is, but right, but theyadd on like another D four on top
of all their attacks. Plus they'recasting hunters mark. So like if I
(19:14):
made them do that every time,it's okay. Well to it's the D
eight for the bow, and thenthe D four for the for the fay
thing, and then the D sixfor the for the tunters mark. It's
like, we don't, we don'tlike got three hours in this game.
But just like moving, they wanderer. They wanderer. That's that I that
I didn't. I knew it,knew it's something, but uh, they
wonder at low levels anyway. Soyou mentioned, you know how much you're
(19:40):
cutting out of the show. Yourearly episodes were five hours getting cut down
to one and a half. Let'sstop at the sheer daunting amount of work
that it takes to make a successfulactual play show. I feel like this
is a huge misconception that a lotof new players have, and I'm coming
at this from from two directions.One, they feel like making the podcast
(20:03):
is easy, because it sounds likeit was easy if it was edited well.
And and the you know, thefirst thought is Okay, we're going
to make our own live stream,our own podcast. Then we're going to
make the millions of dollars like MyCritical Role does. And then they get
on Twitch and they see there's athousand other people doing it and out of
maybe three or four are watchable andthere's no offense to them. I'm I'm
(20:25):
glad they're playing games. I'm gladthey're having fun. But like the IF
I IF, I call it adelusion that I feel like that's being too
harsh, but the the the misconstruedidea that it's easy, but also at
the same time feeling like the showis not edited at all and that your
game is just naturally that good.And this was actually called the Matt Mercer
(20:45):
effect for a while because he wasoperating on such a high level that people
expected their game to be at thatlevel naturally. And then when they started
playing for the first time and theirgame wasn't that good despite them not putting
in their effort as the player,they get turned off of the hobby.
So let let's talk real quick aboutjust tell me about the just the mountain
(21:08):
of work that goes from getting theepisode even before recording, then recording the
editing, then getting it out there, any people to understand how much you're
actually doing when we started this.It's very important and this is the most
important thing I could tell you,and I have nothing to do with d
(21:29):
D. You need to find peoplewho want it as much as you,
and you need to be consistent.If you are not consistent, I don't
think it'll happen. And if that'sonce a month, that's great, twice
a month, that's that's still great. It's just you need to be consistent
in your work, and the qualityof each episode needs to be consistent getting
(21:49):
gradually better. Sure, everything needsto be the same level of quality overall.
And so let's just start from thebottom up. What we have weekly
meetings and at this point in agame, we've been doing this for about
two and a half years. Weeach have roles. Dan and I are
the editors. We edit videos whenwe get a chance to do videos.
(22:10):
We edit the assembly cut, whichis what you actually hear when we play,
and then I do all the soundeffects and Dan does all the scoring,
and everything is from scratch. Jaredtakes care of the finances and we
had to recently just do all ourtax stuff and the amount of work he
did on his end just to goto the bank and talk to people astronomical.
But that's like if you're successful.But these are things you need to
(22:33):
think about once you've got your startgetting ads on your show and a little
bit of money comes through. Andthen Alex is on marketing Patreon as well
too, and like yes, withwithout getting into given away the given way
too much, Like you've got agood amount of actual let's just talk like
just followers on Patreon. Forget whatthey're paying, but like you know,
it's I haven't looked at it,and that is public information. But it's
(22:55):
like, you've got a good amountof followers on patreons. So we have
about one hundred to over one hundredpatrons right now. Record it's a round
about one hundred lest that look,yeah, some of those are free,
but majority of them do bad.You that cash money, that greed and
you have to understand, like allthis money that we get, which is
not a substantial I realized how thatjust sounded. It's not a lot,
but it all goes back into theshow. We want to make art,
(23:18):
if we want to make ds,you have to advertise if you want people
to listen, and we tackle everytype of ED avenue we can take of,
like Spotify music, Podbean, ads, Instagram post, Facebook post,
reddit post boosting those and it doesn'tseem like it does a lot, but
it's just repetition. And so weget together, go back to my main
(23:40):
point. We get together and wedecide what we're gonna play, and normally
we play once a week, whichis already a huge shut of the curve
for most DD groups podcast aside,we play once a week and we record
for two hours. We keep trackand like, hey, we're getting towards
the end of the episode, I'mgonna stop building things up, or if
I feel like nothing has really happenedor they haven't progressed, I'll start pushing
(24:04):
things along through my dming style.And we stop recording around two hours,
and then we edit from the twohours and we usually get about an hour
and a half episode out of thatbecause now we're fully in it. We're
also in all different time zones andand I live on the East Coast,
Jared lives Central, and we'll workI'm not gonna say his jobs, but
(24:27):
it's pretty important. Alec is inHawaii right now for the summer, and
that's six hours behind us, Andyesterday we did two recordings back to back
because he can't record as much becauseof the work he's doing, so now
we're doubling up, and that's probablywhy I don't feel the best. They
got like no sleep, there's nothere's no video. But I got a
(24:48):
little blanket on me, like abushka, and I'm trying to keep warm in
the summer. You get your headright now. It is eighty something agrees
up there right now. You gottaa blanket. I'm so cold. That's
a fever. That's what that is. Probably from when we were doing when
this show was coming in the Dragons, we our co host Josie was in
England for school and that was fivehours ahead of us, So like us
(25:10):
recording at like noon, put heron like five pm, and then being
with him being six hours earlier,you gotta be recording in the middle of
the night pretty much. Although Iwould always want to be the one that's
in the earlier time zone, notthe ones after, because that's dan Alec
was playing in Hawaii. It's liketen in them the morning for him.
We're done with two episodes. It'slike five o'clock and it's one am for
(25:33):
us. Yes, yeah, wewere. We were very fortunate that,
you know, Jim being retired,myself working as a as a concert engineer
where I work nights, our afternoonswere wide open so we can catch Josy
after dinner. And it just kindof worked out as often as we needed
it to until until it didn't.And that's why this show is. That
was what it is now if everyonehas the understanding that this comes first within
(25:55):
reason sure, and that's where theconsistency part I was talking about. People
miss episodes all the time. Wedo it. We take holidays off on
purpose so we can catch up onour backlog. We take the big eight
holidays and we take two weeks offduring Christmas time for Christmas and New Years,
and it's just so like we cancatch up and don't get editing fatigue.
(26:17):
One episode takes about eight to tenhours to edit from start to finish.
That's two hours of recording here.Yeah, and with the show,
with the with the amount of productionthat goes into it, and you're adding
on a lot more, it's avery different kind of edit then this show
takes and like you know, onthis on the surface level from the from
the We'll take the that was athirty thousand foot view, Let's take the
(26:38):
sixty thousand foot view for a second. From sixty thousand feet. You and
I are both D and D podcasters, And the video on the show with
his big finger quotes there and likethe Not only is the final result very
different, but the amount of workthat goes in it is very different too,
which is one of the reasons whyI do a show like this one.
This fits in, this fits inmy lifestyle right now, and it's
(27:00):
a similar editing techniques as most ofmy clients. And you know, and
if a show like yours came tome right now and needed the type of
editing that you need, not notthat what not the part of it that
we were talking about me potentially doingfor you guys, but the whole thing.
I tell them. That's why we'relike, I think, if we
do get an editor in the future, we're just going to get an assembly
editor, and we're still going todo the score on sound effects and probably
(27:22):
chop it up even more. Justa vocal of work is done with the
assembly cut. Yeah, and that'sthat that's going to change from the show
to show what your particular workflow is. But I've seen I think we talked
about what you were what your generalworkflow is, and I would agree with
most of it, but obviously it'sworking on the show that the show sounds
great. Man. So one hugething I wanted to talk about with you
(27:49):
is your dming style. So I'veI've sat with you at at a public
game, I listened to your podcastthat we have not done a home game
together, which might be starting onesoon. If you want to come over,
don't you tease me? Pretty much? The second we're done with this
interview, I got people from workcoming over and we're going to start our
sessions. We're doing a session.I'm going to take them through tales of
(28:12):
the Yawning Portal. I want toplay that. I want to Dad,
you don't live far by coming onover. But so I want to hear
your your thoughts on how to changeup your DM style between doing a home
game versus a public game versus agame that is meant to be listening to
from an outsider like a podcast.Do not compare yourself to other people,
(28:37):
like especially the Big Three Matbers,Brandley Mulligan and Murphy. All those people
do not try to copy them.You can use them as inspiration, sure,
and I think early on I probablyuse Randomlee Mulligan as inspiration, as
a lot of people do. Andthe inspiration I took for him was mimicking
weapons sound effects like pushing swat,and that helped my players really get into
it, you know, trying topaint the image as best as I can
(29:00):
in their head. Talk to yourplayers. That's it's it's astounding. Like
you just go on Reddit and youcan see like these horror like not horror
stories, but all these suggestion pages. How do I talk to my players
to do my players aren't doing aB and C I set up plot hooks
to not fighting, then they don'tseem to have an interest in my big
(29:21):
talk to them, ask them whatthey're into. They might give you big
dms to copy, but like askthem if they're like more into role play,
do they want to do combat?Maybe you got to shorten your combat
a lot, you know, takeoff twenty help points for some of those
bigger monsters, keep the keep itflowing. Nothing kills a session like combat.
And if you get feedback and yourplayers will give it to you keep
(29:45):
asking, they will give it toyou, and he might hurt your feelings
a little bit. May have hadthat happen. But if I hurt your
feelings a little bit, You're hurt. There's right back next session. Can
neither confirm nor deny, Jason,I accept. I accept your criticism and
that that magic armor just doesn't fityou anymore. Man. You will put
on a few pounds in between sessionsthere. But ye talk to you players
(30:07):
and see what they want. Youknow, like we're a group of four
friends that we have great synergy.We also have the perfect amount of people.
I think for an audio podcast,I think maybe five people might be
pushing it. That's the most thatwould go. And it just keeps.
Everyone's going to have a turn andhave a moment and I feel like they're
being heard. And then your DMstyle will just shine through it because you're
(30:30):
trying to make them have a typeof dmu are will really come out.
So that I I'm one hundred thousandpercent on board with all that. For
all three of those situations, doyou change up anything when the audience,
well, when you're trying to caterto the players and in like a Homer
Store, game or something where you'retrying to cater to the audience. I've
(30:53):
never cater to change you at all. Never I sometimes we don't. We
don't get negative commentat We got onecomment on YouTube that just said gay whatever.
Sure it's probably whatever, but wedon't get negative comments. Welcome to
Yeah. Also it was like wemade it boys also everybody. I'll take
that as a compliment. But wedo not. And I say, because
(31:18):
I had people like personally private DMme, I do not cater to people's
ideas or anything. We have Patreonmbcs and we'll talk about that in a
second. But I do not caterand I ignore them, not because I
think I'm better than him. Iwant the story to come for me naturally,
and I know I have a goodsense of what my players like,
and if they're not receptive, thenthe session goes stale, and then I
(31:41):
change it up. I change itup specifically for them. They're having fun.
I'm having fun. If we're allhaving fun, people listening are having
fun, that's not a shot ataudience at all. That's great, And
I think they're they're tuning in becausethe story is good and because the players
are good. Because everything is everythingthey're they're turning into a show, but
(32:01):
it's it's essentially it's a show.You're they're they're tuning in because the show
is good, and like you know, you're if you're watching. I honestually,
it took me it forever and Ikind of forgot that existed for a
while, but I just went backand finished Fox Makina and like, you
know, that is just as muchof a show as any of the actual
play shows are. Yeah, andyou know they're they're not catering to me
(32:22):
specifically, They're they're they're trying tomake a good show, make good story.
I definitely think Matt Mercer, notthat he has ghostwriters, I don't
want to say that, but whenyou have that many people, you definitely
like I think people prefer a beholderover some ghosts. You know. That's
when like I feel like maybe Iwould be like eyebrow, eyebrow. Well
(32:43):
we have even said on this showand then, and I think Jim was
the one who kind of put itthis way, where like Critical Role is
no longer an actual play show,it is a it is a basically what
is essentially a television show, anaudio only television show built around a loose
D and D show, you think, so it's it. It is a
show first more than it is aD and D campaign. Yeah, I
(33:07):
don't think they. I mean Idon't really watch them now. I don't
season three dollars people want a fanof. But I think they still,
you know, do what they do. You know, I don't think he
coerces them to like, hey,you should go down this specific alleyy,
And that's that's not that's not whatwhat we what we think is happening is
just like the the end result isway more. It's way more based on
(33:29):
being a piece of entertainment, notscha okay, based on being accurate,
you know, recording of a Dand D game. You know, I
could definitely see, like the guyin the microphone, like we're losing viewers,
we're losing viewers, show something inthere and then he might just throw
something and I could see him doingthat. I don't talk about the the
the the the edited and recorded shownot as much. Lesseram where like you
(33:50):
know, if the if they've gotthey are they are no longer just a
loose collection of eight or nine friends. They are now in an entire corporation.
They are, They're an unity,They're they're literally any tam And company,
especially now they're putting out things likeFox Machina. They're they're an entertainment
company. You always get the commentlike, oh, I wish I could
play at match table. I wishI could play at Brandon's table. I
don't. I don't think I wouldbe a good player or DM. If
(34:13):
I was playing, It's like walkingout to an elevator full of girls.
I do not think it would goover well at all. I'd be too
scared. Sure, but like it'sjust like it just it just comes down
to synergy. And like if Idon't have synergy, maybe Brennan could probably
lean into the skid because he doesa lot of improv comedy. Sure,
Like if I played a critical role, I got my big chance, I
(34:35):
would take it because I'd be dumb. But I do not think I would.
Yeah, he played performed good atall. And let's not forget their
critical role started because they already hada home game. Yeah, and like
you know, they're all voice actors. How do you think they met each
other? You know, you know, Brennan, these were all people from
former college humor and current dropout inthat thought, that's his wife and like
(34:57):
and Jake is technically his boss.Like, oh, big man, it's
got a wife. What do youthink you better than us? Until next
year? Yeah, I got afiance party half screw you. Sure I'll
take it. But like these peoplewho have a long standing rapport with each
other and they know exactly how toget a good game out of each other.
So let's talk about it's not aboutme for a while. I've been
(35:22):
I've been on your show a fewtimes now and it's a blast, and
I love every time you invite me. So we I put a link to
the episode that I played on whichI think I stretched into a two shot.
It was a it was the prequelepisode. Yes, yes, I
got cutting episode seventy five, seventysix. If you go to a firm,
(35:43):
Yeah, so I have a littlecollection like one of those like like
link tree type websites on a biolinkfor all my dming stuff. And so
if you go to bio bio dotlink slash Jason, the DM games that
I'm games that I'm dming coming upare on there. You can and register
for them there. Links to thepodcast stuff will be there and then I
have I have a link to thatepisode on there as well. I'll put
(36:05):
them. I'll put in the shownotes here too, but yeah, tons
of fun. I feel like Ishould have already known it was going to
be an evil campaign, but Iwent, I went. I went pretty
evil on that. I think Iwas like pretty upfront, like, hey,
you guys are gonna play bad guys. The aha moment for the four
Dan and Jared was that your yoursquad captain was at o Ram, who
(36:28):
was a bad guy. They'd beenfighting for several episodes, so they wanted
to do like I think Jared textme, he goes, I'm about to
do a paradox right now because ittakes place before, and I was like,
no, do don't care. Ithink my thing was like because my
character was supposed to be like thenew recruit and didn't really know what was
going on, I didn't really knowwhat direction I was going to go in,
and I think I think it playedthat pretty naturally. Your sessions are
(36:52):
a great point of schedule conflicts becausewe didn't have an episode ready and Alec
could not record. It was actuallyhe was a part of the world that
didn't have Internet for about a solidmonth, so we needed to come up
and play stuff. And I didn'twant to just do one shots. I
wanted to keep the movie, thestory moving, so like we brough,
you wanted to it as a prequel, and now there are callbacks to that
(37:15):
moment that you played it. That'swhat I want to talk about, yes,
because I didn't get that far yetand I needed to know what happened,
so we could do a couple ofspoilers. If the diehard listeners of
my show are listening to this now, they probably already know what happened.
So you were a late song wizardand you had it familiar black dragon named
(37:36):
Timbat, and you were working witheight Aram pseudo dragon, pseudo dragon right
and you the three of you weresent to look out for a disturbance,
to stop a disturbance at one ofthe farms in a farm stead's basements.
It turns out to be this massiveblood shard, which won't go into it,
but it's a major plot hook forthe campaign. The blood sharts,
(37:57):
even like are super early episodes,like they come up yes, they come
up home immediately. The whole wholecampaign is this is the driven factor and
long story short, a giant monster, a giant demon is summoned from it
and essentially destroys the farmstead. Butyou were also like robbing the house at
the same time, because they hadcalled all the dwarves had called for help.
(38:20):
They were the farmers were dwarves.And then you guys just sort of
ransacking it because ad Orem gave youthe like the go ahead. And the
big moment at the end is thatyou met a dwarf and child named Warwick,
and he had a hammer in abag that he was hiding a false
panel, and because you decided tospare him, you had like this moment
(38:43):
of good. You decided to sparehim and you let him just hide under
the floorboard, and then you guysblew up the house. The result of
that is that now he's been likethis tropical island and he's learning how to
be a blacksmith from the god ofcrafting himself. And that's like a whole
other big story hook that I'm notgoing to get into. But he's learning
how to craft, and he hashis helmet on and he's a very specific
(39:06):
dwarved helmet on it, and hecan't hear he's deaf because when you guys
blew up the house hurt his ears. So I wanted to add like a
little like a pool, like,how are they going to talk to a
dwarf deaf dwarf? I think isfun role play. Yeah, it turns
out he's the key for a greaterstory plot because you gave him that hammer.
(39:27):
Those are legendary crafting hammers that theyneed to basically create weapons to attempt
to fight the big bad guy.And he's learning from the god of crafting
to harness those hammers because they're very, really strong. And when they fought
ador Ram, Tim Bat had teamedup with him and kind of kicked you
to the rocks because you saw thatyou were being good and it wanted to
(39:49):
be with ator Ram, who waslike, no, I want to hell,
I want to steal, I wantto blow shit up. They kicked
you to the curb. Your characterhasn't made an appearance yet since that moment.
If I did, I think Iwould just have you back. Yeah,
I would be like happily shoveled.Happily. Yeah. I think the
character more of a true neutral direction. So I think if Tim Batt,
if Tim has that much of abastard then maybe yeah, oh he was
(40:14):
a baschtlory and that boss fight wasso much fun. That was great.
Oh man, this is uh wherewe're kind of hitting the amount of time
that I wanted to I wanted towrap up, but we touched briefly on
this is one of the things Iwanted to get into when I asked you
about your dming style that boss fight. And again, if you haven't heard
the episode, go check out theepisode. The boss fight was just in
(40:36):
in these like layers and layers andlike, you know, we see you
see this in like j RPGs allthe time where the boss has different forms
and and and different different what's sortof looking for fass, Yeah, theasis
is actually, well, the bosshas different phases, and like this is
something even at the game store gamesthat I played with you, this is
something you're you seem to be reallygood at, and like, this is
(40:59):
something this is what I need tolike go study when we're done talking today,
because like it's such a it justreally changes the whole dynamic of the
battle, and that's something I needto be bringing to my players. Can
you teach me very quickly how todo this and let's let's give the listeners
some value. Today. There's quickand dirty, which is the oh shit,
(41:19):
they're killing it too quick. I'mgonna add a phase two. You
just add more health and he makethem look a little different, or have
the phase be a part of thestory to tell a key moment through its
actions rather than you describing what itdoes or just giving any asswer to a
player. Well, that specific bosswas based off a mosquito. He had
this tall, lanky demon. Heimpaled a guy and drank his blood and
(41:42):
he like or he blowed it upand he was like now twice as strong,
and it was showing. And whatthat was shown was that, oh,
there are powerful monsters inside these stonesthat can get stronger when they feast
on people. And then when youguys actually kill them floated, which was
pretty cool. Everyone took some damage, I think, so one of the
characters died, one of the players, I think Jared's character died. Who
(42:06):
lost the hand, which was no, he was he was me and he
lost an arm. Yeah, humandie, but like but losing the arm
and like and now not only wasthe combat itself in multiple phases, but
then like you kind of ended iton, like circling the camera to each
one of us and forcing us eachto make like a big decision. Yeah,
(42:28):
it was such a cool way toend it, so like he had
to choose whether or not he like, no, it's like this, this
this curse is crawling up your arm. What do you tell everyone? They
just like take the arm, getrid of that. I learned from paid
games where we run games at thelocal shop, that people won't come back
if they don't feel heard or uniquein the story. You got one shot
(42:50):
to attended, You got one shotto keep their interest, and you want
to make sure that everyone has thatdefining hero moment, and if you don't
give it to them, that meansyou don't like them. Really who I'm
talking about? Not to throw anyoneon the bus. I have a DM
there in a while because my schedulehas been so crazy. There's a few
players I can move it out despiteconversations happening. And that's just that's just
(43:14):
true for the general public, whichis who just who we are dming to.
You know, it's just the generalpublic. About three quarters of them
can just go away. I hateto be mean, hate to hate to
throw that out there, but plusyou just got to be honest and you'll
have a better time. Yeah,And then this and this goes into my
other question before, which is whatdo you do when you're dming for the
(43:34):
public, and like it's it seemsthat you're kind of like taking the same
general ideas of like making sure everyonegets through spotlight moment, and it just
manifests in different ways where like onthe podcast, this this now becomes like
a story moment, or at leastlike a soliloquy type of moment where that
point where that character gets to shineas an actor, versus a home game
where it's just like no, wherewe want to tell the best word we
(43:54):
possibly can. It's just for usversus a public game. We want that
player to feel like, well,they paid to play, they want to
make sure that they got their money'sworth, and you give them their spotlight
moment for that, which is easierwhen you have three or four players signed
up and not eight like I getmost of the time. I had them
a game once with ten people.It was super fun, but not everyone
(44:15):
got their moment. No, pooplethat were a little abrasive definitely did not
get their moment unless they got eatenby the dragon. That was the fun
one. I've got that, likeI get it with like like whole families
will come like three like three orfour time and and and the trick there,
give the kid the spotlight moment andlet the parents watch the kid shine.
And then that's that's two players youdon't have to worry about. I'm
(44:37):
super proud. I'm super brad.But when they play like they they'll let
you know just by playing that they'remore into RP. They want to have
that cool, cool the ground momentwhere they chop off something ahead of something.
It's pretty easy when you're just likewhen I come in by the character,
like you get that one kid who'slike I just want to cause chaos
and steal everything. Okay, stealstuff. It's gonna be cursed, but
(44:59):
steal stuf. Have that moment.You know. My biggest thing is I
have a a pawn shop. Magicshop. That is half the items aren't
even magical. He just says they'remagical and just a fifty to fifty shot.
That is it anything? Or ifyou did try to buy a bag
of holding, they got to rolleighteen or higher. Otherwise it's a bag
of the val ring. Yep,you know I think that that was my
that was one of the games Iplayed. I'm like, you know,
(45:20):
I'm just gonna do a detech magic. You're like, you're like everything's cursed,
Like it's so bad. All right, Tony, this this is this
is the time I had set asidefor us. Man, I want to
keep talking about this. I'll absolutelyhave it back on it. Maybe I
want to bring you on just kindof like introduce, you know, our
current listeners to who you are,what you do, what your show is
about. And I definitely want toget you back in and we'll go a
(45:43):
little bit more into some of thethings that make you a unique DM,
and we'll bring on other other dmsto maybe some other shows, maybe just
maybe just some locals that I thinkare great. You would love Dan honestly,
or you talk to him and hisDM styles absolutely crazy, great voices
too, really big on voice actingfor him. Awesome. And but thank
you for having me on. It'sit's blessed. I would love to come
(46:05):
up here and just talk about topicsand please and and if you're coming here
to listen for me, for myfor my discord and stuff in my part
of Spotify. Here's another show youcan listen to when you're waiting for our
show. They come out what everyMonday and Friday or every Monday? Right
now we are we're just gonna doevery Monday for a while maybe and maybe
maybe in definitely what do you maybeat least for now perfect We air on
(46:27):
Tuesday, So when you're getting readyto tackle the shittiest day of the week,
now you got something to listen to. Whether I'm here or not,
These guys a shot. It's you'regonna learn a lot. And for those
who ask for DM tips, that'syour man, that's this is this is
what we do on the show.We want to make our tagline is we
want to make your game better andeverything from our experience, we want to
make sure that you are learning alongwith us. And then Tony is a
(46:50):
is a great example of what doyou do when you already learned it and
now we got to implement it.So I learned in voting school. Is
we have a ton to learn fromyou from on futup. So it's hopefully
we'll figure out times to bring itback in because I definitely want to go
more into like we'll do a wholeepisode on like how to build a monster
and phasis and that kind of thing. That's something I really want to learn
myself. So give us a giveus a plug for em D four four
(47:14):
and they'll they'll they'll take this out. Check out D and D four four.
We're available on all podcasts and platforms. You can also go to D
and D four four dot com,dn D four for dot c A D
four four pod dot com. Weare cleaning all the websites. As a
matter of fact, we've been soaggressive on having different websites that did you
(47:35):
know that A D and D fourfour is a military licensing Canada and we're
more searchable than a military licensing Canada. That's right. That's how good the
adventures. If you want to haveyour stomach filled of butterflies, go on
an epic adventure and D D fourfour is a show for you, and
you can learn from Jason for thestuff we don't cover. Awesome, man,
Tony, thank you seriously much forcoming on. I love having me
(47:55):
on the show. We'll do itagain, man, absolutely, goodbye everybody,
Goodbye Adventures.
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