All bars. Welcome to the barbecue where the cast and creators of Oops All
Bards grill each other. Ashley Banks was unable to join us tonight, but
all less the rest of the party introduce themselves. I'm Chris Clineky. I
play pooched In Rucus the aspiring best Boy. Hi, I'm Anne Coleman and
I play Clarie Souer Cloud. I am Ross Cary. I play Andrach Harold.
I'm Bob Killian. I play Keilonian Stumps the guitar, playing peacemaking turtle
like person. And I'm gonna let Nate go ahead and introduce himself because last
time Nate got involved in the conversation. My name is Nate Runkle, and
I'm the guy who produces this who normally keeps quiet. And I am Jillian
Ashley Blair Ivy. I'm the GM for Oops All Bards. Please don't ever
call me by my full name. I will not know how to respond to
that. So I want to talk about episode two because we had a very
interesting thing happened, which is that the plan had been to record episode one
and episode two on the same day, which is actually what we did,
and then by the time we got to the end of recording episode two,
I suspected that it might be going in this direction, but when I listened
to it, I really and Nate and I talked about it, we decided
that we really needed to re record episode two. Part of that was that
it was there were some technical issues. We were not all great about staying
on our mics, and there were a couple of other things that had happened
from a technical perspective. But I think that the other thing that happened was
that I your GM did not do a very good job of running the encounter.
I was just really ambitious. I had I think like three dozen adversaries
for you at some point. My intention had been to just overwhelm you and
then make it mostly narrative, but everybody seemed ready to have a counter So
when we decided that we were going to scrap that and re record episode two,
I wanted to make it really different, partly because I wanted the campaign
to run better, but also partly because I wanted to still be able to
surprise all of you. So I'd love to know how it felt. Knowing
that normally, in a like a home campaign, we don't rerun entire,
entire encounters. What was the experience like for all of you? I think
for me, frankly, I was relieved to get a chance to redo that
combat because, despite some of the work we did before the campaign, I'm
thinking about our characters and how they would react to something in the moment.
Speaking for myself, I found myself as soon as combat kicked off, switching
into switching out of character and into player combat mode, trying to think of
the quote unquote correct thing to do rather than just reacting in the moment.
So getting a second bite at that apt I personally appreciated. Yeah, I
agree. I felt like it was good to do it many years ago when
somebody when I first heard that live play D and D podcasts where like a
thing and people were doing that. I was really surprised because there are so
many logistics in Dungeons and Dragons, you know that you're playing, especially around
combat, and I remember thinking, boy that that can't work on a podcast.
There's no way that could work, And obviously it has so, but
yeah, it's there are so many the sort of logistics that are involved when
in doing a sort of combat scenario, and Dungeons and Dragons was like very
much made for that, and you know, if I may try and just
real quick and then I'll act pass the time back to you. But like
combat should be one of the most like exhilarating and you know, exciting things
that happens, and there's so many mechanics built in, there's so many opportunities
to lose momentum that like it can turn from the most exciting thing in a
session to the thing that drags the most pretty surely. Yeah, absolutely,
I I appreciated the chance for doover and and specifically I think it was not
just a matter of the fact that this party hadn't played yet, but the
number of potential antagonists. We do UH sort of without a map, without
a visual game, so trying to keep track of where we were and what
was going on was challenging. We also just had atrocious roles for all of
the NPCs UH in the version, in the first version, and while obviously
you want your game to be responsive to the dice and to have that unpredictability,
there is a certain downside to having prepped a ton of different NPCs with
different backstories and reactions and then them all being frozen and unable to use them.
Yes, and you know when we so in this episode that everybody is
now listened to, there were four adversaries that came on and kind of cast
a masshold person over everybody who was on the dais, and in the original
there had been I think again, I think it was three dozen people who
were all responsible for casting that spell, because it was supposed to be more
about shock and awe. If I recall correctly, we were originally like the
outside of the stadium was based or the field whatever, it was completely surrounded
with so the protagamal, the parameters, No, so the parameters of the
dome were the same. It's just that there were instead of just being four
people kind of there to make sure everybody stayed in place, there were three
rows of a dozen people three or four rows of a dozen people who were
who'd all filed in to stand between you and that dome basically to kind of
act as a barrier in case anybody tried to get to the dome. And
when there were that many people casting mass hold, it became almost impossible to
get out of hold person. So one of the decisions that I made when
we recorded, when we re recorded episode two, was that they were only
going to cast hold person long enough for Malvo's speech to happen, which didn't
even happen in the first version of this encounter. So I decided to have
that image of Malvo projected into the sky and they're holding you in place just
long enough for that, and the idea is that they were then going to
release you and hope all right, messages delivered, We're on our way out,
And honestly, I kind of made them squishier so that if they died,
it wasn't that big of a deal. There were four of them.
So I remember saying in the last talk back, which for me was about
fifteen minutes ago but for you may have been longer, that seeing the game
as like a big collective yes and sort of experience is at least for me,
like one of the most important things and one of the things I enjoyed
the most about Ungeins and Dragons and similar games like that aren't D and D,
but you know, borrow from it. But I also think as a
player and or as a dungeon master, understanding just how far you're willing to
go with the yes and is pretty important for myself, and just very briefly,
like in the campaigns that I run. I'm a big fan of games
like Skyrim of like Tears of the Kingdom, things that are really open world
and really are like if you want to do this, like, let's explore
the consequences. Notably, my group and the initial game did not want to
fight, did not want to pick sides in a boss fight, so they
persuaded both bosses to drop arms and rolled really really high, and it took
us fourteen sessions to really explore what happens when those two don't fight. That
was a huge yes and that we took, and it's spent it like half
the pandemic. We were just like working out what that meant, which was
a lot of fun. But also maybe you don't want to spend fourteen sessions
allowing your players to persuade bosses to not fight. So I also think from
a player perspective, for the first session, it felt very much like depending
on who you are as a player, you might be like totally overwhelmed,
like I don't know what to do, or you might take the gamely there's
one dwarf yet, Moyo who still draws breath right, and like if you're
gonna go down, Mazell, go go down swinging, And if you are
looking for opportunities to play the like a character in a certain way, there
are ways to structure the encounter from the dungeon master's perspective where like, yeah,
it feels like you can do anything, but like the best choices all
are like ones that are hopefully guiding you in a certain direction. That also
complements with the dungeon masters trying to do I know said this before, but
like just for the sake of this, so like putting your players in situations
where it may feel to them like it's totally open world and anything could happen,
but it's pretty apparent to them, oh like I could go in this
direction and that would be catastrophic, or I could go in this direction,
the one the DM really wants you to go in and it'll be better.
Can make it feel like it's a free world and also give the dungeon masters
some extra sort of like you know, reins on that without it feeling like
it's a track sort of a like you know, like a rail shooter and
nobody has really any choices or can turn left or right. The second session
did that better. There were fewer NPCs, there were more opportunities for us
to be encouraged to use like Bardic spells rather than than melee combat things,
and I think the second session turn out better as an oops all bars because
of that. And I think Bob was starting to say something about how D
and D and combat feel very intertwined. I think for myself and perhaps also
for Ross who hasn't played a part either, they're the things we know how
to do in D and D, and the first time we went through we
defaulted to those. But it's also a challenge because, as Chris is describing
here, the breadcrumbs make a big difference. Right under Standing what things you
should key into and reading this scene takes a certain degree of skill and confidence
that as a first time squishy bard coming into it, I was not keying
into lots of cues. I didn't know what end was what, and so
revisiting it invited all of us, but I can speak to my own personal
experience. More specifically, it invited me to think about why my character wouldn't
feel immediately personally threatened, why she wouldn't feel she had to default to combat
because when there were so many NPCs. That was the only thing I could
really think of. May have posit another possible theory to that, and this
was Jill being I think a fairly devious DM in some way. Uh,
which is that? And and I'm mindful that we're all level four characters in
terms of mechanically we're advanced to level four. I dare say, at least
to my knowledge, none of us has ever killed before, and two characters
are I to my knowledge characters table has ever committed murder or manslaughter to the
best of our knowledge excluded hashtag free night. I've got bodies, I don't.
I don't allegend. But a lot of times when you're doing at least
in D and D what's thought of as tier one, which is levels one
to four, a lot of times you're introductory encounters, and whether you're doing
pre written or even if you're building a homebrew from scratch, you know your
first encounters are going to be clearing out giant rats from a seller, going
into a spider case, fighting zombies. That things where you don't really have
to think about deep consequential emotional effects, not of the possibility of being killed
but the act of killing. Our enemies in this first encounter were very much
described as humanoids, and had we gone into contact combat mode with especially with
just four of them, at least one of us probably would have had to
reckon with committing a murder. And I thought that was really challenging thing that
Jill put on us to like think about. And that's why that's another reason
why I thought replaying that encounter was a net good because, at least speaking
for Andrik in the intervening time thinking about it, I was like, no,
there's no way Andrec would just kill in cold blood. He wouldn't do
it. Note to self, inquire whether it stand your ground is a thing,
and get bark buttons to ask stand your ground question mark. So I
know everybody here is a pretty experienced player, and and I actually started playing
on the same day in the same campaign, and that was in I think
twenty seventeen or twenty eighteen, so it's been a while. Bob and Chris
have been playing for a long time. Ross has been playing for a long
time. I'm curious about everybody's relationship to combat in general as players, because
in last our last talkback episode we talked about this campaign that we were all
in together. That was really large because of the good nature and grace of
our DM, and sometimes we would have a dozen people who were taking turns
in combat and one round of combat would take an hour. So it in
many ways put me into a place where I liked RP a lot better than
combat, And it wasn't until I started playing in other games it's like,
oh, combat can actually be fun too. So I'm curious as players where
you all stand on combat and how you think of it relative to how you
think about role playing. Can I can start. I'm still not big on
combat. I really like looking at what is before me as a puzzle to
solve, trying to find the way to end combat as quickly as possible,
whether that is trying to charm a monster or transforming my opponent into something else.
In recent campaign finale moments, I transformed my opponent in one on one
combat into a seahorse and then stored it in my water bottle so I would
not have to I'll find it. I don't know how much of that is
informed by the fact that I am in real life a pacifist, but in
our first run through of this episode, I was the one who went to
combat, first pulling out my rapr and slashing up and escaping Daddy with an
amazing entrance line that I'm so sad that nobody will ever hear. But maybe
I'll stay back. I might come back. I'm not going to ruin it
now. But I think what I find most rewarding as a player is in
the character development, in the changing relationships, in finding the breadcrumbs and kernels,
and navigating what that journey could be. So for me, combat is
a way of developing and understanding my character better at times, understanding alliances and
relationships, but it is never the thing that I'm seeking out. I'll take
a swing at this and it'll be a wide swing. I think I might
be the outlier among the four of us here. I said earlier that combat
has the potential to be like the most exhilarating, the most exciting moments,
and oftentimes because of the mechanics, that can end up being like really a
dragged down. And I also said in the last talk back, you know
what you get out of it depends on what you put into it, like
and understand like that's sort of an aspect of us coming together to the table
is going to be a collective putting in and getting out of it right.
Combat in Dungeons and Dragons is one of the most mechanically dense and like Leyden
things that you can do role playing. Is am I gonna ask question or
answer a question? Right? And I'd also say that combat not just in
D and D, but like in other games of those, combat, like
one of the draws, is supposed to be the excitement of snap decisions.
Something happens, you know, what do you do? I remember in the
first episode of Stranger Things, which is not really you know, Dragons,
but that like encounter they're having with the demogorgan in that opening scene, the
dungeon master is leading this as a snap decision. Do you cast fireball?
Do you run away? And he doesn't have like fifteen minutes to hum and
ha through his notes about what it spells are. It's just do you do
it or you don't. In order to get it to that point, the
dungeon master and the players all need to really do a lot of preparation beforehand
to know what their arsenal is, what the enemies can do, and not
you know, wait until it's their turn and then start looking through things.
Now Anne and Jill, you mentioned that when you started your first your first
session of D and D, you came in at level ten. I think
it was level nine. It was, it was, it was high.
I don't know if it was quite a time it was. When I joined
that campaign, I came in a level ten, came in like six or
seven. Still like completely overwhelming amount of spell casters. Like it's not just
do you punch it or not, it's like you can cast fifteen different things.
Better be ready to do it right. So like you weren't. You
were not set up for success there. I don't think to make it really
feel like you can make a snap decision, but I think it can get
there if all the players in the DM want to take in that direction,
and like that's when combat can potentially shine. Yeah, slightly tangential note.
I just want to like thinking about the uh that campaign, so Jill in
that campaign play to Cleric and one Night and mild spoilers for the Legend of
Vox Macina. There's a moment in the Legend of Vox Machina season one when
their their cleric pike trick Foot, re emerges after a long absence and just
lays absolute waste to an approaching army of undead in this really beautiful way,
and Jill sitting on the sofa next means is, wait, can clerics do
that? Because because I think, I think your thought was that clerics were
just pure heel box and I was like, no clerics can tank the heck
out of a game. And it's funny because my cleric, you know,
after that, we look together at my stat sheet in that game, and
I was, despite being a rock gnome, very tanky, and I had
a ridiculous amount of hit points and my AC was really high. And I
don't even remember how that happened. I probably broke the bilt when I first
made her. But to Chris's point about like doing that prep in advance and
knowing your spells and knowing your actions, there were things we played in that
campaign for four or five years, and there were things that were on that
character sheet that in our very last session, our finale session, I looked
at I was like, huh, why did I never do that thing?
So, especially if you're coming into a game as a higher level character,
you're not starting from level one and acquiring these skills, it really is important
to have an idea of what some of the things that you can do your
actions and reactions in combat. And I think I probably would have played that
character differently if I had known some of those things early on, or to
a point from the earlier talkback like be ready to just you know, fail
forward communicate with your team, say I'm a little overwhelmed, like I'm going
to take a few minutes for my turn if you have suggestions like that's okay
too, and understand that Tom, that's gonna take longer as we all collectively
learn how to like to do things together. Bob, what's your relationship to
combat and or combat versus our p as the pacifist of the group, right
right right? Because characters, Yeah, you know, I think actually,
you know, playing wanting to play a pacifist. It sort of occurred to
me. The main sort of drive for Kilonian was that I wanted to play
guitar. Like we were playing we were doing Oops all Bards, and I
was like, I want to bring in the guitar and I want to just
like improvise a little bit. And I love playing Bob Dylan. So I
was like, well, Kilonian is going to be like a Bob Dylan type,
but it's sort of as we were working on the backstory for it,
I was like, oh, what if, like Keilonian was a pacifist that
I've I had heard of other people playing pacifists in D and D, which,
because of how so many campaigns are combat heavy, Dungeons and Dragons has
its roots in like combat Dragons right literally war game exactly. It's like that's
why there are so many rules around combat and like, you know so,
but but that is honestly something that makes it interesting is that, like I
have to figure out in a combat scenario, what would Kilonian do? And
you know, that informed how I built the character to have a lot of
like helping spells or healing spells or things that would you know, not inflict
damage, but would you know, help people or or help to maybe like
stop the situation or like bring down the conflict. So you know, it's
interesting, it makes a drive and I think that when you're playing D and
D and you're doing combat, I think it really helps. The most fun
combat encounters that I can think of were always things where it wasn't just fighting,
there was other stuff going on. You were trying to protect somebody,
you were trying to get into a door. You were trying to like do
something. So when you're if you're someone designing a game, like it helps
to have other things going on in the combat situation or like a motive that
the characters have other than just you know, fight these other people. You
know, it does make it really fun when there's other motives or other things
going on than just fighting. You know. So the other day, on
fourth of July, Ross and I went to a neighborhood block party and our
friend, who was one of the hosts, had a couple of friends in
town. One of them was this kid who was I don't know Ross,
maybe like twelve, thirteen years old thereabouts. Yeah, and he looked Ross
was wearing a Critical roll t shirt and he when when we came in,
he complimented Ross on his shirt. And it's like, oh cool, Like
this kid, this kid at least is familiar with the world of D and
D. There were probaly he drill dice on it like he got it.
And later on we were talking to him and his father and we were talking
about Oops all Barts and the kid says to us, you know, that's
a that's a very interesting choice because you've you've created this game where this campaign
where nobody is optimized to fight, So how are you going to handle combat?
And I thought back to our first failed attempt at this second episode and
what we were talking about earlier in this idea that everybody's character instincts kind of
flew out the window and you went into combat mode. And I'd said to
him, like, that's kind of the point I wanted it to be when
combat happens. I wanted it to be a challenge. I don't want it
to be straight up sword and board style combat. Like we are an all
barred party. We are heavy on charisma, we're heavy on negotiating abilities,
and we've got magic and we have all these other ways to get out of
scrapes. And so when I first started talking to all of you about the
idea for OOPS All Bars, which was almost six months ago, what were
you thinking it would be like when we got into combat situations? Can I
loop back just a little bit to the earlier about kind of relationship with combat?
What I really enjoy is when everything, in my view, everything is
role playing, combats, role playing explorations, role playing, social is role
playing. So when combat can be used to facilitate a role playing goal or
some role playing comes out in the course of combat. I find to be
very fun, whether it's NPCs or characters or character relationships developing through something that
occurs in combat. And one of the things I think that you did well
this on the second time around was, you know, the goal of each
combat should not be to slay the thing in front of you, But sometimes
the goal of combat is to survive and get out. Sometimes the goal of
combat is to just hold off long enough for reinforcements to arrive. Those kind
of alternative goals rather than just kill the thing in front of you, I
think are really productive. And I think that's you know, I think,
as all Bards at least, I don't plan on trying to negotiate or sweet
talk my way out of combat. But what I would, what I hope
we can do at some point, is pursue alternative goals. This time we
were able to grab a hostage out of this combat, and we were able
to stand our ground long enough grab a hostage, and you know that that
pushes the plot forward. From a role playing perspective, That's where I think
this is going. I we're not you know, we're not oops all fighters
where the job is to cut through everything that goes before us, but to
advance the story through through combat encounters. I think that one of the things,
at least for me, that happened between our first attempt recording the second
episode and our second attempt is that we had our final, our finale in
that game, that campaign that Ann and I first started playing in and that
we were all a part of, and our DM presented us with the avatar
of Tiamat and was very clear from the beginning. Michael told us that,
you know, you just need to get through. Was it five rounds of
combat? It started at ten? He scaled it back to five. He
already he did the math on how long it would have taken. Yeah.
Again, it was a big party. But I think that that gave us
all a bit of perspective on there are there are ways to fight around something
versus fighting directly against it. Not to be contra here. I've just pulled
up my well, I've just pulled up my character sheets to check this fact,
because it doesn't feel to me like it is actually that different in terms
of mechanics to play completely different builds. To me, it's about the character
itself, right in terms of needing to roll for things, and and needing
to know your equipment and your spells if you're a caster, and so on.
There's a lot of lap. What I find in terms of when I
think about this question that you've asked, Jill, the what were we expecting
going in to being a Bard? What I find as I look back is
that I may have been a little overconfident. I kind of came into it
thinking like it's just another castor so I'll play him, you know, and
what the redo And also having been able to visit this world a few times
has helped me to see is that choosing to play them all the same way
is in fact a choice, and there are different ways to even use my
character sheet and stats that I perhaps hadn't optimized prior to this. Yeah,
yeah, if you know I was in tripping. I just wanted to throw
out a fun fact, which is that in the original one that we redid,
there was a point at which Keilonian his action was to hug one of
the enemies, which is I was a little disappointed that that didn't come back
up again, but you know, that's a fun thing. It may come.
I'm sure. I'm sure it's going to come up there. Your grapple
check is just going to be yeah, yeah, I guess I. And
also I should say that, like you know, for those listening at home,
like there were multiple extensive discussions that I think sort of like underlie just
a very brave reflection on my response here, but understanding that as far as
I understand it, Dungeons and Dragons, the game is balanced for a party
of four. That like the challenge ratings and the experience you're supposed to get
from enemies is like balanced for that group of four. And if you increase
it to five or decrease it to three or whatever it might be, that
means that like the monsters you encounter are going to need either some scale thumbing
or some adjustments on like you know, behind the screen side in order to
make this still an appropriate challenge. And the party of four is usually one
tank or one Beefy care character and one healer and then two damage dealers,
right, And so if you you can, like you know, mix up
that that that group if you want as players and as a dungeon mess but
if you do just understand, like the game as it is designed, is
not balanced for your particular group, so you're gonna have to like do extra
work to make sure that the group that you have, as opposed to the
one the game was designed for, has an appropriate challenge and has opportunities to
be the characters they want to be, as opposed to the sword and Board
and the healer and the two damaged dealers. Right, So, my expectations
were that encounters were not going to be ones where you just send us against
like you know, somebody who's a oh, there are five of you,
so I'll put you against like, you know, one challenge rating for and
two challenging ones, and that should be about balance. But like the encounter
should be ones where the ways to successfully navigate them just expect my early point.
But the ways to successfully navigate them are going to be to rely on
bardic spells and cohesion as opposed to traditional like somebody needs to hang back and
not die so they can heal, and someoney needs to go and like soak
up things so that if they go down it's okay because they have a bigger
hit pool. I think that's one of the biggest challenges to running anybody's Ryan
campaign. It's a non traditional one, like just knowing like you're you're going
to have to find a way to make this challenging but also fun and not
feel like, you know, you were tasked with something that was really for
somebody else. Yeah, I'm just going to push back a little bit.
And you know, we've been living with five E for nine years now.
The whole idea, the challenge rating of monsters or enemies at all corresponds to
party size or makeup is it's a myth. Challenge rating is useless. Well,
I think in this particular case, because we are existing in an entirely
home brewed universe, and the campaign is entirely home brewed. But I am
you know, I'm borrowing monsters and stats and mechanics from not just official canonical
D and D material, but also a lot of supplemental material if some of
it's been officially released and is affiliated with Wizards of the Coast, and some
of it is just kind of out there in the world and you see stuff
on Reddit forums. I definitely was thinking as I rebalanced this campaign for our
second attempt, or this encounter rather is this in this second attempt, I
wasn't thinking about challenge rating so much as I was thinking about what is going
to be I don't want to kill all of you in our very first encounter
out. We spent a lot of time building up your characters and getting art
made for your characters and all of these other things. So what is something
worth. There is going to be risk and people can get None of you
did get hurt because you all rolled very well, but you can get hurt.
But at the same time was going to be low enough risk that you
were going to be able to scrape out of this? You know, my
initial thinking, I said, you know, we had dozens of adversaries in
the first time that we tried to make this, and my thinking was everybody's
going to say, oh, we're out numbered. We're just going to sit
here and wait for whatever is going to happen to happen. And that wasn't
the case. That wasn't how things wound up turning out. And so knowing
that, I kind of decided, well, let's let's build it in such
a way that if fighting happens, then it's going to be waited in your
favor getting back. Because we talked a lot about above table kind of more
heady stuff. But getting back just into the game into what the audience has
just listened to. I'm curious about the one adversary's decision to use the sleep
spell that actually ended up allowing us to take a hostage and was it And
you don't have to spoil anything if I'm getting into spoilers for down the road
here, But I found that to be a curious decision because it did not
go well for the adversaries and I couldn't figure out whether the adversary had misread
us in terms of our strength our abilities at that point, and that this
is an enemy that was well organized enough to cast hold person on some very
powerful people on the stage. Somehow a dome has been created ceiling in some
also very powerful people, and yet they made this one decision in the heat
of the moment that took out one of their own allies, which I I'm
just I'm still trying to piece together what that particular adversaries read on. And
I think it was me and Bell who were right in the vicinity that didn't
get affected at all, but their ally did. Yeah, so two things
happened there. One was that, yes, I kind of thought that this
guy is going to misread you because you are, as far as he's concerned,
your kids like you are all recent you're not even officially college graduates,
and so assuming that you're not as powerful as he was was a fatal mistake
because they were able to cast the whole person so easily. Now part of
that is I tweak the mechanics of old person so that it was amplified by
the four of them casting it together, and it's you know, casting it
at a higher level. All of those things I made it. I didn't
even roll for it, like hold Person was part of the story there,
whereas the decision to cast Sleep was that was a deliberate like he's going to
underestimate you. Now, Something else that happened there is that I misread the
other battiest character sheet. His armor class was twelve. It's not that he
had twelve hit points left. So we've all recorded episode three now and we
know what happens with that battie who wound up being put to sleep, and
what the const once of him only having twelve hit points at the time that
he went to sleep was. But in the moment where I looked at the
character sheet and I'm running combat and I've got so many different tabs open on
my computer. I said, yeah, he's got twelve hit points. He's
down. It wasn't until I listened back to the rough cut of episode two
where I went, well, crap, I'm going to have to figure out
how to make that work in episode three. It's a really interesting thing that
to bring up the fact that we redid the that episode, because as a
if you're new to Dungeons and Dragons, or even if you've played for a
while, if you are being if you were running the game, if you're
a gm DM, there are gonna be times where things don't happen the way
that you think that they were going to happen. And there are gonna be
times when you make mistakes, when you misread a stat block or it's going
to happen right exactly, and Chris to your point about yes, and in
D and D, that can be tricky because on the one hand, you
know, you could be thinking to yourself, Okay, there's this one there's
gonna be this one point where the bad person's going to put them all to
sleep and they're going to wake up somewhere else, and then someone's like I'm
immune to sleep like my character, and you're gonna be like, wait,
okay, never mind, but you're not immune to this sleep. You go,
you know, like figure pat sure out to Michael too, Executi princer
if you're listening, like this happened to him time and time again because he
had eleven characters and you couldn't keep track of them all on like half of
us to be like no, sorry exactly, and he was so patient.
Yeah, there's yeah, there's different ways to deal with that. Like on
you can sort of you know, you're running the game, so you can
come up with whatever you want. You could say, well, this is
what's going to happen, or you know, you can use that as an
opportunity to be like, well maybe everybody else falls asleep and this person pretends
to be asleep, and what is that like or whatever. I'm curious,
Jill, you know, for you have you I imagine you've had to sort
of rewrite or rethink some of the things that happened in here, and what
has that experience been like for you. In the very beginning of our first
episode, I mentioned that I am not officially a first time DM because I've
run several one shots, but this is my first campaign, and I don't
know why. I was like, yes, I will put my very first
campaign out into the world. And also I'm going to homebrew a lot of
stuff. So it's a constant process of writing and rewriting and even looking at
my notes as we prepared to record episode three and having listened back to the
recording of episode two, there were certain choices that were made where it was
like, all right, well those five pages that I worked up, those
are out the window now, and is it something that I can and I'm
keeping all of this stuff. I've got a scratch sheeet where it's like,
maybe I can bring this person back, maybe I can make this encounter happen
in a different place. One of the things that happened between episode one recording
an episode two and this, I think again was because we wound up having
to rerecord episode two, is that Andrik starts episode two in a slightly different
place from where he finishes episode one. And at the end of episode one,
Andrik has this kind of very tense moment where he looks over toward where
Belle and the other dancers are preparing and he sees this person Monahan, who's
in Bell's dance troupe, and they have a moment. It's very clear that
there is something between them, and I just completely forgot about it when I
prepared to redo episode two. So now one of the things that I and
we've recorded episode three, so one of the things that I as the DM,
have to think about is do we just drop this or do I figure
out an excuse to bring Monahan back? Is Monahan under the Dome? I
don't know. So there's this kind of constant writing and rewriting and rejiggering process.
I have two degrees in creative writing. I did my undergraduate degree in
creative writing and then because I wasn't enough of a disappointment to my parents,
I got an MFA and creative writing and I when you're writing for something like
that, it's very static and it's very much meant to be you the writer,
in control of the entire narrative. And yes, like when you're writing
fiction, sometimes the character speak to you and they might make something. You
might write something that's very surprising, but it's different when there are actual,
living, breathing player characters here who are affecting the narrative. That you so
carefully laid out. If only they were a degree in recreative writing, that
would be the degree for any dungeon master. So if it does come back,
folks, you've just for the first time heard of Chekhov's Monaghan. Yeah,
but it's also true in D and D campaigns in general. You know,
we have the whether the benefit or the drawback of recording this. But
in D and D campaigns, dms or players will drop a lot of bread
crumbs, and it's not uncommon for anywhere between fifty and eighty percent of those
bread crumbs to never be picked up, to never come back. And that's
fine. It's like, we just totally not okay. If you're an English
teacher or current English student in creative writing, that is what we call bad
writing. Please edit out your extra breadcrumbs to put in intentional red herrings.
But come on, man, But when we're doing an improvisational, collaborative storytelling
experience, it's bound to happen because you know what, the twenty percent to
forty percent of bread crumbs that do get picked up in unexpected ways are going
to be so much more memorable than the oh why was that plot hole left?
Oh, why was there a polar bear? Let's start on lost.
So I was just gonna say, like, Bob, we've talked about this,
you know, outside too, Like I think it's it's okay if you
know, just just speaking back and like the dungeon Master perspective slash like lowercase
a advice Like on the one hand, you may come to the table like
I think all these days are really really interesting and I can't wait to explore
like my players, and then your players like are like no, I'd rather
run a tavern and have people come to us, and like, you know,
like just because like I've had to yeah, like just because your ideas
are the ones that you think are important or interesting doesn't mean that your players
don't have other ideas that are important are worth embracing and pursuing too. Yeah.
The thing that is DMS, we always like will joke about amongst ourselves
is oh, yeah, I've set up these like they get to a new
town. There's a tavern where they're going to stay for the night, but
like they get to get a feel for the people in the town, and
like there's this dark elf in a hooded cloak. There there's you know,
an orc and a large te fling having an arm wrestling contest in the corner.
Okay, well, who else is there down at the end of the
bar is uh Boblin the Goblin. They will all want to talk to Boblin
the Goblin. Yes. I've had a few moments where dming a game where
I, you know, there's like a random security guard and you know,
of course, everybody's like, what's the security guard's name? And I'm like,
uh, it's Bill, and they're like, I want to talk to
Bill. And then you know, you give Bill a voice, and oh,
everybody loves me Bill him and everybody loves him, and then everybody wants
Bill to come back, and you're like, you did not plan for that
at all, but it happens. But you know what, that's it's great
and it's a gift, and that's why it's really fun. Is that.
Then you know, then Bill becomes a character. You know, he goes
a d M p C. Yeah right, adventures. Yeah right, Okay,
I think we're gonna stop the conversation there. Thanks to the party for
joining us, Thanks to all of you for listening. The next episode of
Oops all Bard's Episode three should be coming to your podcatchers in two weeks,
and we look forward to seeing you or hearing from you then. Oops All
Bards is created, GMed, and directed by Jillian Ashley Blair Ivy. This
episode was produced, edited and sound designed by Nate Runkle. Oops All Bards
stars Ashley Banks as Bell Sernameo and Coleman as Clarice Sauerkloun, Ross Curry as
Andrek Harrowhold, Chris Klinecki as Poochedin Ruckus, Bob Killian as Kilonian Stumps,
featuring Paige Klinecki as the voice of the bark Buttons. The Oops all Bard's
theme song is by Bob Killian with additional lyrics by Jillian Ashley Blair Ivy.
Oops All Bards is executive produced by the porch Room are part of the porch
Room Network on Spreaker Prime. For more information, visit oopsalbards dot com.
Thanks and be sure to subscribe to Oops All Bards on Spotify, Apple Podcasts,
or your podcatcher of choice. We'll see you next time. How'll it
go? Well, We're sure you can guess. Oops All bars oh on