April 26, 2024 • 50 mins
In this episode of 'Hello Adventurers', the DMs engage in discussions about Dungeon Master Player Characters (DMPCs), various role-playing techniques, and the intricacies of balancing the roles of DM and player within a campaign. They draw distinctions between DMPCs, NPCs with heightened agency, and cohorts, highlighting the critical nature of player agency and the potential challenges that DMPCs can pose in overshadowing player characters.
The episode also addresses listener questions on the utilization of accents and voices in role-playing, transitioning from a player to a DM role, and practical strategies for supporting new DMs. The hosts share personal stories and offer advice on enhancing the role-playing experience, cautioning against the misuse of DMPCs, and emphasizing the importance of respecting player choices and maintaining a player-centric approach in crafting game narratives.
Send us your questions to helloadventurerspodcast@gmail.com or tell us yourself at helloadventurerspodcast.com/voice
The episode also addresses listener questions on the utilization of accents and voices in role-playing, transitioning from a player to a DM role, and practical strategies for supporting new DMs. The hosts share personal stories and offer advice on enhancing the role-playing experience, cautioning against the misuse of DMPCs, and emphasizing the importance of respecting player choices and maintaining a player-centric approach in crafting game narratives.
Send us your questions to helloadventurerspodcast@gmail.com or tell us yourself at helloadventurerspodcast.com/voice
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:20):
He Hello adventures the podcast for roleplayers and game masters to help level up
your game. We're dungeon Masters JasonPortiso, I'm Joe McCall and Jim Crocker,
and today we're going to dig intothe mail bag. And oh no,
it's a mimic. They're all mimics. That's all mimics. No going
(00:40):
to dig into us. Ah,yes, uh, that's just a bag
of devouring at that point. Butthat's a whole other thing. We'll do
a whole episode on the cruelest thingsyou could do to your players other than
mimics. Yeah, everything is amimic. Every bag is devouring. But
today we are we are fresh outof voicemails, so this is the time
for you guys to jump on thevoicemail. Hello Adventurers podcast dot com slash
(01:03):
voice. We love we love hearingyou guys. Ask the questions. No
dumb questions either. There are nodumb questions unless you're Nick and you absolutely
cannot look up moms. Yeah,stop looking at monsters. Nick is one
of our players. He sent usfour questions so far, and none of
them were good. But now theywere all. They were all. We
can say that because we're friends withthem. Yes, they were all answered
(01:23):
already, let's put it that way. And they all come down to question,
how do I write a good questionfor your show? They all come
down all these questions can be answeredwith stop googling during the game, which
I shouldn't have to answer on theshow anyway. But today's questions did come
to us in an email from Caleb, who I believe gave us a voicemail
on the first mail back episode andhe was very happy that we took his
(01:45):
question. So Caleb, thanks forlistening, thanks for checking us out,
and thanks for believing in us.And he sent us just like he said,
I'm going to email you too manyquestions, and I said, I
dare you? And then you emailme a bunch of questions and I'm like,
this isn't this is? Do youthink this is too much? Come
on to email him back and kindof gave me quick answers on almost everything
in here, but we've answered noneof them so far on the show.
(02:07):
I answered. I answered him tohim because I knew it was going to
be at least two months until anyof those episodes were released, and you
know he deserved answers at the time. So, but there's a couple of
questions in particular that I really wantedto talk about on these episodes. So
so all of today's questions are comingfrom Caleb. The first question is do
you use accents or special voices?How many do you use? And which
(02:29):
are your favorites. So the reasonI wanted to talk about this one is
because there's a lot of different waysto handle voice acting in your role play
and my opinion, and I guyswant you to answer this as well,
I say that there are three waysto handle role play in character. Number
(02:50):
one is fully in character. That'swith a voice, with you know,
a little face if you want toput a hat on, that's cool too.
Yes, fully fully acting, whichnot body, Yes, your body
in the character. Yep. Yeah, well we'll call this embodied. And
this is like, this is likethe level of this, there's like tier
three. This is the highest levelof it, and not everyone's comfortable with
it, and not everyone's good atit, Like some actual actors aren't great
(03:14):
at it. You don't have tobe good at it to have fun with
it. You can absolutely have ablast with it. In fact, even
being a little bad at it,it could be more fun. Karaoke.
Yeah, do we go to karaokeand someone's killing it? Get them out
of here, all right? Iwant to see accents. I want to
see his drunk eye struggle struggling through. I will survive. But the reason
that a lot of shows like allcritical Role is perfect example because these are
(03:36):
all actual actors and actual voice actors, and everyone kind of thinks that that's
that's the bar and that's the standard. And it's not that they are the
outliers of being fully like exceptionally exceptional. They're very, very good at voices
and not just like even normal voiceacting like doesn't go to the places that
(03:59):
they go their accents and their craftlike they are artisans. I have a
vocal for her. I have alwaysbeen absolutely fascinated by voice actors, even
before a critical role. There's athere's a documentary called I Know That Voice
that features voice actors like like BillyWest and E. G. Daily,
John DiMaggio name, I'm not sureI know Tara Strong is a part of
(04:23):
that. She was, I'm prettysure. J Just Harnell, there's there's
there's a lot of just great voiceactors. But but anyway, so Eg
Daly. Yeah, I'm pretty sureis Tommy Pickles. Let me see,
so, so eg deal is areally Yeah, she was Tomles on rug
Rats, She's Buttercup on the PowerpuffGirls, Rudy Tabooty on Chalk Sowne.
She I mean Babe Pig in theCity. She is prolific as a voice
(04:46):
actor. She was also an actressI think in the movie Valley Girl.
Okay, gonna look it up.I'm gonna yeah, I'm gonna look it
up really really quick. What's what'sfunny about that? Is like almost every
show you just mentioned Tara Stro anothervoice actor was also on Tara Strong.
Was Dill Pickles. Uh, andshe was you said she was Buttercup you
daily, Yeah, then I knowTara Strong was one of the powerpuff Girls.
(05:10):
I can't think of which one.I thought she was Bubbles. She
was in Valley Girls. So andshe had a music career in the eighties.
So really, really, you gotthat much control over your voice,
It's not it's not unheard of.Yeah. So anyway, so that is
gonna be like like your like yourtop level full embodiment of full voice acting
and really going for like the criticalrole experience and like, you don't have
to be good at it, butI'd be comfortable with it, and not
everyone is comfortable with it. Sothe level just below that, I'm gonna
(05:35):
say, is the your role playing. But in your own voice. You're
you're you're still you're still reading thelines, but you're not in costume,
right, so this you know,you're you're still Let's say that I'm the
dress rehearsal. Sure, so let'ssay I'm role playing a fairy artificer.
Okay, if I was in fullvoice, it may be something like this,
a little fairy voice, but inthis level, it's just gonna be
(05:57):
it's just gonna sound like me,right, Okay, and I sound like
this, I sound like a halfwork. Then I do a fairy and
like it's like, yeah, wegotta go, we gotta go get the
rainbows from the buttercup field. Likeit's just gonna be like some actually like
that fairy voice the best, obviously, So if you're putting on voices,
okay, honestly, so do Iand I think the fairy should sound like
this, This might be the worst, simple and I thought, so pretend
this was a bad example. No, But but role playing in your own
(06:18):
voice is totally fine speaking in firstperson and then and then the third level
basically two versions of first person.You kind of got your first person method
and your first person you know,like just like you say, your own
voice first person method first person meyes is kind of what's going on,
and the third one is third person. You can absolutely just describe what your
(06:41):
character is saying. So there's adifference between like like, I think we
know, guys, I think weI think we need to go follow him,
right kind of guys, can wego first? Like, guys,
should we go follow this dude?I'm pretty sure he's the guy we need
to go after, versus my characterreally a louse to the fact that we
should probably be following this right,and and there's nothing wrong with a mixture
of all those. They absolutely flipbetween all three yeah, constantly, And
(07:06):
like if someone else also flips betweenthe three, I have a hard time
noticing when they're in full character.Okay, I know it's when they're in
full character, But switching from firstfirst person voice to third person voice totally
totally, totally fine as long aswe keep the story moving and keep the
story you know within the story thatthat's that's great. In fact, this
is actually really common when like,okay, the the d M one one
(07:30):
character. You know, let's saythe rogue goes ahead, does a little
reconnaissance, notices this huge scene playingout, and the DM goes, okay,
you see to be at a bigbat is talking to who you thought
was your was your ally, andyou know they have this whole big thing.
It's helped up at the plane.Road goes back. The rogue's not
going to say, okay, guys, I saw the big bats talking to
who we thought was our ally,and he's not going to recap the whole
(07:53):
thing, right, He's gonna belike, okay, I tell them what
I saw, right, that's whatyou need. Yeah, So now we
flipped from first person to third person, and this is it. It's already
something you do. I'm also abig advocate of explicitly using third person when
as the d M you're describing twon PC's talking to each other, because
(08:13):
it's like, like you've got tobe very very good and keep seeing very
very short if you're gonna do yeahmel blank blah blah. Oh yeah,
right, we've talked about mel blanklike that. That's just just say he
says this to him, she saysthat back to her, and then put
the focus back on players as quickas you can. I want I want
(08:35):
punching Judy puppets. Yeah, okay, So like to act, there's no
there's no need, there's no needto do Wabbit season Duck season. You
know Mel Blank style where it's thesame guy to two voices arguing with himself.
You want you want to tell meMel Gibson is not Blank? Is
like, is not the greatest ofall time? There's this there's alone scene
(08:58):
possibly in that scene season Duck seasonepisode where Bugs dresses as Daffy and Daffy
dresses as Bugs and they have aconversation I believe with them r Fudd.
But it's Daffy's voice in the styleof it's it's not Daffy's voice, it's
it's Bugs Bunny doing an impersonation ofdaf It's Mel Blank doing Bugs Bunny,
(09:20):
right, and then also Mel Blankdoing Daffy doing It's that's it's spread.
It's a mind blowing and like forpeople who nerd out over voice actors like
I do, that is like beyondstier stuff. I so anything to add
on like the ways that you canvoice act. Yeah. So I would
(09:43):
also just add, so somebody thatlikes to do this and likes to try
to do voices and accents, andI just I've always kind of just been
a natural. I don't want tosay mimic maybe no, but it's somebody
that's always picked up on like otherpeople's accents. My wife and I and
she was first pregnant, we tooka trip up to the Berkshires and at
(10:05):
that time I had changed my GPSto have an Australian accent, and we
went up for a weekend and overthat weekend we both perfected our Australian accent.
I'm sure it was perfect no reason. I'm sure you sounded like a
native speaker joke that weekend at theend of that weekend maybe. And it
was also the same time something hadcome up with I'll teach you guys right
(10:28):
now on the air how to sayrazor blades in Australian. Say rise,
rise up up lights, lights,and now say it all together, how
you say rise of blights? Okay, And so there's things like that.
There's actually websites you can go whereyou can see phonetically how to say things
to get that accent at PA InternationalPhonetic Alphabet when I was getting my theater
(10:50):
degree. Yeah, of course classon it, and we would take monologues
and break them down. Took theactor in real life. But then the
other part of it is too.It doesn't have to be a voice.
It doesn't have to be a brandnew accent. It can be your voice,
just inflected slightly differently. So Iknow, like I've used it in
(11:13):
our game, and I don't knowthat it'll necessarily translate here, but it's
just like a how are you?It's it's just like a little bit you
put a little vocal frying it,you lower it. I already know that's
your partender. That's that's my bartender. Usually bartender is going to have like
more of a new dog. Yeah, hey, well the bag, what
do you want. There's a partenderthat I've used over and over again.
(11:35):
She's Gerdia, a dwarfing lady.You met her, You met Gerga I
won my one shots and she's likehalf New York Boston like that gruff and
half like Cockney like freshen you drinkgovernor type. Yeah, it's like,
hey, we're here to meet thisguy. He hasn't been in yet,
doll. And here's the other thingtoo, you're it's a fantasy setting,
(11:56):
like these accents don't have to evenbe real, and if they're not good,
if you're if your Irish accent,that's like the joke that me and
my wife always have is like Ido these or what is it from?
I Love you man? Okak,you know he's like, why does my
Irish accent sound like he's from Jamaicaor something like, like it's so bad,
(12:16):
and like there's nothing wrong with that. I would just say that you
want to do things in good faithand obviously don't you know, don't try
to be mean or nasty towards agroup of people, and just be careful
there, tread carefully any accents,any any kind of what we might think
of as a you know, likelike an ethnic accent or anything like that.
(12:37):
You want to steer clear of thatwhen you start doing accents that have
particular racist overtones or that you know, right, and also genders too,
I wouldn't like, I wouldn't evennecessarily try to go because you know,
most men are going to go,oh hi as a what and that's just
not necessarily accurate, and it's that'swhat's it's a caricature at that point.
(13:00):
And that's one of the things thatargues for most of the time, as
much as you can talking in yourown voice, but changing the inflection,
right, changing the pace, changinghow you know, like where the periods
and commas come in your sentences,how you're you know, like like whatever
whatever, like colloquialisms or you know, vocal tics that you drop in there.
(13:24):
That's I've always thought that that's amuch better way to convey different characters
than to try and have to go, this guy's got to rush in accent,
and so I got to remember allof the times that I got to,
you know, drug you know,to pronounce this is this letter as
a v instead or something. I'malso a big fan of using things like
catch phrases is kind of a catchyword for but maybe like crutch phrases,
(13:48):
little little little phrases that that's theticket, like that kind of a thing.
Yeah, stuff like that. I'ma big fan of, like little
little bumbling voices, like like likemy museum curator having like constantly dappings for
it is like oh my, oh, my am, I, oh,
my man, my min and justlike just having that Yeah, who is
that? It's like the white rabbitin Alice in Wonderland. That's always like
checking the time, like a wholetime, is it? Yeah? I
(14:09):
have to I have to be movingon here. So this the second part
of Cilb's question here is is howmany voices do you use in which are
your favorites? Uh? And it'snot so much like how many because Joeye
knows how to do one. It'sjust the Scottish accent. Joe is a
pretty good Scottish accent. But mytrick to this and this is something that
we did an episode on this backin Karmage is very early on. But
(14:31):
one of the best tricks I everheard came from Dan Castleinetta, who is
the voice actor for Homer Simpson andyou know thousands of other voices like that.
He said that he will develop avoice by first doing a bad impression.
And this is great. If you'renot that great impressions, you just
do it very easy. The youjust do a normal impression. I've gotten
a lot of my character voices byjust trying to do an impression, failing
(14:54):
and rolling with it. Yeah.So the example of that Dan Castlenetta gave
was he he started off with theimpression of Colombo, and then it turned
into a bad impression of Columbo,and then it turned into a purposely bad
impression of Colombo. And that's howwe got most Sis lack on The Simpsons.
Yeah, sure, yeah, Icould see that, Peter Faulk Yeah,
and that's that's just how that thatone started. That. See.
That's by the way, kids,Colombo as a TV detective when we were
(15:18):
young, not even when we wereyounger, when our parents I think were
when was that the eighties? Jim, can you explain Columbo? I can't
explain Columbo because Colombo touches on ourmystery episode. Yeah we did. Colombo
was a a how done it show? A one done it show. At
the beginning of every episode of Colombo, you saw exactly how the crime went
(15:41):
down, and the episode was like, how would Colombo get, you know,
the person that did it, eitherto admit it or gather enough facts
that you know, he could thenapprove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person
that he suspected. Sometimes from thejump and you know, if you ever
hear if somebody ever is about toleave a room, and then they stop
(16:03):
and turn back to you and say, oh, one more thing, that's
Columba. Yeah, that's we actuallylearn something called So in my professional life,
I've sold cars, and one ofthe things you learn up sure a
lot of cars salesmen learn is somethingcalled the Columbo close. And that's what
you essentially do, is you getup to go, and then you go,
oh and one more thing. IfI can give you these numbers today,
(16:27):
you know, are you leaving inmy car kind of a thing,
and that's essentially your Columbus. Butbut yeah, so Colombo was or Peter
fawk right, that's the was theactor. Yeah, it was also the
grandpa that reads the story. Yeah, that's that was Columba. That was
the guy that played Columba, Peter. So one of my favorite things to
(16:48):
lean on is also like kind ofborrowing general like overarching character ideas from like
cartoons and things like that, andthis is greater that. This is better
for like smaller characters and car tunes. To play smaller characters in your game.
If you're having like, you know, if you're somebody that's going to
talk a lot, use something that'scloser to your voice. Sure, but
(17:10):
I mentioned that that that bubbling museumcurator character. I use this voice a
lot for a lot of MPCs thatthat are supposed to be like, you
know, they're kind of tragic,but they're also like they're sympathetic figures.
You want to help these request givers. You want to help them, but
you don't want You want to likethem enough to help them, but not
so much that you want to bringthem with you. I need them,
(17:30):
I need you to leave them there, oh somebody. Yeah. And my
favorite voice to use for that isKiff from Futurama, where he's just so
hello, he's perfectly pathetic to wherelike he can still like explain things,
but he gets very exasperated very quickly. It's like, oh, it's it
seems that there's been some I guessyou always call them disappearances going through the
(17:53):
museum. How many how many peoplehave been gone? Oh? Maybe something
like something five, five, maybeeight. It's just like it's it's a
fun character because he's so like he'sso exasperated, and you can really kind
(18:14):
of take that stutter to like avery fun place voice wise. But I
would just say just overall, likehow many do you use? What are
your favorites? Like, maybe,yeah, as many as you're comfortable we
need can get away with. Andwe all have our favorites. And you
know, if you play with thesame people over and over again, they'll
come to know your favorites. Likeobviously, Jason knows who my bartenders are
(18:34):
when he hears them, and heknows that my one Scottish accent, which
I'm not even I can't do nowthat it's been called out. The one
of the original hosts on Curmudgins andDragons, Jack has this one character that
is always the shop keeping in allof his games, and it is supposed
to be the same character, andit's the most annoying, like like a,
(18:59):
I don't know what that is.It's too much spit in its mouth
and the whole he's supposed to beannoying. Yeah, and he is,
and he's great. I actually hada teacher in high school, and I'm
not going to mention the name andjust just a case of Chris yeah or
something like that. I think ChrisChris and I had, But I had
a teacher in high school with that, So that's I think of that shore
(19:22):
every time I hear that voice.Hey, hey, hello there. I'm
definitely pro anything that gets the playersto not want to spend too much time
in this y. Yes, Ithink that's that's a great thing. Yeah,
making your shopkeepers super annoying so Idon't spend a lot of time shopping.
That's the thumbs up from me onthat. Sure. I just to
put a button on this one.I was going to repeat again, and
just I'm going to quote the emailthat I sent back to Caleb. Just
(19:45):
steer clear of the Jeff Dunham effectand ask yourself if you're overstepping the line
of good taste when doing a foreignaccent. So have fun, but be
respectful. Yeah. And also,I mean, and I guess the kind
of the little coda that I wouldput on this too, is that you
have tools besides just voice. Ifyou've got a character that is constantly like
scratching at their scalp, if you'vegot a character that is constantly, you
(20:08):
know, twirling a dagger between theirfingers or something like that, you know,
or like working a coin like it'sa magic trick, you know,
or always looking over their shoulder,that's a thing that you can do as
you're doing the voice. It doesn'tnecessarily need to be just like a voice
all the time to be an audiogame. It could it serves the same
(20:29):
purpose, and make sure that you'vegot that in your tool your toolkit as
well. There's even some dms thatwill bring around a little a little like
tote of like stuff that you willfind in like a like a photo booth
at a wedding. It's just likea mustaches and you don't have to go
all out, but it's the carrattop approach. Even just like having like
a little sword with the prop andyou mentioned like no it's throwing the pen
(20:51):
and and things like that, youcan have something that you twirl so like
it could be the voice, itcould be the it could be the the
hand gestures and a fake cigar.So what what I'm saying is that there
are verbal, somatic, and materialcomponents to this. Yeah, sure,
take your combination. And the otherthing to keep in mind is that is
that you've also had that same firstperson third person approach where you can twirl
(21:12):
a pen in your fingers to indicatethat they're doing a thing or work a
little point or something, or youcan just say you know they ask him
a question and he say and yousay, oh, that got his attention.
He stops twirling the dagger for amoment. Yeah, just stare at
you. That's just good storytelling.Then deliver what he's going to say.
That's just good storytelling. But cool. I think voices are fun, and
(21:33):
if you think they're fun, totally. If you don't think they're fun,
you don't have to. Yeah,Hello Adventurers, thank you so much for
listening. If you enjoy the show, the absolute best thing you can do
to support us is to subscribe soyou'll be notified when new episodes are released.
You can also leave us a reviewfive stars. Of course, that
(21:55):
will help us get seen by moreD and D players, and more than
anything else, just tell your friendsabout us. If you like what we're
doing here, then there's a goodchance that your DM or your players will
enjoy it too. And you don'tneed to loop gold to do any of
that. We appreciate your listening.Now back to the show, So let's
take another one of Caleb's questions here. He had this under a section he
(22:15):
called playing with new dms. Soit's when one of the players steps up
and wants to take the reins ofdming for the first time. How can
a forever DM in a PC positionhelp ensure the new DM's success. So
he's asking, like, if you'rethe if you're the forever DM and a
new player wants to step up,what can you do to make sure that
that you hand over the baton correctly? Him? Despice something that you've seen
(22:40):
a lot. Yeah. One ofthe things that you can do, and
this is the thing I cannot recommendstrongly enough, is if you know that
one of your players wants to becomethe DM, have them co DM with
you for a few sessions. Havethem just kind of ride shotgun, you
know, do it like the copsdo a ride along, right, you
know where you know the first timeyou're out there, you go with a
(23:03):
pair, a rookie with a veteran. Have them just kind of sit there
and like what we used to doin the store when we had a new
DM was someone that wanted to trainto do it. Literally, we would
just have them sit there for asession or two behind the screen and they
would just watch the DM. Yeah. Shadow shadow is a great word for
that, and shadow the DM justlike you're training for any other job right,
(23:25):
have them shadow the new DM andthen you know, have conversations with
them, and then when they stepup to do it the first time,
you have that veteran DM shadow themfor a couple of sessions and then they
transition to be a player. Butonce you transition to being a player,
you're a player, yes, Andthe most helpful thing that you can do
(23:48):
is we talked in a previous episodeabout assigning a buddy of like a veteran
player buddy to a rookie player,is you can make it yourself one of
those player buddies. If you've gotany kind of new players at the table,
settle in, help the players withquestions that they may have, but
let the DM do their thing unlessthey explicitly ask you a question about something
(24:15):
that's going on. You know,you got to let them. This is
the hardest thing. You have tolet them make a few mistakes. And
if they make mistakes, that's okay. If you want to write it down
and talk about it, you know, and just mention it later in the
game that they got to that theygot a rule wrong or something like that.
But you got to keep your mouthshut if they're gonna you know,
like like if they if they makethe wrong ruling on something, if the
(24:38):
other players at the table are justgoing along with it and they don't care
enough to like to jump in tolook it up or something like that,
just let that go and then youknow, talk about it at the end
of the game and show them,you know, full respect and the same
courtesy that you would expect for themto show you. But but like if
you're if you're jumping in every timethey make a mistake, that's gonna you
(25:00):
know, we all know how thatworks in training, right, Yeah,
Yeah, it gets makes people totake chances and and to you know,
because because it's a complicated game.It's a deeply complex game. And I
guarantee, no matter how long you'vebeen playing for, no matter how much
of veteran DM you are, there'sstuff you get wrong. And sure I
(25:23):
think DM style and DM Style twocan play a part of like there's certain
things that I'm going to be fastand loose with that you know, Jason,
or you might not that you mightbe real sticklers for that rule,
right, never that right, yeah, And and you know I've known that
like people in law enforcement, likesome of them like like are sticklers for
(25:44):
tint on windows, you know,and that's like a thing in New Jersey
here where I'm from, tickets.Yeah, and then other people aren't like
They're like, no, I'm notgonna because I have t I have tint
on my car, So I'm notgoing to give anybody else a problem for
that. People find their style.Yeah, exactly. And so so I
think that, you know, formy answer, you know, what can
you do? I think that youcan continue to be helpful. I know,
(26:07):
Jason sometimes like if I'm if I'mlike and I get caught on like
like grapple for instance, and I'mlike, I think or you know,
you kind of see that, I'mlike going to look it up and you
know it like, hey, I'mpretty sure this is what it says,
Like oh yeah, there, thereit goes. And I think maybe it
starts with a conversation, good communicationbefore that of hey, listen, do
you mind if I you know,if I see you're kind of forgetting something,
(26:30):
or do you want me to chimein? Or do you want me
to keep my mouth shut? Andthen I think respect their answer, you
know, And we did have thatconversation, Yeah, we absolutely did.
And I think that different people learndifferently, and so I'm very much like
a jump right in and do it. And there's like I have to understand
certain aspects before I can really understandanything. I have to understand how you
(26:55):
know, the mechanics of everything oflike in Dungeon Dragons, I have to
understand why it works before I canreally make a I guess a clear decision
and learn and clearly or so thisthere's kind of the I was going to
have this be a separate question,but this kind of ties right into this.
So a couple episodes ago we hadmentioned letting a player take care of
(27:17):
some of the clerical parts of dming. So one of the questions here is
what are some things that dms usuallydo that players can take off of their
plate for them? And I calledit DM's a little helper. We can
call the DM's right hand whatever youwant to call it, the co d
M. It would be called CODMbecause they're still a player. But what
is let's let's let's go a littlebit more into a list of things that
(27:40):
a player could either volunteer to door a DM could try to offload onto
a player. What is? Whatis? What are some stuff that is
fair to let them do. Imean the first thing that people usually say
is track initiative. Initiative, Yeah, say say who's going when? If
you you know, if you haveone of those little magnet boards, they're
responsible for moving the people on themagnet board. You know, whatever it
(28:02):
is that that, however it isthat you keep track of initiative, having
a player take over that task.What other kind of stuff can we give
them? I think it's whatever theDM is comfortable with. So it could
be sometimes, you know, dependingon your game. Like I know,
in our game, it's we play. If we have a majority of our
players that want to and can makeour sessions, we play. So if
(28:25):
that's the case, some tables mighthave the DM might run a player character
that night. Sometimes there's NPC,an NPC, an NPC that needs to
be run. DM should never runa player character again, yeah, yeah,
no, I agree, And sothat's something. But so there are
certain published adventures or published campaigns likeBaldersgate that have PCs or excuse me,
(28:51):
NPCs controlled by the d M.Yeah, yeah, or yeah exactly.
So sometimes it's like this is soannoying because she's joining you. If you
only have four players, it's reallya dungeon built for five, and you
don't have the experience to change thoseencounters. Then you need those those NPCs
(29:11):
run by the DM, for lackof a better term, dmpcs. I
know we're going to get to that, but those d MPCs, I would
have players run the cohorts in battleand stuff if they were comfortable do that.
Sure. Yeah, I think earlyon in some of our games that
we played, like like over aPandemic we're playing over Zume, there was
like a an NPC or two thatyou had us control and combat. You
(29:34):
can certainly do that essentially, anythingthat doesn't involve I mean, you know
with NPCs it can even be activedecision, but certainly anything the DM is
doing that doesn't involve an active decisionyou can hand off to the players,
depending on your comfort level. Youcan hand off tracking initiative. You can
hand off keeping track of the hitpoints of your monsters if that's what you
(29:56):
want to do. Sure, ifyou're comfortable with that, you can totally
do that. Certainly, you canhand off the responsibility for moving things around
the map, right if you're playingwith a map in miniatures, Oh yeah,
you know the thing where you've gotto stand up, reach out over
the you know screen and go one, two, three, four and move
(30:17):
the ogre. You can hand itoff to a player just you know,
as a matter of routine that whenI do hand off. Yeah, absolutely,
so all of that stuff, youknow, and in some cases it
may not even necessarily save a tonof time, but it's you're not having
to switch modes right like like likefrom I'm thinking about what the monster's going
to do next to oh shit,I have to do them, you know,
(30:41):
like the physical process of moving it. In some cases, what you're
doing is buying yourself a couple ofextra seconds to think about things because the
players doing that insteady you, andit gives you some some you know,
some some planning time that otherwise wouldhave been that otherwise just would have been
busy work time, like work.Yeah. I was running a game at
a brewery about a month ago,and the table that we usually used it
(31:03):
was just a little cramps this time, and so we brought up we brought
it up with a different different gamethough one less player, but everyone just
kind of took up more space andwe were using it. We were using
maps and so we kind of movedeverything over to like the lounge area,
so like you know, two playerswere on a couch and like the other
two were going to like were onmy armchairs and like it was super cozy.
It was awesome. But then whenthe time for combat, I had
(31:25):
to like get up and like it'sa it's a coffee table. So I
had a meal next to the tableto move. I hate playing D and
D and like a conversation pit.Yeah, at a table. Man,
if it was if it was,if it was fully feater than mine,
it probably would have been great.But I insisted on using the maps,
and I had one of my logosprinted all the miniatures for me, so
(31:47):
I'm like, I cannot use them. So it was like, yeah,
that's kind of that's something that couldhave either offloaded or maybe I could have
just handled better with the space.But I'll be there again from time this
recording. I'll be there again inlike a couple of days. So most
ye, how that goes. Soone more and we almost start touching on
this and I'm going to remind youguys that we want this episode to be
(32:08):
on the brief side, so we'regoing to not go too far into this,
and I know Jim has a veryshort answer, but I think we
well, this is I don't knowwhy you're going on about it. This
is a super easy one to hirewomen, and I think I think we
have different different opinions on this.The question is on the subject of dmpcs.
Are they awful? Can a dmever do them well? And are
(32:30):
there any major dus and don'ts?Yes, no, and there's only one
don't do it And anything that anythingthat is not awful is not a DMPC.
And that's where I all of theways that all of the ways that
people talk about dmpcs making dmpcs awfulare ways to make them into NPCs with
(32:52):
slightly more agency and not actual dmPCs. So so let's break down what
d It's a Dungeon Master player character, which means that the Dungeon Master is
playing another character at the table andin that regard, right, that is
(33:12):
the strict definition we're using. Arethey are awful? They are absolutely awful.
You're you are a dmy one thatsounds exhausting. I just talked about
how like I would hand off cohortsbecause they're so annoying, Like it's such.
It's just another thing that I haveto like on top of the monster
or monsters and everything else and allthe rules and everything else. Oh,
(33:35):
I know, I have to nowalso run a character. Yeah, it's
terrible when they talk to an NPC. You gotta have a conversation with yourself.
You got to somehow compartmentalize in yourhead the fact that you know everything
about the adventure while sincerely playing aplayer character that is trying to overcome the
adventure. It's not And you're takingheroics away from the player characters from the
(33:57):
other players at the table. Andthat's like, this is this is a
time for your four or five friendsto shine, like yeah, to like
be the hero of their story.And you are to get to play everybody.
It's not one of their characters beingso uh, you know, just
(34:19):
just wanting to play, wanting toalso get in on that. It's just
kind of a little month. Sohere's where here's where I'm gonna I want
to be that guy. There's situationswhere I have seen success and whether you
want to call an NPC or ad M p C an NPC taking on
a PC ish type of role,let's this this is I want to I
(34:42):
want to stay away from the argumentof semantics. Okay, So so except
the argument of semantics is important herebecause he's saying, you know, how
do we do this? Well,how do we? How do we not?
So you know, the way youdo it is you don't play a
d m PC, you do somethingelse. Yeah, So I'm saying that
we'll use these for for the sakeof that and for brevity, that we're
(35:06):
going to use the strict definition ofd m PC as Dungeon Master player character,
which means that for an entire campaign, the Dungeon Master is also playing
a player character that level and levelsup and participates in scenes as an equal
to the other players all of that. So I have two examples of times
(35:29):
when it was not awful. Onethe campaign was kind of like I don't
want to say screwed from the start, but like we were starting at disadvantage.
I'll use my own example first,and I mentioned this almost every episode,
but it's always just worth prefacing thatI run store level one shots and
on this particular day, like theywanted me like twice a week. At
this point, it was like aWednesday night, no one was around the
(35:50):
one, but we had like fourpreregistered and there was a couple that that
canceled kind of on the same day. So from four down to down to
two. Actually, you know,it was do with I had three scheduled,
a couple left, and I onlyhad one person. So I called
up one of my friends in myhill is off floating, and they're just
another body in there. And sonow now I'm now I'm up to two
(36:12):
and like, so there's only twoplayers there. They paid to be there,
and we're gonna around the game.I'm not that good to be able
to rebalance encounters for two PCs.So we we actually instead of taking any
of our premate characters or any ofthe characters that I made, I'm like,
okay, we're going all in onthis. I have these random character
dice we just rolled dice punched theminto Fast Character dot Com and all three
(36:34):
of us played just whatever we rolled, and so I'm like, okay,
I'm gonna have to take a DMPCon this one, just to round out
combat at least with the caveat that, like, you know, this character
will not be participating in any puzzles, not a DMP right, yeah,
under under our strict definition, thatis not a dm yep. Absolutely,
(36:55):
and in that regard it only hadagency in partially in combat. Yeah,
he just can't solve the mystery becauseyou're well you already know because I play
him as though he does not.But you were practicing some form of emergent
(37:16):
mystery style, in which case itwould matter you would come up with a
solution together. Yeah, well thiswasn't a mystery. This is a zombie
horde thing. But like you know, he just knew, Like you know,
I am I going to purposely walkinto a room that I know a
zombie is in because I have toplay like I don't know, I just
kind of let them make things themain calls. Yeah, I think that
(37:37):
to Jim's point, every time thatit works, it's not a d MPC,
it's an NPC with additional agency.And that's fine. And that's and
that's where you get into cohort territorythat they're really just there to help balance
combat. They're not going to takean active part in progressing the story along.
(37:57):
I mean, you can kind ofuse them as a whatever. The
opposite of a red herring is ofsomebody that's gonna like you can't find the
answer. Oh, they have theanswer. It's just gonna help again for
brevity's sake, I think. Butfor the most part, they're really there
to more or less balanced combat,like, oh man, I needed five
people to fight this red dragon,I only have four. I only have
(38:19):
three. Well, the other sampleis going to bring up and like,
Allie, tell me if this isa d n PC or not. And
I know you guys haven't listened toyou know, summary or definitely not all
of it, but campaign one.From that, there's a character called Balnor
that that joins the party from prettyearly on. He's not from the start,
this was he was done. Therewas there was not intended to be
(38:40):
a d m p S. Butpretty early on they they find a deck
of many things and they get theI'm sorry, yeah, I know it's
I'm already I'm already gym is alreadyout. But there was a modified deck
whatever, blah blah blah. Theyget the the the is it the NIGHTCRD
Squire card whatever it's called, andyou get a you get a level four
(39:00):
fighter of the same race. That'swherever draws it. Yeah, it should
be played as a cohort. Yeah, and then that this ends up being
played by by the DM and leveledup along with them, and like he
was only supposed to be a shortthing and they end up sticking around that
being an important part of the story. Yeah, but he was. This
is a comedy show in a ina in a D and D costume.
(39:22):
He ended up being a pretty majorpart of the of the stories. And
it's a show that you know,it has ratings and ratings, but like
they have advertisers that that's a that'sa corner case that I don't think is
necessarily applicable to people, just kindof you know, the typical table that
we're going to. I will saywhere I've seen success again being more like
(39:45):
MBC. So Critical Role has Ithink it was campaign to right, Yeah,
I don't know how many campaigns are, but not actually a D and
D game Critical Role. Critical Roleis a television show that uses D and
D to come on but their scriptsessentially yeah, and any of these popular
(40:05):
shows. And there they even sayI think man Merser says like, yeah,
it's a little bit of D andD. It's like based on D
and D five, but there's alot of homebrew to it. And yeah,
it's just the reason to you ounceon. But well, yeah,
they they have ended up using someof those rules, but I think they
still use home Brewer rules. Butwhatever. So the whole point in saying
(40:28):
that is there was a character thatwas from Jorhas, which is like the
monster Nation that they you utilize ina couple of fights, and I think
that essentially what what happens is theydon't make any major decisions anytime, even
if the player characters are like,hey, what do you think we should
do? The I don't know,I honestly don't know. I don't have
(40:49):
an opinion, and they just kindof kick it back and and there and
there you have it. Right,is is that it's really just a cohort
or an NPC with additional agency,and that the way to do it is
to do it that way, isto always kick back to the players that
they can't have a dog in thefight. Because once you cross into the
territory of d m PC, ofyou are a DM, but you also
(41:14):
have a player character. You aretaking away from your players. You're like
you're taking even if the players wantit, you're taking some of the fun
out of the game. So todo it well, you don't do it,
you do something else. Yeah,all right, So uh okay,
so the definition that I had inmy head this seems like something that you
(41:37):
guys even okay with. It's justweird because it's not right. And that's
and that was basically before before wewent on air, we were going through
these questions and we were like,oh, what what should we choose?
And that was something that we talkedabout and and that was my first thought
was, well, it's this,and then I realized Jim's right, they're
not DMP d MPC. We haveto Again. We could argu the semantics
(42:00):
of it all day, but justfor for brevity's sake, and for this
argument, we'll just say it isa d M playing that is also playing
a PC and it cannot it cannotwork. It just just cannot work.
Not well, okay. So sothe answer to the question here is ask
yourself what you're actually doing right anddoes it fall into the character does it
(42:22):
fall into the category of n PCwith additional agency slash cohort what they call
it cohort or does it now theySome older versions of the rpg R stories
we used to look for were aroundbad examples of of dmpcs or what Jim
would call normal examples of d mp C and like this is when like
(42:43):
it's examples of where the DM islike no, he's the main character star
of the show. And like Ijust saw that as bad examples. But
if that's that's what it is,but so so, But even Jim right
and says, well that's a cornercase, like are there examples of of
where it could work, yes,but like there's so few and far between,
(43:06):
just don't even do it, likeand more than likely, if you
are doing it and doing it successfully, it's probably not one. It's probably
one where you're still just giving theagency back to the players and you're not
allowing that quote unquote d MPC tomake any real decisions other than or am
I going to use a long storthe two things there. Okay, so
(43:30):
let's let's let's let's forget to turnthe NPC for a second, because now
it's getting back into a into asemantics thing. So like, are we
okay with NPCs with improved agency?Okay? Yeah? I mean, and
the way you do it well isthat you offload as much of the decision
making onto the players, Yes,as you can manage given the situation at
(43:54):
the table. Cool. And ifthat means they make all the decisions for
for that character in combat, ifit means that, you know, they're
actually if it means that, thatkind of becomes like a troop play character
where you know, if the fightergoes you know, if the fighter wants
(44:15):
to go to the tavern to getsome information but the wizard isn't interested in
doing that because he's studying his spellbook. You go, Okay, so for
this particular scene, Joe, we'regoing to hand you that character as much
of that as you can do.That's what you want to do is hand
off the hand that off to theplayers, and that's how you'll get successful.
(44:37):
Yeah. The best example that Ican that I know of that that
in a way that works is thecohort example of and a game that you
played with me was Raya Mantlemore ina Descent into and yeah, and that's
example. Yeah, and essentially andthat was even and I'll say this,
the best your best bet is tojust learn how to balance and without it,
(45:00):
because that's really what you were doing. And because here's why, it's
a lot as a DM to keeptrack of right when you're keeping track of
everything else. And it's a lotfor the players. I don't know if
you remember, I don't know,and it might have been you, but
I gave it. I was like, hey, can you just run this,
Like it's as far as combat,as far as decisions, I don't
think you can speak up or somebodydid and they're like, hey, this
(45:20):
is a lot, like you can't. I don't want to play two players,
don't. I don't want to playtwo characters. I just want to
play my character. And I waslike, that's fair, that's absolutely fair.
I'm sorry, Like, and Itook that back. And there's some
cool shortcuts that you can use therethat I have done on occasion, like
in the store when I just neededto kind of like have a shortcut to
that where like we wanted to havesomebody who had an impact and have the
(45:42):
players have some decisions about how theymade an impact without handing them whole character.
And what you can do there isyou can say okay, basically once
per combat turn that NPC can makeessentially what amounts to the assist where you
get advantage or somethinghere where they giveadvantage and at the beginning of the turn,
(46:05):
you guys can have a conversation andgo, okay, it's really important
that the wizard's spell goes off,so he's going to strack the monster that
they cast the spell on so thathe gets advantage on his you know whatever,
like a range touch attack, right, and and and just that's a
that's a kind of a halfway betweenthe DM doing it all themselves, but
(46:25):
the player is having to control awhole character, you know, and you
know, maybe you give him ax number of uses of cure light wounds
and they can you know, tossthat around or something like that. Because
the last is the classic example isthe party that like has no healer,
right, and so you give themthe NPC healer and you know, you
(46:45):
just say, okay, you know, once per turn they can throw a
da to healing out and we're goingto assume that they're staying out of the
way of monsters might and that's whythey don't get to hit anything. There's
my answer. My answer to thatis, oh, you go to the
shop and the potions are one getone, yeah, because you obviously are
(47:06):
going to do that more, right, I do, uh, And I've
had in a lot of games.We called it the Prismatic six pack.
It's a six pack of otions inevery color for the price of three.
There you go, or four orwhatever whatever it is, whatever I need
to do right to get them tobuy it. And one group didn't is
in my my quote unquote the MPCgame the opposite problem where they both ended
(47:29):
up on casters and I had toroll up a barbarian real quick just to
keep them alive. Yeah, butlike definitely, like I would hate to
be running somebody as a DM andlike you're fighting let's say it doesn't even
have to be the big bed butlike a boss level whatever, and like
it just the way it just comesaround is that like they have one hit
(47:52):
point and you're and now there's youcan handwave that and everything else. But
again, I think that the peoplethat tend to use quote unquote d MPs
are going to be newer d ms. And I know for me, like
I just didn't know that there wasother options. It was like it was
given to me as this cohort andI was like, Okay, I'm running
this. I was like this isawful, and I just had to learn
that way. I would hate.I would hate for it to come around
(48:15):
and like the monster has one ortwo or five whatever HP, and it's
like the cool. As a player, I'm going to be pretty annoyed about
that. Let's let's put a buttonon this so to answer your question,
rules as written or question as writtenq A q A W d m p
(48:37):
cs are bad. But I thinkyour answer your question as intended is as
you know, ask yourself, areyou doing more of what I thought the
m PCs were or what or Jimcorrectly explained MPC you're playing? Are you
talking about d m p cs.Are you talking about MPCs with more agencies
(48:58):
or more agency or or cohorts?Yeah, in which case go for if
you need to, if you canget away without it, maybe, don't
you know? Or or and Imean, and I think that third thing
that we talked about, or arethere shortcuts that you can come up with
that kind of narratively say there's acharacter there, but we've abstracted that to
a simple mechanic that you could handoff to the players to use every turn
(49:21):
to indicate the presence of that ofthat character. Cool, let's let's wrap
this thing up so you can sendus your questions to Hello Adventurers Podcast at
gmail dot com, or you canask us your questions yourself Helloadventurers Podcast dot
com slash voice. Well love tolove to answer your questions. Yeah,
Otherwise, Calebs asked us a lotmore that we could always get to so
(49:42):
but I want to I want todiversify this a bit. Yeah, if
we're going to fly through these andwe did not know, we didn't,
great job guys, Now we wegot to raced off from that though.
So yeah, please please please sendus your questions and send us your your
most egregious d MPC bills or yourbest accent. But yeah, I get
a Hello Adventures Podcast dot com slashvoice. You can always tell us tell
(50:06):
us yourself. But that's going towrap it up. So thank you so
much for listening to Hello Adventurers.We are your host Jason Portiso, Jim
Crocker and Joe McCall producer, editorEngineer Jason Portiso. Music by a Nick
Spurrier, artwork by Christin Roderick.You can reach out to us with any
feedback or suggestions by emailing Hello AdventurersPodcast at gmail dot com. Hello Adventures
is a JCP Audio production. Goodbyes
He Hello adventures the podcast for roleplayers and game masters to help level up
your game. We're dungeon Masters JasonPortiso, I'm Joe McCall and Jim Crocker,
and today we're going to dig intothe mail bag. And oh no,
it's a mimic. They're all mimics. That's all mimics. No going
(00:40):
to dig into us. Ah,yes, uh, that's just a bag
of devouring at that point. Butthat's a whole other thing. We'll do
a whole episode on the cruelest thingsyou could do to your players other than
mimics. Yeah, everything is amimic. Every bag is devouring. But
today we are we are fresh outof voicemails, so this is the time
for you guys to jump on thevoicemail. Hello Adventurers podcast dot com slash
(01:03):
voice. We love we love hearingyou guys. Ask the questions. No
dumb questions either. There are nodumb questions unless you're Nick and you absolutely
cannot look up moms. Yeah,stop looking at monsters. Nick is one
of our players. He sent usfour questions so far, and none of
them were good. But now theywere all. They were all. We
can say that because we're friends withthem. Yes, they were all answered
(01:23):
already, let's put it that way. And they all come down to question,
how do I write a good questionfor your show? They all come
down all these questions can be answeredwith stop googling during the game, which
I shouldn't have to answer on theshow anyway. But today's questions did come
to us in an email from Caleb, who I believe gave us a voicemail
on the first mail back episode andhe was very happy that we took his
(01:45):
question. So Caleb, thanks forlistening, thanks for checking us out,
and thanks for believing in us.And he sent us just like he said,
I'm going to email you too manyquestions, and I said, I
dare you? And then you emailme a bunch of questions and I'm like,
this isn't this is? Do youthink this is too much? Come
on to email him back and kindof gave me quick answers on almost everything
in here, but we've answered noneof them so far on the show.
(02:07):
I answered. I answered him tohim because I knew it was going to
be at least two months until anyof those episodes were released, and you
know he deserved answers at the time. So, but there's a couple of
questions in particular that I really wantedto talk about on these episodes. So
so all of today's questions are comingfrom Caleb. The first question is do
you use accents or special voices?How many do you use? And which
(02:29):
are your favorites. So the reasonI wanted to talk about this one is
because there's a lot of different waysto handle voice acting in your role play
and my opinion, and I guyswant you to answer this as well,
I say that there are three waysto handle role play in character. Number
(02:50):
one is fully in character. That'swith a voice, with you know,
a little face if you want toput a hat on, that's cool too.
Yes, fully fully acting, whichnot body, Yes, your body
in the character. Yep. Yeah, well we'll call this embodied. And
this is like, this is likethe level of this, there's like tier
three. This is the highest levelof it, and not everyone's comfortable with
it, and not everyone's good atit, Like some actual actors aren't great
(03:14):
at it. You don't have tobe good at it to have fun with
it. You can absolutely have ablast with it. In fact, even
being a little bad at it,it could be more fun. Karaoke.
Yeah, do we go to karaokeand someone's killing it? Get them out
of here, all right? Iwant to see accents. I want to
see his drunk eye struggle struggling through. I will survive. But the reason
that a lot of shows like allcritical Role is perfect example because these are
(03:36):
all actual actors and actual voice actors, and everyone kind of thinks that that's
that's the bar and that's the standard. And it's not that they are the
outliers of being fully like exceptionally exceptional. They're very, very good at voices
and not just like even normal voiceacting like doesn't go to the places that
(03:59):
they go their accents and their craftlike they are artisans. I have a
vocal for her. I have alwaysbeen absolutely fascinated by voice actors, even
before a critical role. There's athere's a documentary called I Know That Voice
that features voice actors like like BillyWest and E. G. Daily,
John DiMaggio name, I'm not sureI know Tara Strong is a part of
(04:23):
that. She was, I'm prettysure. J Just Harnell, there's there's
there's a lot of just great voiceactors. But but anyway, so Eg
Daly. Yeah, I'm pretty sureis Tommy Pickles. Let me see,
so, so eg deal is areally Yeah, she was Tomles on rug
Rats, She's Buttercup on the PowerpuffGirls, Rudy Tabooty on Chalk Sowne.
She I mean Babe Pig in theCity. She is prolific as a voice
(04:46):
actor. She was also an actressI think in the movie Valley Girl.
Okay, gonna look it up.I'm gonna yeah, I'm gonna look it
up really really quick. What's what'sfunny about that? Is like almost every
show you just mentioned Tara Stro anothervoice actor was also on Tara Strong.
Was Dill Pickles. Uh, andshe was you said she was Buttercup you
daily, Yeah, then I knowTara Strong was one of the powerpuff Girls.
(05:10):
I can't think of which one.I thought she was Bubbles. She
was in Valley Girls. So andshe had a music career in the eighties.
So really, really, you gotthat much control over your voice,
It's not it's not unheard of.Yeah. So anyway, so that is
gonna be like like your like yourtop level full embodiment of full voice acting
and really going for like the criticalrole experience and like, you don't have
to be good at it, butI'd be comfortable with it, and not
everyone is comfortable with it. Sothe level just below that, I'm gonna
(05:35):
say, is the your role playing. But in your own voice. You're
you're you're still you're still reading thelines, but you're not in costume,
right, so this you know,you're you're still Let's say that I'm the
dress rehearsal. Sure, so let'ssay I'm role playing a fairy artificer.
Okay, if I was in fullvoice, it may be something like this,
a little fairy voice, but inthis level, it's just gonna be
(05:57):
it's just gonna sound like me,right, Okay, and I sound like
this, I sound like a halfwork. Then I do a fairy and
like it's like, yeah, wegotta go, we gotta go get the
rainbows from the buttercup field. Likeit's just gonna be like some actually like
that fairy voice the best, obviously, So if you're putting on voices,
okay, honestly, so do Iand I think the fairy should sound like
this, This might be the worst, simple and I thought, so pretend
this was a bad example. No, But but role playing in your own
(06:18):
voice is totally fine speaking in firstperson and then and then the third level
basically two versions of first person.You kind of got your first person method
and your first person you know,like just like you say, your own
voice first person method first person meyes is kind of what's going on,
and the third one is third person. You can absolutely just describe what your
(06:41):
character is saying. So there's adifference between like like, I think we
know, guys, I think weI think we need to go follow him,
right kind of guys, can wego first? Like, guys,
should we go follow this dude?I'm pretty sure he's the guy we need
to go after, versus my characterreally a louse to the fact that we
should probably be following this right,and and there's nothing wrong with a mixture
of all those. They absolutely flipbetween all three yeah, constantly, And
(07:06):
like if someone else also flips betweenthe three, I have a hard time
noticing when they're in full character.Okay, I know it's when they're in
full character, But switching from firstfirst person voice to third person voice totally
totally, totally fine as long aswe keep the story moving and keep the
story you know within the story thatthat's that's great. In fact, this
is actually really common when like,okay, the the d M one one
(07:30):
character. You know, let's saythe rogue goes ahead, does a little
reconnaissance, notices this huge scene playingout, and the DM goes, okay,
you see to be at a bigbat is talking to who you thought
was your was your ally, andyou know they have this whole big thing.
It's helped up at the plane.Road goes back. The rogue's not
going to say, okay, guys, I saw the big bats talking to
who we thought was our ally,and he's not going to recap the whole
(07:53):
thing, right, He's gonna belike, okay, I tell them what
I saw, right, that's whatyou need. Yeah, So now we
flipped from first person to third person, and this is it. It's already
something you do. I'm also abig advocate of explicitly using third person when
as the d M you're describing twon PC's talking to each other, because
(08:13):
it's like, like you've got tobe very very good and keep seeing very
very short if you're gonna do yeahmel blank blah blah. Oh yeah,
right, we've talked about mel blanklike that. That's just just say he
says this to him, she saysthat back to her, and then put
the focus back on players as quickas you can. I want I want
(08:35):
punching Judy puppets. Yeah, okay, So like to act, there's no
there's no need, there's no needto do Wabbit season Duck season. You
know Mel Blank style where it's thesame guy to two voices arguing with himself.
You want you want to tell meMel Gibson is not Blank? Is
like, is not the greatest ofall time? There's this there's alone scene
(08:58):
possibly in that scene season Duck seasonepisode where Bugs dresses as Daffy and Daffy
dresses as Bugs and they have aconversation I believe with them r Fudd.
But it's Daffy's voice in the styleof it's it's not Daffy's voice, it's
it's Bugs Bunny doing an impersonation ofdaf It's Mel Blank doing Bugs Bunny,
(09:20):
right, and then also Mel Blankdoing Daffy doing It's that's it's spread.
It's a mind blowing and like forpeople who nerd out over voice actors like
I do, that is like beyondstier stuff. I so anything to add
on like the ways that you canvoice act. Yeah. So I would
(09:43):
also just add, so somebody thatlikes to do this and likes to try
to do voices and accents, andI just I've always kind of just been
a natural. I don't want tosay mimic maybe no, but it's somebody
that's always picked up on like otherpeople's accents. My wife and I and
she was first pregnant, we tooka trip up to the Berkshires and at
(10:05):
that time I had changed my GPSto have an Australian accent, and we
went up for a weekend and overthat weekend we both perfected our Australian accent.
I'm sure it was perfect no reason. I'm sure you sounded like a
native speaker joke that weekend at theend of that weekend maybe. And it
was also the same time something hadcome up with I'll teach you guys right
(10:28):
now on the air how to sayrazor blades in Australian. Say rise,
rise up up lights, lights,and now say it all together, how
you say rise of blights? Okay, And so there's things like that.
There's actually websites you can go whereyou can see phonetically how to say things
to get that accent at PA InternationalPhonetic Alphabet when I was getting my theater
(10:50):
degree. Yeah, of course classon it, and we would take monologues
and break them down. Took theactor in real life. But then the
other part of it is too.It doesn't have to be a voice.
It doesn't have to be a brandnew accent. It can be your voice,
just inflected slightly differently. So Iknow, like I've used it in
(11:13):
our game, and I don't knowthat it'll necessarily translate here, but it's
just like a how are you?It's it's just like a little bit you
put a little vocal frying it,you lower it. I already know that's
your partender. That's that's my bartender. Usually bartender is going to have like
more of a new dog. Yeah, hey, well the bag, what
do you want. There's a partenderthat I've used over and over again.
(11:35):
She's Gerdia, a dwarfing lady.You met her, You met Gerga I
won my one shots and she's likehalf New York Boston like that gruff and
half like Cockney like freshen you drinkgovernor type. Yeah, it's like,
hey, we're here to meet thisguy. He hasn't been in yet,
doll. And here's the other thingtoo, you're it's a fantasy setting,
(11:56):
like these accents don't have to evenbe real, and if they're not good,
if you're if your Irish accent,that's like the joke that me and
my wife always have is like Ido these or what is it from?
I Love you man? Okak,you know he's like, why does my
Irish accent sound like he's from Jamaicaor something like, like it's so bad,
(12:16):
and like there's nothing wrong with that. I would just say that you
want to do things in good faithand obviously don't you know, don't try
to be mean or nasty towards agroup of people, and just be careful
there, tread carefully any accents,any any kind of what we might think
of as a you know, likelike an ethnic accent or anything like that.
(12:37):
You want to steer clear of thatwhen you start doing accents that have
particular racist overtones or that you know, right, and also genders too,
I wouldn't like, I wouldn't evennecessarily try to go because you know,
most men are going to go,oh hi as a what and that's just
not necessarily accurate, and it's that'swhat's it's a caricature at that point.
(13:00):
And that's one of the things thatargues for most of the time, as
much as you can talking in yourown voice, but changing the inflection,
right, changing the pace, changinghow you know, like where the periods
and commas come in your sentences,how you're you know, like like whatever
whatever, like colloquialisms or you know, vocal tics that you drop in there.
(13:24):
That's I've always thought that that's amuch better way to convey different characters
than to try and have to go, this guy's got to rush in accent,
and so I got to remember allof the times that I got to,
you know, drug you know,to pronounce this is this letter as
a v instead or something. I'malso a big fan of using things like
catch phrases is kind of a catchyword for but maybe like crutch phrases,
(13:48):
little little little phrases that that's theticket, like that kind of a thing.
Yeah, stuff like that. I'ma big fan of, like little
little bumbling voices, like like likemy museum curator having like constantly dappings for
it is like oh my, oh, my am, I, oh,
my man, my min and justlike just having that Yeah, who is
that? It's like the white rabbitin Alice in Wonderland. That's always like
checking the time, like a wholetime, is it? Yeah? I
(14:09):
have to I have to be movingon here. So this the second part
of Cilb's question here is is howmany voices do you use in which are
your favorites? Uh? And it'snot so much like how many because Joeye
knows how to do one. It'sjust the Scottish accent. Joe is a
pretty good Scottish accent. But mytrick to this and this is something that
we did an episode on this backin Karmage is very early on. But
(14:31):
one of the best tricks I everheard came from Dan Castleinetta, who is
the voice actor for Homer Simpson andyou know thousands of other voices like that.
He said that he will develop avoice by first doing a bad impression.
And this is great. If you'renot that great impressions, you just
do it very easy. The youjust do a normal impression. I've gotten
a lot of my character voices byjust trying to do an impression, failing
(14:54):
and rolling with it. Yeah.So the example of that Dan Castlenetta gave
was he he started off with theimpression of Colombo, and then it turned
into a bad impression of Columbo,and then it turned into a purposely bad
impression of Colombo. And that's howwe got most Sis lack on The Simpsons.
Yeah, sure, yeah, Icould see that, Peter Faulk Yeah,
and that's that's just how that thatone started. That. See.
That's by the way, kids,Colombo as a TV detective when we were
(15:18):
young, not even when we wereyounger, when our parents I think were
when was that the eighties? Jim, can you explain Columbo? I can't
explain Columbo because Colombo touches on ourmystery episode. Yeah we did. Colombo
was a a how done it show? A one done it show. At
the beginning of every episode of Colombo, you saw exactly how the crime went
(15:41):
down, and the episode was like, how would Colombo get, you know,
the person that did it, eitherto admit it or gather enough facts
that you know, he could thenapprove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person
that he suspected. Sometimes from thejump and you know, if you ever
hear if somebody ever is about toleave a room, and then they stop
(16:03):
and turn back to you and say, oh, one more thing, that's
Columba. Yeah, that's we actuallylearn something called So in my professional life,
I've sold cars, and one ofthe things you learn up sure a
lot of cars salesmen learn is somethingcalled the Columbo close. And that's what
you essentially do, is you getup to go, and then you go,
oh and one more thing. IfI can give you these numbers today,
(16:27):
you know, are you leaving inmy car kind of a thing,
and that's essentially your Columbus. Butbut yeah, so Colombo was or Peter
fawk right, that's the was theactor. Yeah, it was also the
grandpa that reads the story. Yeah, that's that was Columba. That was
the guy that played Columba, Peter. So one of my favorite things to
(16:48):
lean on is also like kind ofborrowing general like overarching character ideas from like
cartoons and things like that, andthis is greater that. This is better
for like smaller characters and car tunes. To play smaller characters in your game.
If you're having like, you know, if you're somebody that's going to
talk a lot, use something that'scloser to your voice. Sure, but
(17:10):
I mentioned that that that bubbling museumcurator character. I use this voice a
lot for a lot of MPCs thatthat are supposed to be like, you
know, they're kind of tragic,but they're also like they're sympathetic figures.
You want to help these request givers. You want to help them, but
you don't want You want to likethem enough to help them, but not
so much that you want to bringthem with you. I need them,
(17:30):
I need you to leave them there, oh somebody. Yeah. And my
favorite voice to use for that isKiff from Futurama, where he's just so
hello, he's perfectly pathetic to wherelike he can still like explain things,
but he gets very exasperated very quickly. It's like, oh, it's it
seems that there's been some I guessyou always call them disappearances going through the
(17:53):
museum. How many how many peoplehave been gone? Oh? Maybe something
like something five, five, maybeeight. It's just like it's it's a
fun character because he's so like he'sso exasperated, and you can really kind
(18:14):
of take that stutter to like avery fun place voice wise. But I
would just say just overall, likehow many do you use? What are
your favorites? Like, maybe,yeah, as many as you're comfortable we
need can get away with. Andwe all have our favorites. And you
know, if you play with thesame people over and over again, they'll
come to know your favorites. Likeobviously, Jason knows who my bartenders are
(18:34):
when he hears them, and heknows that my one Scottish accent, which
I'm not even I can't do nowthat it's been called out. The one
of the original hosts on Curmudgins andDragons, Jack has this one character that
is always the shop keeping in allof his games, and it is supposed
to be the same character, andit's the most annoying, like like a,
(18:59):
I don't know what that is.It's too much spit in its mouth
and the whole he's supposed to beannoying. Yeah, and he is,
and he's great. I actually hada teacher in high school, and I'm
not going to mention the name andjust just a case of Chris yeah or
something like that. I think ChrisChris and I had, But I had
a teacher in high school with that, So that's I think of that shore
(19:22):
every time I hear that voice.Hey, hey, hello there. I'm
definitely pro anything that gets the playersto not want to spend too much time
in this y. Yes, Ithink that's that's a great thing. Yeah,
making your shopkeepers super annoying so Idon't spend a lot of time shopping.
That's the thumbs up from me onthat. Sure. I just to
put a button on this one.I was going to repeat again, and
just I'm going to quote the emailthat I sent back to Caleb. Just
(19:45):
steer clear of the Jeff Dunham effectand ask yourself if you're overstepping the line
of good taste when doing a foreignaccent. So have fun, but be
respectful. Yeah. And also,I mean, and I guess the kind
of the little coda that I wouldput on this too, is that you
have tools besides just voice. Ifyou've got a character that is constantly like
scratching at their scalp, if you'vegot a character that is constantly, you
(20:08):
know, twirling a dagger between theirfingers or something like that, you know,
or like working a coin like it'sa magic trick, you know,
or always looking over their shoulder,that's a thing that you can do as
you're doing the voice. It doesn'tnecessarily need to be just like a voice
all the time to be an audiogame. It could it serves the same
(20:29):
purpose, and make sure that you'vegot that in your tool your toolkit as
well. There's even some dms thatwill bring around a little a little like
tote of like stuff that you willfind in like a like a photo booth
at a wedding. It's just likea mustaches and you don't have to go
all out, but it's the carrattop approach. Even just like having like
a little sword with the prop andyou mentioned like no it's throwing the pen
(20:51):
and and things like that, youcan have something that you twirl so like
it could be the voice, itcould be the it could be the the
hand gestures and a fake cigar.So what what I'm saying is that there
are verbal, somatic, and materialcomponents to this. Yeah, sure,
take your combination. And the otherthing to keep in mind is that is
that you've also had that same firstperson third person approach where you can twirl
(21:12):
a pen in your fingers to indicatethat they're doing a thing or work a
little point or something, or youcan just say you know they ask him
a question and he say and yousay, oh, that got his attention.
He stops twirling the dagger for amoment. Yeah, just stare at
you. That's just good storytelling.Then deliver what he's going to say.
That's just good storytelling. But cool. I think voices are fun, and
(21:33):
if you think they're fun, totally. If you don't think they're fun,
you don't have to. Yeah,Hello Adventurers, thank you so much for
listening. If you enjoy the show, the absolute best thing you can do
to support us is to subscribe soyou'll be notified when new episodes are released.
You can also leave us a reviewfive stars. Of course, that
(21:55):
will help us get seen by moreD and D players, and more than
anything else, just tell your friendsabout us. If you like what we're
doing here, then there's a goodchance that your DM or your players will
enjoy it too. And you don'tneed to loop gold to do any of
that. We appreciate your listening.Now back to the show, So let's
take another one of Caleb's questions here. He had this under a section he
(22:15):
called playing with new dms. Soit's when one of the players steps up
and wants to take the reins ofdming for the first time. How can
a forever DM in a PC positionhelp ensure the new DM's success. So
he's asking, like, if you'rethe if you're the forever DM and a
new player wants to step up,what can you do to make sure that
that you hand over the baton correctly? Him? Despice something that you've seen
(22:40):
a lot. Yeah. One ofthe things that you can do, and
this is the thing I cannot recommendstrongly enough, is if you know that
one of your players wants to becomethe DM, have them co DM with
you for a few sessions. Havethem just kind of ride shotgun, you
know, do it like the copsdo a ride along, right, you
know where you know the first timeyou're out there, you go with a
(23:03):
pair, a rookie with a veteran. Have them just kind of sit there
and like what we used to doin the store when we had a new
DM was someone that wanted to trainto do it. Literally, we would
just have them sit there for asession or two behind the screen and they
would just watch the DM. Yeah. Shadow shadow is a great word for
that, and shadow the DM justlike you're training for any other job right,
(23:25):
have them shadow the new DM andthen you know, have conversations with
them, and then when they stepup to do it the first time,
you have that veteran DM shadow themfor a couple of sessions and then they
transition to be a player. Butonce you transition to being a player,
you're a player, yes, Andthe most helpful thing that you can do
(23:48):
is we talked in a previous episodeabout assigning a buddy of like a veteran
player buddy to a rookie player,is you can make it yourself one of
those player buddies. If you've gotany kind of new players at the table,
settle in, help the players withquestions that they may have, but
let the DM do their thing unlessthey explicitly ask you a question about something
(24:15):
that's going on. You know,you got to let them. This is
the hardest thing. You have tolet them make a few mistakes. And
if they make mistakes, that's okay. If you want to write it down
and talk about it, you know, and just mention it later in the
game that they got to that theygot a rule wrong or something like that.
But you got to keep your mouthshut if they're gonna you know,
like like if they if they makethe wrong ruling on something, if the
(24:38):
other players at the table are justgoing along with it and they don't care
enough to like to jump in tolook it up or something like that,
just let that go and then youknow, talk about it at the end
of the game and show them,you know, full respect and the same
courtesy that you would expect for themto show you. But but like if
you're if you're jumping in every timethey make a mistake, that's gonna you
(25:00):
know, we all know how thatworks in training, right, Yeah,
Yeah, it gets makes people totake chances and and to you know,
because because it's a complicated game.It's a deeply complex game. And I
guarantee, no matter how long you'vebeen playing for, no matter how much
of veteran DM you are, there'sstuff you get wrong. And sure I
(25:23):
think DM style and DM Style twocan play a part of like there's certain
things that I'm going to be fastand loose with that you know, Jason,
or you might not that you mightbe real sticklers for that rule,
right, never that right, yeah, And and you know I've known that
like people in law enforcement, likesome of them like like are sticklers for
(25:44):
tint on windows, you know,and that's like a thing in New Jersey
here where I'm from, tickets.Yeah, and then other people aren't like
They're like, no, I'm notgonna because I have t I have tint
on my car, So I'm notgoing to give anybody else a problem for
that. People find their style.Yeah, exactly. And so so I
think that, you know, formy answer, you know, what can
you do? I think that youcan continue to be helpful. I know,
(26:07):
Jason sometimes like if I'm if I'mlike and I get caught on like
like grapple for instance, and I'mlike, I think or you know,
you kind of see that, I'mlike going to look it up and you
know it like, hey, I'mpretty sure this is what it says,
Like oh yeah, there, thereit goes. And I think maybe it
starts with a conversation, good communicationbefore that of hey, listen, do
you mind if I you know,if I see you're kind of forgetting something,
(26:30):
or do you want me to chimein? Or do you want me
to keep my mouth shut? Andthen I think respect their answer, you
know, And we did have thatconversation, Yeah, we absolutely did.
And I think that different people learndifferently, and so I'm very much like
a jump right in and do it. And there's like I have to understand
certain aspects before I can really understandanything. I have to understand how you
(26:55):
know, the mechanics of everything oflike in Dungeon Dragons, I have to
understand why it works before I canreally make a I guess a clear decision
and learn and clearly or so thisthere's kind of the I was going to
have this be a separate question,but this kind of ties right into this.
So a couple episodes ago we hadmentioned letting a player take care of
(27:17):
some of the clerical parts of dming. So one of the questions here is
what are some things that dms usuallydo that players can take off of their
plate for them? And I calledit DM's a little helper. We can
call the DM's right hand whatever youwant to call it, the co d
M. It would be called CODMbecause they're still a player. But what
is let's let's let's go a littlebit more into a list of things that
(27:40):
a player could either volunteer to door a DM could try to offload onto
a player. What is? Whatis? What are some stuff that is
fair to let them do. Imean the first thing that people usually say
is track initiative. Initiative, Yeah, say say who's going when? If
you you know, if you haveone of those little magnet boards, they're
responsible for moving the people on themagnet board. You know, whatever it
(28:02):
is that that, however it isthat you keep track of initiative, having
a player take over that task.What other kind of stuff can we give
them? I think it's whatever theDM is comfortable with. So it could
be sometimes, you know, dependingon your game. Like I know,
in our game, it's we play. If we have a majority of our
players that want to and can makeour sessions, we play. So if
(28:25):
that's the case, some tables mighthave the DM might run a player character
that night. Sometimes there's NPC,an NPC, an NPC that needs to
be run. DM should never runa player character again, yeah, yeah,
no, I agree, And sothat's something. But so there are
certain published adventures or published campaigns likeBaldersgate that have PCs or excuse me,
(28:51):
NPCs controlled by the d M.Yeah, yeah, or yeah exactly.
So sometimes it's like this is soannoying because she's joining you. If you
only have four players, it's reallya dungeon built for five, and you
don't have the experience to change thoseencounters. Then you need those those NPCs
(29:11):
run by the DM, for lackof a better term, dmpcs. I
know we're going to get to that, but those d MPCs, I would
have players run the cohorts in battleand stuff if they were comfortable do that.
Sure. Yeah, I think earlyon in some of our games that
we played, like like over aPandemic we're playing over Zume, there was
like a an NPC or two thatyou had us control and combat. You
(29:34):
can certainly do that essentially, anythingthat doesn't involve I mean, you know
with NPCs it can even be activedecision, but certainly anything the DM is
doing that doesn't involve an active decisionyou can hand off to the players,
depending on your comfort level. Youcan hand off tracking initiative. You can
hand off keeping track of the hitpoints of your monsters if that's what you
(29:56):
want to do. Sure, ifyou're comfortable with that, you can totally
do that. Certainly, you canhand off the responsibility for moving things around
the map, right if you're playingwith a map in miniatures, Oh yeah,
you know the thing where you've gotto stand up, reach out over
the you know screen and go one, two, three, four and move
(30:17):
the ogre. You can hand itoff to a player just you know,
as a matter of routine that whenI do hand off. Yeah, absolutely,
so all of that stuff, youknow, and in some cases it
may not even necessarily save a tonof time, but it's you're not having
to switch modes right like like likefrom I'm thinking about what the monster's going
to do next to oh shit,I have to do them, you know,
(30:41):
like the physical process of moving it. In some cases, what you're
doing is buying yourself a couple ofextra seconds to think about things because the
players doing that insteady you, andit gives you some some you know,
some some planning time that otherwise wouldhave been that otherwise just would have been
busy work time, like work.Yeah. I was running a game at
a brewery about a month ago,and the table that we usually used it
(31:03):
was just a little cramps this time, and so we brought up we brought
it up with a different different gamethough one less player, but everyone just
kind of took up more space andwe were using it. We were using
maps and so we kind of movedeverything over to like the lounge area,
so like you know, two playerswere on a couch and like the other
two were going to like were onmy armchairs and like it was super cozy.
It was awesome. But then whenthe time for combat, I had
(31:25):
to like get up and like it'sa it's a coffee table. So I
had a meal next to the tableto move. I hate playing D and
D and like a conversation pit.Yeah, at a table. Man,
if it was if it was,if it was fully feater than mine,
it probably would have been great.But I insisted on using the maps,
and I had one of my logosprinted all the miniatures for me, so
(31:47):
I'm like, I cannot use them. So it was like, yeah,
that's kind of that's something that couldhave either offloaded or maybe I could have
just handled better with the space.But I'll be there again from time this
recording. I'll be there again inlike a couple of days. So most
ye, how that goes. Soone more and we almost start touching on
this and I'm going to remind youguys that we want this episode to be
(32:08):
on the brief side, so we'regoing to not go too far into this,
and I know Jim has a veryshort answer, but I think we
well, this is I don't knowwhy you're going on about it. This
is a super easy one to hirewomen, and I think I think we
have different different opinions on this.The question is on the subject of dmpcs.
Are they awful? Can a dmever do them well? And are
(32:30):
there any major dus and don'ts?Yes, no, and there's only one
don't do it And anything that anythingthat is not awful is not a DMPC.
And that's where I all of theways that all of the ways that
people talk about dmpcs making dmpcs awfulare ways to make them into NPCs with
(32:52):
slightly more agency and not actual dmPCs. So so let's break down what
d It's a Dungeon Master player character, which means that the Dungeon Master is
playing another character at the table andin that regard, right, that is
(33:12):
the strict definition we're using. Arethey are awful? They are absolutely awful.
You're you are a dmy one thatsounds exhausting. I just talked about
how like I would hand off cohortsbecause they're so annoying, Like it's such.
It's just another thing that I haveto like on top of the monster
or monsters and everything else and allthe rules and everything else. Oh,
(33:35):
I know, I have to nowalso run a character. Yeah, it's
terrible when they talk to an NPC. You gotta have a conversation with yourself.
You got to somehow compartmentalize in yourhead the fact that you know everything
about the adventure while sincerely playing aplayer character that is trying to overcome the
adventure. It's not And you're takingheroics away from the player characters from the
(33:57):
other players at the table. Andthat's like, this is this is a
time for your four or five friendsto shine, like yeah, to like
be the hero of their story.And you are to get to play everybody.
It's not one of their characters beingso uh, you know, just
(34:19):
just wanting to play, wanting toalso get in on that. It's just
kind of a little month. Sohere's where here's where I'm gonna I want
to be that guy. There's situationswhere I have seen success and whether you
want to call an NPC or ad M p C an NPC taking on
a PC ish type of role,let's this this is I want to I
(34:42):
want to stay away from the argumentof semantics. Okay, So so except
the argument of semantics is important herebecause he's saying, you know, how
do we do this? Well,how do we? How do we not?
So you know, the way youdo it is you don't play a
d m PC, you do somethingelse. Yeah, So I'm saying that
we'll use these for for the sakeof that and for brevity, that we're
(35:06):
going to use the strict definition ofd m PC as Dungeon Master player character,
which means that for an entire campaign, the Dungeon Master is also playing
a player character that level and levelsup and participates in scenes as an equal
to the other players all of that. So I have two examples of times
(35:29):
when it was not awful. Onethe campaign was kind of like I don't
want to say screwed from the start, but like we were starting at disadvantage.
I'll use my own example first,and I mentioned this almost every episode,
but it's always just worth prefacing thatI run store level one shots and
on this particular day, like theywanted me like twice a week. At
this point, it was like aWednesday night, no one was around the
(35:50):
one, but we had like fourpreregistered and there was a couple that that
canceled kind of on the same day. So from four down to down to
two. Actually, you know,it was do with I had three scheduled,
a couple left, and I onlyhad one person. So I called
up one of my friends in myhill is off floating, and they're just
another body in there. And sonow now I'm now I'm up to two
(36:12):
and like, so there's only twoplayers there. They paid to be there,
and we're gonna around the game.I'm not that good to be able
to rebalance encounters for two PCs.So we we actually instead of taking any
of our premate characters or any ofthe characters that I made, I'm like,
okay, we're going all in onthis. I have these random character
dice we just rolled dice punched theminto Fast Character dot Com and all three
(36:34):
of us played just whatever we rolled, and so I'm like, okay,
I'm gonna have to take a DMPCon this one, just to round out
combat at least with the caveat that, like, you know, this character
will not be participating in any puzzles, not a DMP right, yeah,
under under our strict definition, thatis not a dm yep. Absolutely,
(36:55):
and in that regard it only hadagency in partially in combat. Yeah,
he just can't solve the mystery becauseyou're well you already know because I play
him as though he does not.But you were practicing some form of emergent
(37:16):
mystery style, in which case itwould matter you would come up with a
solution together. Yeah, well thiswasn't a mystery. This is a zombie
horde thing. But like you know, he just knew, Like you know,
I am I going to purposely walkinto a room that I know a
zombie is in because I have toplay like I don't know, I just
kind of let them make things themain calls. Yeah, I think that
(37:37):
to Jim's point, every time thatit works, it's not a d MPC,
it's an NPC with additional agency.And that's fine. And that's and
that's where you get into cohort territorythat they're really just there to help balance
combat. They're not going to takean active part in progressing the story along.
(37:57):
I mean, you can kind ofuse them as a whatever. The
opposite of a red herring is ofsomebody that's gonna like you can't find the
answer. Oh, they have theanswer. It's just gonna help again for
brevity's sake, I think. Butfor the most part, they're really there
to more or less balanced combat,like, oh man, I needed five
people to fight this red dragon,I only have four. I only have
(38:19):
three. Well, the other sampleis going to bring up and like,
Allie, tell me if this isa d n PC or not. And
I know you guys haven't listened toyou know, summary or definitely not all
of it, but campaign one.From that, there's a character called Balnor
that that joins the party from prettyearly on. He's not from the start,
this was he was done. Therewas there was not intended to be
(38:40):
a d m p S. Butpretty early on they they find a deck
of many things and they get theI'm sorry, yeah, I know it's
I'm already I'm already gym is alreadyout. But there was a modified deck
whatever, blah blah blah. Theyget the the the is it the NIGHTCRD
Squire card whatever it's called, andyou get a you get a level four
(39:00):
fighter of the same race. That'swherever draws it. Yeah, it should
be played as a cohort. Yeah, and then that this ends up being
played by by the DM and leveledup along with them, and like he
was only supposed to be a shortthing and they end up sticking around that
being an important part of the story. Yeah, but he was. This
is a comedy show in a ina in a D and D costume.
(39:22):
He ended up being a pretty majorpart of the of the stories. And
it's a show that you know,it has ratings and ratings, but like
they have advertisers that that's a that'sa corner case that I don't think is
necessarily applicable to people, just kindof you know, the typical table that
we're going to. I will saywhere I've seen success again being more like
(39:45):
MBC. So Critical Role has Ithink it was campaign to right, Yeah,
I don't know how many campaigns are, but not actually a D and
D game Critical Role. Critical Roleis a television show that uses D and
D to come on but their scriptsessentially yeah, and any of these popular
(40:05):
shows. And there they even sayI think man Merser says like, yeah,
it's a little bit of D andD. It's like based on D
and D five, but there's alot of homebrew to it. And yeah,
it's just the reason to you ounceon. But well, yeah,
they they have ended up using someof those rules, but I think they
still use home Brewer rules. Butwhatever. So the whole point in saying
(40:28):
that is there was a character thatwas from Jorhas, which is like the
monster Nation that they you utilize ina couple of fights, and I think
that essentially what what happens is theydon't make any major decisions anytime, even
if the player characters are like,hey, what do you think we should
do? The I don't know,I honestly don't know. I don't have
(40:49):
an opinion, and they just kindof kick it back and and there and
there you have it. Right,is is that it's really just a cohort
or an NPC with additional agency,and that the way to do it is
to do it that way, isto always kick back to the players that
they can't have a dog in thefight. Because once you cross into the
territory of d m PC, ofyou are a DM, but you also
(41:14):
have a player character. You aretaking away from your players. You're like
you're taking even if the players wantit, you're taking some of the fun
out of the game. So todo it well, you don't do it,
you do something else. Yeah,all right, So uh okay,
so the definition that I had inmy head this seems like something that you
(41:37):
guys even okay with. It's justweird because it's not right. And that's
and that was basically before before wewent on air, we were going through
these questions and we were like,oh, what what should we choose?
And that was something that we talkedabout and and that was my first thought
was, well, it's this,and then I realized Jim's right, they're
not DMP d MPC. We haveto Again. We could argu the semantics
(42:00):
of it all day, but justfor for brevity's sake, and for this
argument, we'll just say it isa d M playing that is also playing
a PC and it cannot it cannotwork. It just just cannot work.
Not well, okay. So sothe answer to the question here is ask
yourself what you're actually doing right anddoes it fall into the character does it
(42:22):
fall into the category of n PCwith additional agency slash cohort what they call
it cohort or does it now theySome older versions of the rpg R stories
we used to look for were aroundbad examples of of dmpcs or what Jim
would call normal examples of d mp C and like this is when like
(42:43):
it's examples of where the DM islike no, he's the main character star
of the show. And like Ijust saw that as bad examples. But
if that's that's what it is,but so so, But even Jim right
and says, well that's a cornercase, like are there examples of of
where it could work, yes,but like there's so few and far between,
(43:06):
just don't even do it, likeand more than likely, if you
are doing it and doing it successfully, it's probably not one. It's probably
one where you're still just giving theagency back to the players and you're not
allowing that quote unquote d MPC tomake any real decisions other than or am
I going to use a long storthe two things there. Okay, so
(43:30):
let's let's let's let's forget to turnthe NPC for a second, because now
it's getting back into a into asemantics thing. So like, are we
okay with NPCs with improved agency?Okay? Yeah? I mean, and
the way you do it well isthat you offload as much of the decision
making onto the players, Yes,as you can manage given the situation at
(43:54):
the table. Cool. And ifthat means they make all the decisions for
for that character in combat, ifit means that, you know, they're
actually if it means that, thatkind of becomes like a troop play character
where you know, if the fightergoes you know, if the fighter wants
(44:15):
to go to the tavern to getsome information but the wizard isn't interested in
doing that because he's studying his spellbook. You go, Okay, so for
this particular scene, Joe, we'regoing to hand you that character as much
of that as you can do.That's what you want to do is hand
off the hand that off to theplayers, and that's how you'll get successful.
(44:37):
Yeah. The best example that Ican that I know of that that
in a way that works is thecohort example of and a game that you
played with me was Raya Mantlemore ina Descent into and yeah, and that's
example. Yeah, and essentially andthat was even and I'll say this,
the best your best bet is tojust learn how to balance and without it,
(45:00):
because that's really what you were doing. And because here's why, it's
a lot as a DM to keeptrack of right when you're keeping track of
everything else. And it's a lotfor the players. I don't know if
you remember, I don't know,and it might have been you, but
I gave it. I was like, hey, can you just run this,
Like it's as far as combat,as far as decisions, I don't
think you can speak up or somebodydid and they're like, hey, this
(45:20):
is a lot, like you can't. I don't want to play two players,
don't. I don't want to playtwo characters. I just want to
play my character. And I waslike, that's fair, that's absolutely fair.
I'm sorry, Like, and Itook that back. And there's some
cool shortcuts that you can use therethat I have done on occasion, like
in the store when I just neededto kind of like have a shortcut to
that where like we wanted to havesomebody who had an impact and have the
(45:42):
players have some decisions about how theymade an impact without handing them whole character.
And what you can do there isyou can say okay, basically once
per combat turn that NPC can makeessentially what amounts to the assist where you
get advantage or somethinghere where they giveadvantage and at the beginning of the turn,
(46:05):
you guys can have a conversation andgo, okay, it's really important
that the wizard's spell goes off,so he's going to strack the monster that
they cast the spell on so thathe gets advantage on his you know whatever,
like a range touch attack, right, and and and just that's a
that's a kind of a halfway betweenthe DM doing it all themselves, but
(46:25):
the player is having to control awhole character, you know, and you
know, maybe you give him ax number of uses of cure light wounds
and they can you know, tossthat around or something like that. Because
the last is the classic example isthe party that like has no healer,
right, and so you give themthe NPC healer and you know, you
(46:45):
just say, okay, you know, once per turn they can throw a
da to healing out and we're goingto assume that they're staying out of the
way of monsters might and that's whythey don't get to hit anything. There's
my answer. My answer to thatis, oh, you go to the
shop and the potions are one getone, yeah, because you obviously are
(47:06):
going to do that more, right, I do, uh, And I've
had in a lot of games.We called it the Prismatic six pack.
It's a six pack of otions inevery color for the price of three.
There you go, or four orwhatever whatever it is, whatever I need
to do right to get them tobuy it. And one group didn't is
in my my quote unquote the MPCgame the opposite problem where they both ended
(47:29):
up on casters and I had toroll up a barbarian real quick just to
keep them alive. Yeah, butlike definitely, like I would hate to
be running somebody as a DM andlike you're fighting let's say it doesn't even
have to be the big bed butlike a boss level whatever, and like
it just the way it just comesaround is that like they have one hit
(47:52):
point and you're and now there's youcan handwave that and everything else. But
again, I think that the peoplethat tend to use quote unquote d MPs
are going to be newer d ms. And I know for me, like
I just didn't know that there wasother options. It was like it was
given to me as this cohort andI was like, Okay, I'm running
this. I was like this isawful, and I just had to learn
that way. I would hate.I would hate for it to come around
(48:15):
and like the monster has one ortwo or five whatever HP, and it's
like the cool. As a player, I'm going to be pretty annoyed about
that. Let's let's put a buttonon this so to answer your question,
rules as written or question as writtenq A q A W d m p
(48:37):
cs are bad. But I thinkyour answer your question as intended is as
you know, ask yourself, areyou doing more of what I thought the
m PCs were or what or Jimcorrectly explained MPC you're playing? Are you
talking about d m p cs.Are you talking about MPCs with more agencies
(48:58):
or more agency or or cohorts?Yeah, in which case go for if
you need to, if you canget away without it, maybe, don't
you know? Or or and Imean, and I think that third thing
that we talked about, or arethere shortcuts that you can come up with
that kind of narratively say there's acharacter there, but we've abstracted that to
a simple mechanic that you could handoff to the players to use every turn
(49:21):
to indicate the presence of that ofthat character. Cool, let's let's wrap
this thing up so you can sendus your questions to Hello Adventurers Podcast at
gmail dot com, or you canask us your questions yourself Helloadventurers Podcast dot
com slash voice. Well love tolove to answer your questions. Yeah,
Otherwise, Calebs asked us a lotmore that we could always get to so
(49:42):
but I want to I want todiversify this a bit. Yeah, if
we're going to fly through these andwe did not know, we didn't,
great job guys, Now we wegot to raced off from that though.
So yeah, please please please sendus your questions and send us your your
most egregious d MPC bills or yourbest accent. But yeah, I get
a Hello Adventures Podcast dot com slashvoice. You can always tell us tell
(50:06):
us yourself. But that's going towrap it up. So thank you so
much for listening to Hello Adventurers.We are your host Jason Portiso, Jim
Crocker and Joe McCall producer, editorEngineer Jason Portiso. Music by a Nick
Spurrier, artwork by Christin Roderick.You can reach out to us with any
feedback or suggestions by emailing Hello AdventurersPodcast at gmail dot com. Hello Adventures
is a JCP Audio production. Goodbyes
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