Hello everybody, Welcome back to Desks and Doork's, your favorite board game design
and creation podcast that has always brought to you by you. I am Kyle
and I am joined as always by my illustrious co host Graham Gains. Let's
up everybody real quick before we start this episode. If you have not gotten
yourself a copy of After the Rain, you could do so on an indie
press revolution. And if you're listening to this episode, it's already too late
and I'm inside your walls. And also we have started the actual publication process
of if you're within at this point, cover sheets have been printed out and
the books are being compiled and they'll be stapled and then actually sent out to
everybody soon. So if you're listening to this and you backtiss on Gigstarter,
congratulations, your copy will be coming soon. If you did not get a
copy and you'd be interested in doing so, now we're looking at updating the
Desks and Doorc's digital storefront so that you can actually order a physical copy of
the book directly from us. So very exciting and a great segue because today
we get to talk all about role playing games. I'm, first of allmost
I'm just really excited about the episode. I am too, because I feel
like it's You've been doing a lot of a lot of good YouTube content this
past week, and honestly, I don't know what's more shocking. You're blistering
tier list of RPGs uh or the other one about the uh about Cyclopean where
you compared me to one of history's most famous hucksters and frauds. Um Listen,
There's there's two things that happened on YouTube this week that I'm just like,
oh my god. You know, like I know, the PG Barnum
thing was supposed to be a compliment, but that's been Like Graham, you
know, he's such a people person. He's he's he's like the Bernie made
off of RPG. Seriously, really that bad of a historical figure? I
I think, so yeah, Like I have to do more reading then.
I mean, you know, the Greatest Showman is like one thing, but
like, oh man, he lied, he cheated. Uh he he like
bought a black woman like after slavery was like, uh what abolished? Uh?
He's you know, the like sucker born every minute. Probably not true,
but yeah, he's Oh my god, I'm so sorry. If I
had known half of that, I would have found a better hype man to
compare you too. Yeah, like Bernie Madoff, Like Bernie Madoff and all
of that. And you're you're probably still more pissed off about some of my
RPG opinions. Oh absolutely, Uh. I think I think I'll clear the
air by just like dropping a few on. Yeah, what are some I
was filling out a little bit right here. I'll blaze through them for you,
knock us off into your first tail from the table. Let's go with
Arcanum S tire baldriss Gate A tier baldriss Gate two S Tire chron Tigger Stier
Dao Sex stre Dao Sex Human Revolution B tire Dao Sex Human hugh Kind Divided,
man Kind divided C tier uh Divinity Original Sin two A tier Dog Dragons
Dogma Ctier followed one S tier followed two S tier uh Ice Windale B tier
Ice Windale two A tier, Kingdoms of Amlar, Reckoning D tier Cotur two
btier Never Winter Nights B tier are the expansions are you? Are you more
offended by my opinions or the fact that most of the ones that you mentioned,
I haven't played. No no, no, no, no, uh
you you did give Plainscape Torment a B tier, which is bizarre. But
I but like, but I got stuck on P T. Barnum, so
I had to use one thing. One. Expansions for Never Winter Night are
S tier. Uh. Never Winter Nights two C tier, except for the
Masket betray Or expansion that's S tier. Uh. Pathfinder Kingmaker B tier,
Pillars of Eternity A tier, Pillars of Eternity two A tier. Uh,
Shadow Run sn s C tier, Shadow Run Returns B tier Shadow Shadow Run,
Dragonfall S Tier big S tier. Okay, there's just Shock Star,
Sister Chuck two S tire Torment, Tides of New Minera B tier, okay.
Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines, which I finally finished is recently. I'm solid
A tier Man Whicher one D tier. Yeah, that's there, you go,
there you go. I filled out it filled out your list. That's
that's fair, that's fair. Which one gets. Listen, it's an exciting
D tier, but it's a D that that seems reasonable. You know you
like you like sky Rim and which are more than I do. But that's
fine. I do. I know I like Dragon Age more than you do
that well, I like Origins pretty well, but you love I love the
Origins. May be sad when it was finished because I was like, man,
I wish they could experience this is another time. And then I played
Dragon Age the other dragon Ages, and they were not they were not nearly
as good, which they were not. But that's a great segue. Um,
you know, much like Pt. Bardam being the master of segus and
also the master of being a terrible person. Apparently. So today we're gonna
be doing tales from the table. This is gonna be a little bit different
than our usual formats. Usually Graham and I have like a topic we discuss,
we talk about like our favorite things, or we rank them. Um,
you're not in a tier list necessarily, but in a numbered list,
but I hope so we need more tier lists. We do need more tier
lists. I mean, hey, listen, you said you want to do
more midweek content. I do. We can do a tier list together at
some point. I'll even let you pick what the tier list is. And
if it's all Oreo flavors again, I made all do spaghettios, I'll do
Chef Boy or du you know, Kanye West albums. Yeah, I guess
he's yea now more than anything, we're getting getting sidetracked. But there's the
thing. So if you are hoping for a list episode or something with that's
focused around a certain topic or a theme, it's not gonna happen today.
What is going to happen today is just some good old fashioned storytelling. Graham
and I've been playing RPGs for a very very very very very long time,
and this is a chance for us to sit back, relax, and just
share some of our favorite RPG moments that we've ever had. So I have
a drink. I would encourage all of you if you're listening to the podcast,
pause it, go get your beverage of your choice. Mine is off
brand Seltzer water, and sit back and just enjoy. I would love to
hear some of your favorite moments. Not your gram because I'm gonna hear yours
about twenty secods, but I'm yeah. But those of you who are listening,
if you are interested, please let us know in the comments below.
If you're watching this on YouTube, or if you're listening to this on any
of your favorite podcasting sites, should just a message over at desks and dorks
dot Org. It'd be great. I would absolutely love to hear some of
other people's favorite stories, because the one thing I think that brings everyone together
about RPGs is that we all have crazy stories about playing on rpg and that's
what keeps us come back. It's that human element. I don't think it's
the rules or the systems of an RPG, at least not for me,
that keeps me coming back, But it's the experiences that I have with other
people. And I'm super excited to hear yours, Graham. I'm excited to
hear some of mine, and I would love to hear more from everybody else.
So sit back, kick back, have a drink, grab a snack,
and we're gonna we're gonna get into Tails from the Table. And if
people like this, maybe we will do another Tales from the Table episode.
I picked three or four of my all time favorite moments that I have ever
had from RPGs, and yeah, I'm just I'm excited and I'm ready to
go. Though though, I had like a list of like fifty or sixteen
things, and I was like, I would love to talk about any of
these, but you know, here's what we got so yeah, I thought
about my life as a as a role player and a designer in terms of
continuity. So I started picking out these different stories which were either like breakthrough
moments for me or things where I learned something about what was happening, or
things where the script was changed. So I thought about it broadly in terms
of like how these pieces connected, which is how I'm excited to kind of
link these different anecdotes together. Yeah, I did not do that. I
picked I just thought about I literally just I sat down and I do what
I did. What I do for any time I have to make a really
important decision, because I'm a big believer in that a lot of times people
try to ignore their first instinct. Well, they'll try to talk themselves out
of doing what their initial gut reaction is. And this is something that comes
up in therapy too, by the way, which I think is really cool,
is like someone would be like, Okay, what's the first thing that
comes to your mind when you deal with this feeling or this experience, And
a lot of times people tend to ignore that. And so I literally asked
the question of myself, what's the best thing that's ever happened in RPG,
and it was the first three or four things that popped my head. I
circled those immediately. I made my list out. But at the end of
the day, those first three or four things were the ones that were there,
because when I think about what's the best time that I had playing an
RPG, it's these three or four things. And so I've got more.
This is not an exhaustive list of the amazing things that I've gotten to experienced
playing RPGs. But I was just like, I want to talk about the
things that resonated the most clearly with me and with my memories and so and
with some games too. And I tried to mix it up a little bit
too, but like in terms of game, but a lot of these,
a lot of these rhyme with fungeon maggins. If we're being, yeah,
we're being That's where I started. So you know, all right, I'm
ready, Graham. Do you want to kick us off? You want me
to kick I would alive for you to kick us off. All right,
So we're going to talk about one of my favorite moments that has ever happened
in the game of Dungeons Dragons. For those of you who don't know three
point five is the addition that I cut my teeth on. I started in
three, but I cut my teeth in three point five is the addition that
I love the most. It is the RPG that I think is my favorite's
my favorite addition of D and D. And it's a no contest for me.
But the people that I have played Dungeons and Dragons with more than anybody
are my younger brother front of the show, Colin, who's in Australia right
now, and my cousin Joe Um. So every summer, my cousin who
lives in New York, Um, we would drive up to go see him,
and it was basically it would be him, my brother, and me
and the three of us would essentially have the run of this run, the
run of his house because his dad worked. My uncle is like a lawyer
and not lawyer, but he worked for the law school up in Syracuse,
and so he would work really long hours and so essentially you had these three
teenage kids who had a full run of this house. He would just leave
us a pile of like cash and the car keys. Literally it was it
was insane, and I forgot. I forgot. You were born a decade
before me in the Latchkey Kid eighties. Yeah right, so it was how
many how many neighborhood sheds did you burn down accidentally? At No neighborhood sheds,
thankfully, But what would happen was I think if we were probably more
troublemaking kids, I think this would have been worse. So let me set
the stage. They love to Douneon the Dragons. If I was crazy about
Dune the Dragons, Joe and Colin at that age loved it, probably more
than me. My brother is the consummate engineer's brain where he wants to see
a problem and break it. Colin has made more characters, I think than
most people have written anything for D and D. Like cleaning up our basement,
I found a binder of like one hundred and twenty eight character sheets.
Yeah, and these were not in like the printed off ones. These were
the handwritten ones. So he had stat blocks, He had characters for different
situations, He had them flagged by party composition, for strategy. He would
surf forums to learn like busted character builds. That was like his whole stick.
And my cousin was just like I could just do a bunch of jank
nonsense, like if Colin was optimizing it for utter efficiency, my Cousin's like,
what's the weirdest garbage that I can throw together at this moment? Right,
And so the two of them were obsessed. And what this meant was
I would run a series of campaigns every single summer for us. So we
would go out, we would do whatever chaos we're going to do, and
we would come back and we played Dudgeon of Dragons for anywhere from two to
eight hours, and it was awesome. So this is what I call the
Charades incident. In keeping with jank nonsense, my cousin is wizard and decides
he's going to take the spell comprehend languages and detect thoughts Detect thoughts. I'm
like, okay, cool, you get some cool stuff for those of you
not in the know. When you're a wizard in three point five, you
get higher level spells sooner. So these were more powerful spells that he was
getting at an earlier level because of his class. Usually you'll take stuff like
scorching Ray, which lets you disintegrate people by like pointing a finger at them
and then just instantly evaporating a dust, or like some in monster or like
orb of Fire, and my cousin is like, comprehend languages, let's go
nonsense. This culminates in, but it winds up paying off. They wind
up showing up to this ocean town that is having trouble with a sea monster
I had thrown in a sea monster that had been I was looking at the
monster manual, I was like, all right, cool, this is a
sea monster. It was like a sea lion I think is the actual name
of it. Challengeating five, perfect for two adventurers. They go and fight
it and they get absolutely dumpstered. I mean, they got annihilated by this
thing. So they go back to town and they're trying. They're licking their
wounds and trying to figure out, like, crap, are we supposed to
get past this thing. I'm looking at the monster manual, I go,
oh, this thing speaks, doesn't speak, but it has an intelligent score
and it understands aquin as a language. And so my cousin Jess goes detect
thoughts the next time that they saw it, and he hears it. It's
internal monologue in its little Mermaid was no a reel surface orel please wow?
Yeah, it's anyway, So he clearly hears intelligible thoughts in this thing's head.
It's he's hearing its internal monologue, and he goes, I got it.
I cast comprend languages, right, So of course right it was.
It was perfect. It was the wonderful serendipity of me looking at a part
of the staff block. I had never even considered my cousin choosing the absolute
most jank nonsense spell in the entirety of that edition that he could have picked.
And then my brother comes in, because when Colin can't beat a problem
with raw talent and power, he'll just improv So my cousin understands what the
creature is saying internally, but neither of them speak the language that it understands.
And what this epic boss battle fight devolved into was my brother on the
prow of this boat gesticulating with his arms while my cousin is yelling from the
other side of the boat telling him what the thing is thinking, and trying
to get this massive like seven foot tall half orc barbarian who essentially plays charades
with this sea monster. And none of it was done with dice rolls.
It was a literal game of charades that was played between myself, my brother,
and my cousin, and it was done entirely in character, and it
wound up being one of the best moments in that RPG entirely, and I
awarded them bonus experience. They got whatever, But it was such a great
moment because it's it's like a little crystallization of everything that I love about a
dungeon, the Dragon's experience. It is creative problem solving. It is of
course, you're just it's the personalization. Of course I'm going to take the
random nonsense spell. Who knows when it will come in handy, And it
just so happened it came in here, and it was a great example of
a collaborative storytelling effort on the part of the myself as the DM, and
the players at the table. It is one of my favorite Like I could
look at my brother or my cousin now we were like fourteen, I think
when we did this, Yeah, and I could say the Sea Monster Charades
incident, and the two of them will immediately know what I'm talking about,
and we will regale each other with tales of that day as if we are
like war heroes. It is it's ingrained in our brains, and it remains
one of my favorite RPG moments that I've ever had. I've just imagine is
he keeps saying, like sea monster, but you call it a sea lion.
It is now I'm sea lion. I'm just imagining that it's just like
a slightly bigger than normal sea lion. So no, no, no,
no, no, no no, no, you're not You're not allowed.
That's your story. And because of kind of the magic trick of the collaborative
hallucination that is role playing games, you say one thing and everybody starts thinking
it. My example is always like you're in a graveyard, and then everyone's
thinking about different graveyards, like some people have big tubstone, some people it's
all overgrown, you know. Otherwise. So you said sea lion, and
so you're talking about this like sea monster. And usually when I think sea
monster is like a crack in something huge, you know, overwhelming. But
you just said sea lion. So I'm just like, oh, it's just
like a slightly bigger than normal sea lion, and you're talking about this epic
experience, and I'm just imagining it's very confused sea lion being like what okay,
all right, I just want fish man. You're like, uh,
that's how we cut our teeth. It's it's true role playing hero thinking.
For those of you who have not listened to this, the sea lion is
a giant like predatory cat monster with a mermaid tail the size of a buick.
Like, that's basically what. It's a sea lion. You know,
you an of the zoo all we've all seen that thing. All seen sea
lions right next to the beholder. It's it's not it's not an owl bear.
It's a literal sea lion. Like it's it's it's just a pinaped doing
its thing. Um So, to transition to my first story, I want
to ask you a question, Kyle, or it's not about sea lions.
We'll do the sea lion tier list later, you know, maybe next week
on YouTube. What was the first character you ever made? Uh? The
first character that I can remember making was a halfwork Uh. It was a
halfwork fighter, halfwork fighter as a half fork fighter. Was the first character
that I remember fully remember remember their name. I don't. I don't remember
his name. I made two. This is just is gonna sound awful.
I have played dungeons and Dragons as a player twice. That's insane in my
entire life, I've played it twice as a character. Um, but I
remember both. I remember what was his name, law school Lazul. I
remember the other one. I had a half fork fighter and a half our
druid. Um. I remember half fork Druid's name. He was gaz okon
the path Breaker. That's pretty good. That was pretty It was pretty good.
This was a you could do. This is back when you could do
like Races of Destiny was a three point five things. Yeah, there was
a beast tamer druid and that's what I was right. Um so uh so
there's there are some crossovers with our kind of origin story to RP. I
too have a brother, but I have an older brother got out to Shamus
h. Shamus Um introduced me to a lot of things growing up, because
he was four years older than May and five years ahead in school. So,
um, my dad got us into comp books. We'd move around a
lot every few years and we'd always be looking for whatever the new comp book
stores were. I started playing Magic the Gathering in nineteen hundred and ninety five
because my brother found out about magic from true story Newsweek. So the nerd
rolls downhill like imagine, like how cool nerd? You know, imagine the
gathering is particularly like it it's heyday. But my brother was the kind of
nerd who was like, you know, ten and red Newsweek and was like,
oh, this card game. So it was just me and him,
and you know, I went to people's houses and like saw largely video game
RPGs, and so the numbers came at me, flying in the air.
And I've always been a writer kid and a theater kid. I when we
got our first computer, our Windows three point one, I was writing these
like children's books and praying them out and like doing illustrations and stuff. And
Pretend is the best game in the world. Yeah, And like literally every
game I played with my toys or friends on the playground, they were all
Pretend And so I absolutely adored it and was like writing as much as I
could and performing as much as I could. And so being having an older
brother who was in high school meant that I too started on three point out
in two thousand and the year two thousand we had the Adventure Begins Box,
and I can still vividly remember, and I was utterly obsessed. You've talked
about your cousin Joe that's his name and Colin being the obsessed people. That
was me. From the moment I found D and D, I was completely
hooked. I played it as much as possible, I ran in as much
as possible. I feel like the common story with people's lives, just like
Oh, I played a little bit in high school. But it was so
fun. I haven't, you know, haven't played a long time. That
was never me. If I couldn't find people to play with, I would
find people and I would teach them. Imagine I'm like a P. T.
Barnum Bernie made Off kind of figure, but for role playing image.
So the first game, the first game of dn D I ever played.
So I love that you said half work because I have made more half works
than any other any other kind of character in D and D. I think
half works are the best, the most exciting, than the most interesting.
Um and I always felt like they got a bad rap and uh, playing
them against type was always really exciting. Playing a wizard or a sorcerer and
people assuming that you were dumb was like, always really exciting. Um.
But my first D D character was an Elvin Munk. I loved the mugs.
The mugs were cool, and I liked all the limitations to it.
And so my brother was in a D and D game, ran by his
friend, and I was the little brother. They're sixth grade. They're at
the table with all these high schoolers. Are like, what is this lame
sixth grader doing there? I was so pumped. There was one other little
broth at the table, but he was older than me, and so they're
in the middle of this like big dungeon crawl. And so I remember vividly
how much I loved making the character because I gave myself all these little things
that I thought were going to help me on this great adventure. So I
wrote down that I wanted a hand mirror because I was gonna look around corners,
and I put down anti toxin because I was like, that sounds useful.
I don't know what I'm going to run into. And my brother's friends
were kind of weirdos and d bags, and they were just like warndering around
and like be in jerk coughs, and they would open up a room,
see the monsters, close the door, keep going. And I couldn't understand
because I was like, we're here to be adventurers, We're here to like
do things. But it was all just this like comical act and they kept
doing it over and over again. But I'm the tiny ten year old at
the table, so I didn't really know what to do. And eventually they
get to a room with a giant snake in it and they're like nope,
and they slam the door and I'm like okay, and they use my hand
mirror and I look around the corner and I see the huge snake and I'm
like, none of you are gonna go, and they're already gone. They've
gone up to the second floor and they're opening doors and closing them. So
I'm by myself and I get, you know what, No, this is
not why I came here today, And so I chuged my anti venom and
I leap into the room and already I feel like I'm on cloud nine because
I'm imagining my Elven monk hero one on one punching this snake and the other
little brother he's playing this dwarf and Claric. He decides he doesn't want to
leave me, so he does flesh the stone. He melts into the wall.
He starts chucking alchemists fires from his like spot in it. He hits
the snake and then fails. It hits me, and so we're both on
fire and my sixth grade brain is exploding from this image that I to this
day can't get over. I'm punching and slamming this huge snake and it's biting
me, and I'm crapped. We were both on fire. Well, everyone
else left, and you know what, I won. I beat that snake
myself, and so I'm still there, like I survived. I'm burning the
snake, the snakes, and I I could not believe what had happened.
It was the most excited I'd ever been at any point in my life reaching
that point. It was the high point of my life at that point,
and I realized I had been utterly hooked for the next three years. It
was all this kind of stuff. I in sixth grade. I was taking
my notebook to class and rolling. I have pages and pages and pages of
roll forty six drop the lowest, so you just have pages and pages and
pages of like me getting like stat sheets of that. I got in trouble
a lot in school. I don't know if that comes across. But I
got in schools, mention and various things, and so I would get all
my assignments, do them immediately, and then I'm stuck in the corner and
I'm making dungeons on graph peoper and making the first character I fell in love
with, whose name was Grummish. Grummish was a Dwarf. He was half
Dwarf, half Mark, and he gotta thought like this, Grummish, Hey,
I like, I just wanted to be got the zeeing, got the
funny, and he had like a green skin and red hair that came out
of his pot helmet. He's not my favorite character, but Grummish was the
first character that I that I made that I loved. That's wonderful. There's
your there's your first story, and and so funny because all I can think
about is I had a teacher in high school, and I'm one of those
people that my hands have to move in order for me to understand what you're
saying, like some some aspect of this has to be in motion, And
so I would make and I still have it. There's a purple plastic bind
apprickeeper in my basement full of maps, all of which were done in AP
religion and AP philosophy. That was the great thing about taking algebra classes in
middle school and high school is that you have to do graph paper, which
is great from making dungeons. I had all this graph paper that I was
supposed to be doing homework. Gon, so I do the homework and then
use the rest of it to literally just make dungeons. Oh yeah, shout
out to shout out to missus Gadoun, my freshman year teacher. She's like,
you definitely need this graph Yes, I do, You're right, Oh,
man, I love. I think it's I don't know, it's there's
something so like visceral about the fact that you can just talk about that experience
and like it's so not universal, but there's so much like because I guarantee
you, like there'd be so much like bleed over in so much connection between
our stories and like if I chuck a D twenty into a room full of
nerds, I guarantee you there's probably like six people i'd hit who are like,
yeah, man, I was doing maps in class too. Like there's
something so I don't know, there's something universal about that appeal and about that
process that I just I love. I think it's just freaking awesome. UM,
oh my god. So I'm gonna talk the next The next story that
I've got is a story about an experience that I've actually told you about before,
when you and I first met and you were the moderator on the panel
for the Level one anthology. Heck yeah, because you and I have very
similar feelings about prep um in a game. I dislike it. Um.
If you had a like a quick phrase to some of that, what would
you say, rep makes me want to get off this mortal coil? Um
shorter. Yeah, preparation leads to perishing. It's closer. That's closer.
Yeah, Oh prep is death. Yeah, that's great. Um. In
any case, stick with that one. Um. One of the things that
I do as I run kids d D group, and one of them or
two of them actually listened to this podcast is part of the reason I don't
swear in the podcast, or I try very hard to there. I should
have had forehead because I want to acknowledge the existence of sex, drugs,
and cursing, because that's the history of role playing it is. But this
story is dedicated largely for them. So I ran two years ago, I
ran a summer D and D camp for kids, and none of them had
ever played, and it was a magical experience. And I mean that literally.
They were some of the most creative, interesting, introspective people that I've
gotten to play a game with before, and it was glorious to watch them
grow both as players and people throughout that whole campaign. And it's been cool
because now, like we're three years beyond that camp, or two and a
half years beyond that camp. One of them is graduating high school soon.
I got to meet one of their girlfriends, which was really interesting that he
played D and D and now he has a girlfriend she and she plays with
him now, which is fantastic. UM. Shout out to Lane. He
wrote an RPG and thanked me in the comments for it because the one day
he's like, well, you wrote After the Rain, can you bring that
in and play with us? And we played it and he was like cool
and left and took his allowance money and bought a copy of my game for
himself, had me sign it, and then yeah, double deep in at
work, listen, listen, but I love that gentleman. We got him,
Um, we got I had one of my kids make a presentation about
why Taco Bell is the best restaurant um the same kid who painted Fantasy over
Lord, Jeff Bezos. So like, this is just a great group of
kids, but it's the end of camp, the first time that i'd met
them, the first year that i'd met them. And if you were going
to end a session re union dragons, Graham just just reach back into that
that elf monk, alchemist, fire snake punching state of mind. What's the
one monster you want to fight? Knowing this is your last hurrah for D
and D camp to ask red dragon, a dragon? A dragon? So
of course I threw a dragon at him. I had to what color of
dragon? I threw a white dragon at them. It's all right because our
store has a couple like really really like contest competition winning ministure painters, and
one of them had painted up a colossal adult white dragon miniature. So it's
about the size of a football, and the kids had seen it a couple
of times, but it was not an eyeshot, and no one noticed until
I reach in to the box of stuff and slam it on the table.
And it was this wonderful moment where all of those kids, the kids had
done it perfectly. They realized they didn't have enough strength to beat this thing
on their own, and so the first part of the campaign was they knew
that something was coming, and the kids were like, well, we have
all these friends, because that was the one thing because their kids and one
of them saw the allies box on the character sheet and goes, I want
allies and spent the entire campaign making allies. And I was like, I'm
going to make that important now, and so we spent the first half it
was entirely role playing, the kids going to the different parts of the Kingdom
they'd visited and literally assembling their Justice League Avengers Crew of all of the NPC's
they'd made friends with throughout the course of that whole, Like, it's the
end of Avatar, dude, it was the Eclipse. It's the Eclipse.
Oh it's the swamp Benders. Yeah, it was. That was They're like,
oh, my god, they're the nalls that think you're a god.
And my Bard's like, yeah, I am a god. My worshippers,
oh there's the ranger that punched you in the fay, like and it was
great. And what happened was this incredible thing where we fought, we fought,
we fought, we fought, we fought, and every soft and I
would take notes behind the DM screen. The notes meant nothing. There was
there was no no, there was no hit points, there was no tracking.
One of my kids, who God love her to death. She's a
great kid, but has been has been struggling a little bit with some self
esteem over that last week because she was like, you know, I think
people like me being here, but I feel like I'm not contributing to the
group. Um. And that was really tougher because she was smart enough to
realize. She's like, I'm not really pulling my weight rolls wise, and
everyone else in the group is kind of like has their own thing that they're
really good at, and she's like, I'm just like and she she was.
She's very good at entertaining people, she was very good at diplomacy checks,
she's very good at making the allies, bringing people together. But she's
like, I don't really do a lot when we're in combat. And so
she had put herself in a great position during that combat. She was like,
all right, cool, it's distracted, it doesn't notice me. I'm
gonna run over to where there's this crossbow. I'm gonna take the crossbow and
I'm gonna shoot it. And I'm like, all right, roll it.
Jess so happened to be a crid and I was like, great, I'm
thinking to myself, I'm like, depending on how high she rolls, this
dragon's dying here. And she got like seven and eight, and without a
word, I just very gently took the miniature and just tipped it over and
they went bevistic. We play in the back room of our local game store
and they're all like you right day. And usually I'm like, guys,
you can't yell. And I look at them. I was like, all
right, we're gonna run around this room in a circle. Oh yeah,
we did. We all just ran around the room in the circle. I'm
running around with them. The stormer comes back here, We're like, yeah,
we're doing great. It's like me and like six kids or street like
it. Hearkens back to one of the best and smartest things that I've heard
about role playing games. This goes back to something that you and I talked
about in that panel talk, which is the dragon dies when it stops being
fun to fight. There's there's that apocryphal story about a person walking through a
convention sees people dming and realize a TikTok video it need I saw it.
I saw it as a Reddit post and a Twitter thread first, so I
think this has been floating around forever. But the story basically goes persons walking
through this convention see somebody scribbling in their notebook as their party is fighting a
dragon, and they noticed that the dungeon master is not recording hit points,
and they flagged them down afterwards, and they asked, how do you know
when the dragon dies? And the dungeon master just goes The dragon dies when
it stops being fun to fight. And watching that group of kids who had
gone through like so much together that summer and had forged these friendships and forged
these bonds and learned a little bit about each other and learned a little bit
about what they want to watch them sort of come together like this. It
has never reinforced for me the idea that the dragon dies when it stops being
fun to fight more in that moment, because every single one of them got
to feel like a hero, And that to me is like, it's everything
the D and D's about. So I love it. That's one of my
favorite moments. I know what story is a thematic connection to that one.
But bringing up the whole idea of like the killing the dragon, the dragon
dies, that it stops being fun for me has always been true, and
when I was too young to understand, I very quickly realized the uncomfortable tension
before I was like a Capital G game designer that there was two weird things
happening in Dunderstand Dragons, that there was these crunchy rules, but then also
the fun happened, which was the narrative the fiction being created from it,
And so what was the flow chart and why was that occurring? And what
was a bad game versus what was a good game? And how did these
things happen? And you have a DM screen and you have the fiction,
you have the rules, but how much you narrate, how much you describe,
there's nothing that really dictates that level. And so like very early on,
I remember flavor swapping. I remember pulling things out because we would get
in it fights in eighth grade about you know what. We didn't know what
metagaming was, but you were still like, does your character know this thing
is week to fire? Does it matter? And then why is that important?
And so we're all having these you know, this thing runs downhill,
and so I started running things and I realized I have the stat block,
but like what if I just make something up about what it is? And
then all of a sudden I realized that I was scaring the heck out of
my my friends, which is what I wanted, Like, yes, it's
a dragon. But then all of a sudden You're like, Okay, well
what do I know about the monster manual? The other, the other part
of this univer Hurstle dungeon making thing you've talked about is the memorization of the
monster manual, Like it's just fun, Like the kid carries it around.
Um. I remember being in high school and I ran into a kid like
one of my mom's art openings, and he was literally carrying around a three
point zero uh monster Manual. And so we were talking about like how to
kill it, kill a tresque and stuff? Oh have to how do you
kill a tress? How how did you guys? Because that was always a
point of contention for us, we had the same debate like how what's the
best way to do it? I mean, it depends on the addition because
the fifth edition one is like kind of whatever, and then the third edition
one like regenerates and then you have to cast wish and like all this crazy
stuff. So all right, sorry, you didn't mean torupt your grandmas.
We had we had the same My brother and I used to go back,
what's the best way to kill the treste? What's the best way to kill
a tarrasque? So? Uh, something that you and I have in calm
is that as adults we've run lots of games for kids, and but as
a kid, I also ran lots of games for kids constantly. Um,
and so I feel like I want to tell the opposite of that story,
the idea of all of these kids screaming and being exciting, and for me,
the strongest memories I have of of D and D, particularly in that
era of like six seventh eighth grade, where I was constantly playing. If
there was a kid having a sleepover, I'm like, we're playing D and
D all night, right Like I was a pusher, you know, I
was. I was a p T. Barnum type And um, I'm wake
up, it's going to be photoshop pictures of your face on I know it.
I know. I am like Uh. For me, I have so
many representative stories about D and D, and I think about role playing in
general. But for me, the things that are really universal about D and
D is not these huge, wonderful you know, high five in moments of
a NAT twenty and killing the monster or great role playing or whatever. It's
absolute catastrophic failures. There's something about D and D that like brings out the
sixth grader out in everybody where it's all madness. It doesn't really make sense.
So I I in seventh grade. I switched schools, and so I
went to the game club to run stuff. And at the game club there
it was like nine tables of kids playing chess and the tenth table me running
Dungeons and Dragons. And I didn't know how many kids are there, and
they all showed up, so there were nine kids. I was running D
and D for now. I don't remember if you remember the adventure box very
vividly, but the very first adventure is two rooms. You open a door
and there's goblins, yes, and then there's a second door and there's a
traps chest in a second room. Okay. I played with one of my
friends who is also seventh grade and eight sixth graders who had never played before.
And so what happened was I gave the opening narration, I plopped them
in front of that that first door, and I said, what do you
do? And the eight sixth graders are all kind of confused, and my
friend dadda, I've played at least once before, and one of Graham's campaigns.
He opens the door and rushes forward and then immediately gets surrounded by all
the goblins. So he has nowhere to go. He's surrounded by all sides
by goblins and him, and there's eight people all jamming to try and get
in the door, and none of them can do it. So every round
the goblins are slowly hitting him down and he'll like hack one, and he'll
hack one, and then he'll get to one of the kids smashing clown caring
to try and get in, and they're like, well, what do I
do? And we have it on the little grid because this is long before
I said, you know what, grids are stupid. We're going to do
only Theater of the Mind forever, which is long, long long. When
I started to do I said, I don't know, maybe you do a
strength check to get to get him out of the way, and they said
okay, and that's all they did. And so everyone's turn was grabbing the
person in front of them chucking back. They'd move up, somebody else would
take a strength check, trust them. And so my friend is slowly getting
hacked to death by one, two, three, four, five goblins who've
completely surrounded him, and his back is to an ever increasing rotating series of
other morons trying to throw each other over their shoulders to get in, and
he's getting lower and lower and lower, and he has just like a couple
hit points left, and finally the guy in the front has the initiative and
he like knocks my friend out of the way and they push in, and
slowly but surely, the other eight pieces come and decimate the last few goblins,
and now all of a sudden, it's my friend barely alive and the
only one that really knows and the other eight sixth graders who are like,
yeah, we did it, guys great like unaware of just like the pure
frustration and chaos that it occurred. And what does my friend do again,
He's the only one who knows what to do, So I say, okay,
there's another door he goes aha, and of course he's the first one
on the ball, goes inside. Okay, there's a chest man, well
I open it. It's trapped. He gets hit with an arrow and dice
because he was so weak from getting the ship being out of him from the
goblins. And at that point club time was over and everyone went to class,
and I was like, that's D and D. And to me,
that is still one of the most D and D stories to me that I've
ever heard, because it's chaos and tragedy and stupidity. And then just like
a truly epic failure at the end of top out a lot. That's D
and D to me. We could think about as that SpongeBob he was like,
we did it. We saved the city and everything's burning down. Sure,
it's like all the six we didn't. We saved the city of your
friends, like bleeding out, grilling on the floor. There's like twitching goblins,
like just dying, like oh my god. You know, I feel
like tell Us from the Table, catastrophic failures is its own list and its
own is its own episode. Um, because I want to close off with
the one type of story that I think every D D player has, and
that is a dice roll story. Every d D player just told a dice
roll story. No, I told the story about planning, about preparation or
the lack thereof, and about how teamwork and strategy mattered. This is a
story about strict no no, don't off no no, no, okay,
that's Bernie made off to you. Your story was about how the hit points
the dragon didn't matter right, about how the girl felt bad and she got
the final die role she did. That's why the kids running around. The
kids are running around because they got to kill the best monster. But this
is a dice roll, so a true dice roll story. So let me
only let me set the stage. Let me set the circus stage. Let's
do it. Now, you're speaking my language. Oh I love you,
mister maid Off. You're good. Can I interest you in a definitely not
Ponzi's game? You always doesn't know? Does it? It's a gift?
What do I say? Nine people trying to cram in to get to the
Yeah, my first Ponzi's game. It's trapped chest dot com. Yeah,
honestly, try not trapped chest. Trapped chest dot com sounds like a D
and D apparel website. Uh okay, minor tangent did were you did you
miss It's a trap dot net? Were you around for? That was the
Star Wars thing somebody got there. There was a series of these things where
they would just play gifts on repeat right that it was hosted time was d
GEO Cities It might have been there was something. Yeah, of course I
remember this. I had a by the time I got to college. One
of my call of Cthulu buddies was absolutely obsessed with Animal act bar So any
any point crop he would that's that's what it's a trap dot net was,
And it was just a gift of it on Lugar It's up trapp. Oh.
I don't know why that was rent free in my brain, but it
does. So to give you some context first, before this um, every
summer when I was in college, we would go to my friend's dad's beach
house and we would hang on the beach all day and we would play D
and D at night. It is like every nerds dream. We had brought
my friend, who is still a professional actor. He does like dinner,
theaters and all this other stuff. He had never played D and D before.
So let me introduce to you trogdoor the Bernonader, which so he so
he so he this creative person and stepped from beloved flash videos from Star Runner.
Yeah, which I also think is its own unique D and D thing.
Did you have people who like every time they like they would again we're
talking about the full D and D. I was the only person who couldn't
stand Homestar Runner, and literally every person also was like, this is the
greatest thing of all time. I'm like the early days of the Internet,
Like, let's let's chill out. Well, just like how many YouTube has
only been around for one year's how many Lego lisses have you have you played
with? Like? How many legalist is? How many ans? Honestly,
it's uh the Hobbits are uh dais and card Yeah, that's yeah, that's
that's what I remember. And there's just I just I vividly remember so many
people I would play with would name their characters after other fantasy properties or other
properties in general, more than how many Lego losses I've played with. Is
the what I call arragoning in the corner um you're doing the establishing. People
talk a lot about the tavern. I don't care, like leave the tavern
alone. That's fine, But I am somebody who wants to share the spotlight
and every and everybody all the time. Like it's very important that girl who
is feeling you know that that moment you very smartly gave her the spotlight when
she needed to do. I think that's that'll be our next thing, which
is DM skills. What are the skills? D yes? Yes? What?
What? What? What is important? And for me a huge one
is is spotlighting. How do you listen? And that's the prep is death
thing. Prep is death is PREPA's death because you want to listen to people
and you pull the stories being told and you beat in the middle and that's
what you create. You know, that's the magic. So the spotlighting that
occurs is so so so important. Um, why was I talking about this
ring in the char As soon as you said, Eric Gorning in the corner,
pretty excited the prancing pony. It's the prancing pony. The more than
Lego losses is when I go around because I want in that first hour of
an RP session, I want everyone to fall into character. I want to
really kind of feel like what it means to be this mind and think like
this other person, and so I do a lot of Okay, well,
why that's happening? What are you doing? It's it's it's it's just as
powerful, not more than what do you do, but more that like you
just keep shifting around. Oh, I just observe. I'm observing, and
I'm like, that's fine, okay, but especially when they're like in a
corner, like looking at things like okay, so you have nothing to do,
but your air got into the corner, like it's it's a it's a
round room. Even in a round room, you would find a corner,
a shadowy corner to be go hiding in, said like, smoke your pipe.
They got long cape. Oh always always, that's what I call ergon
in in the corner. I've never heard it described that before, but I
will be stealing that turn of phrase. That's great, yea ergoning in the
corner is So this this person, my friend Adamstramsky, awesome dude, decided
he was going to make a half work. So already we know this character
is going to be great. We're already on board, right, and it's
a half work monk. Oh. And this is what I love about Adam
and where a great player will shine is that he purposely made. But his
name is trog Door. You've lost me, I know. But here's the
thing. Trog Door wound up becoming the beating heart and soul of this group
because trog Door's intelligence was three sure, but trog Door's charisma was four.
Trog Door's wisdom was six. To rog Door was as dumb as a bag
of hammers, and it would usually get everybody into trouble. And props to
Adam who role played that character beautifully because he did the unintelligent thing without it
being annoying or without it being a distraction, which is really hard. He
was never a nuisance, and it was always in the service of advancing the
goals of the party and other players, or complicating those goals in a way
that was really meaningful. And so because of that nuance and his skill with
that, the party grew really really attached to trog Door, to the point
where even when trog Door would botch something and make their lives so much harder,
there like it was the classic like Brady Bunch, they were like trog
Door. This all culminates when the group finds out that there is a vampire
living on the outskirts of town who has kidnapped a child, and the party
had an immaculately planned entry strategy. They had resources prepped, they had cool
spells. At one point we had a warlock blast a snow bank and then
the cleric cast light on the snow that flew up in the air. Because
this is the science major, was the cleric. He goes, well,
snow is ice crystals, so if I cast light on this, it should
theoretically refract and reflect the light around the room that the vampire is in.
And I'm like, that's not how that works, But that's such a cool
idea, then absolutely you're gonna do that. It's gonna be great. So
it's always the quote unquote science majors that come up with the most garbage science.
It's not the people who are like, I don't know math, you
know. But it was something nutty tum and despite all those things, the
plan were to um the vampire winds up killing despite the fact that it didn't
make any sense, it didn't work well, and they had great plans.
They were like using cover, they were trying this stuff, and it wound
up being horrible and trog door is Lahill Mary for the group and trog Door's
one goal was He's like, I'm guant to burn alive fire and trog Door
goes, it's my time to shine and throws every lit thing he came finding
into the barn and sets it on fire, trapping the vampire inside, giving
the party time to escape with the kid, but trapping trog Door in the
burning building with a very angry vampire. It did not go well for him.
He died. Adam is now, to his credit, totally okay with
trog Door being dead, and he just goes, ha, you know what,
though, I'm gonna roll if I get to twenty, it's got to
come back alive. Rolls a twenty and I'm like, okay. Everyone's like
that's really funny at him, but that's not how that works. He goes,
what if I roll a second twenty, that's like, you're not gonna
And before I can say you're not gonna do that, he rolls a second
twenty. For those of you who've never played before, usually in Dudgeons Dragons,
a natural twenty it's an automatic success on anything. At this point.
The energy at this table is electric. There are two twenties rolled in two
roles, and what is the likelihood, what is the probability of that you
do two twenties in a row? Come on, don't google it. Don't
google it. This is easy math, my friend, it's not. And
as a D and D you should know this. No I don't. I
don't tell me what the math is. It's one over twenty times twenty therefore
something or thousand, four hundred. Yeah, that it's a one in four
hundred chance. Same thing for one and ones. Because there's an old kind
of house rule that probably started in a D and D. If you roll
two twenties, you automatically kill a thing. If you roll two ones in
a row, you kill yourself. It's a house roll. And there have
been some third moments. I there's a lot of tumbler stories, which is
like, we had this terrible plan and we rolled a nat twenty or two
twenties in a row, which is how I seduced the dragon, and now
we're married, you know, so, and two twenties in a row,
twenties in a row, and so I look at him and I go,
all right, you roll a third twenty. We'll resurrect trog door. Okay,
could you do that? Math. Now, now I've walked you through
the first one out it is summer four hundred times twenty is something eighty thousand,
eight thousand, I don't know. It's eight thousand, right, not
one thousand. You got it? Day Um he's He's like, yeah,
I'll run it. Why not? Um rolls it. All of us standing
up. It's three am. Washes, the dice goes wobble wobble, wobble,
wobble, wobble wobble, natural twenty and we went nuts. He hit
the one out of eight thousand chances and we went nuts. It was awesome
to this day, one of the most because again it was not a planned
thing. Um. It was not like I wasn't going to like allow this
to full resurrection to happen. But it worked out and it remains like one
of my favorite moments because this character that everyone thought, oh it was it
was fun because it was this one. There was a character that everyone thought
was going to be a joke, wound up doing a really meaningful sacrifice and
then wounding up somehow to the sheer power of luck and buffoonery getting his way
out of it, and we tied it into the story a little bit more,
there was some how do you get resurrected? You're burying the lead?
How did Brogdor the Burnonator? How did he get resurrected? How did he
get resurrected? Part so who cares? Who cares? So? If you
so? In Dungeons Dragons in three point five, which is the edition,
were playing, Uh, there is a god of travel and I'm going to
butcher his name. I think it's far Again far Leton, something who has
a fu In any case, trog Door had ingratiated himself to the local church
of Farleton, because the one thing that they talk about in that faith is
that it is the journey more than the destination. And no character exemplified that
mythouse more than trog Door did. Trog Door's whole stick was bernonading, but
it was bernonating. But it was not caring about where he was headed.
It was about figuring. It was about enjoying where the friends. It was
about the friends he burned along the way. You're right, but it was
just about living in the moment and enjoying where he was in that journey.
Um. And it was a facet of that character that came up as a
joke like it was like, haha, it turns out the real things we
burned where the friends we made along the way, but but wound up being
an actual, meaningful part of his character. But wait, but wait,
wait a second, we did burn friends. So trog Door in the afterlife
basically meets this god and he's like, you know what, man, kind
of like you, kind of like your style, So tell you what.
I'm gonna give you a do over. And it was and role played this
entire conversation. Just imagine like this an infinite, all knowing, omniscient being
and an idiot having a conversation. And it was great. God, we're
not all knowing or we're all powerful, you know. It was. It
was a super been around longer now, I mean maybe I don't know.
Any case, it was a fun time for us, and it remains my
favorite dice roll story because he hit the one out, he hit the one
twenty, hit the second twenty, hit the third twenty, and then by
the end of it it was great. So yeah, the die roll stories,
they're they're they're hard to translate because it's very much a you had to
be there one it is. But I felt like I wanted to talk about
one. I had to get at least one in there. Yeah it is.
It is the only die roll story on this list though, Yeah,
you got two stories in there. Oh my god, get out of here,
get all right. I would have loved the the too, the gods
of the burning building. Everyone's screaming, and you know it's It's very much
the Blue Fairy at the end of Pinocchio coming down and being like, you've
done it, trog Door, You've you've You've become a real orc and then
like resurrected it because like divine interventions, a thing and a sixth pike mid
point everyone, I think like clarics. Love those moments where you're like,
oh, I got to talk to my god once. It was dope,
right, yeah, because they rolled two twenties in a row and they got
to talk to their god, Like that's how it works. Yeah, it's
all oh yeah, and again diceral story is not always my favorite, but
that one was just it was a story that resonates and I still think about
it sometimes, still like it. No, I like trog Door, I
like I like I like the the heart and soul of a Party. I
love the characters that become jokes that like everyone then takes seriously like that's that's
awesome, and it is. It is very d and d to give a
character an incredibly stupid name as a joke. And then Sessions and Sessions later
realized that, like you deeply care about this fictional stupid joke to Maine,
Yeah, like that's that's magic, that's alchemy, that's that is and that's
the beauty of dn D. All Right, Graham, Um, one last
story, I think, and then think will end it for today, and
then yeah, so I have a little bit of a different story at least
it's it's a it's a little bit different, um, because it kind of
goes outside the magic circle a little bit and it talks about real life.
It talks about friendships, and it talks about some some stuff that's a little
bit painful. But it has has made made me think about it ever since.
So I gave up on dn D pretty quickly because I was I was.
I didn't know why, but I was curious about other numbers and systems
like widen numbers do these things. And in middle school, uh, the
games I played all the time when I would go home on my computers fall
at one and two, which, funny enough, years later I get to
learn that they're based off of gurps and then got changed. So there's a
reason why they felt so familiar to me. They felt like role playing games.
And I thought I was the most obsessed person with uh with the fall
At one and two systems, but there was somebody online who had translated the
rules into a pretty crunchy P and P system, which I then ran from
my two closest friends, the first the character who's been killed by the trapped
chest, and my other closest friend. And so at that point it was
like sleepover as constantly, so we're, you know, we're doing D and
D and eventually I'm like, I want to run my own Fallout game.
And this was an eighth grade and so we're we're all doing this game,
and we we become friends into into high school, and it becomes one of
those things where like because everyone's sitting puberty and changing, like we all grew
apart as friends. And every time I would try and go back and like
reclaim these two friendships, like I would get rebuffed, you know, they
would tell me that they like didn't want to talk to me again, that
they had drown to different We went to different schools. My closest friend ended
up going to a private school, and everybody's going through things high school,
it's it's teenagers. But I my two closest friends, who I had played
countless campaigns with like in high school, just stramp didn't want to talk to
me anymore. So I end up going to college and meeting a new group
of friends, and then ran coll Cthulhu and Vampire their Mask Garade, And
that's a whole other swoop of lessons that I learned playing those games around those
things, running sessions that didn't have a single die roll, and then these
these nineteen year olds are like, that was the best session I've ever had?
Why didn't we roll any dice? And and my good friend he had
gone off to another private college. So I was. I was in the
hometown, the hometown public university, and he had gone off to this expensive
school. And so I had a group of friends who had been going to
the local college with a couple of years now, and so we had a
couple of houses where everyone would hang out at and we would throw parties and
do other things. And one semester, I guess he got ed of his
you know, forty fifty thousand dollars a year college and came back to Slummett
with us in Albuquerque, and he started to cruise around in the friend groups
that I was in, and I hadn't seen him for years and years and
years. The last thing was, like I said of an email the summer
after a senior year, and he was like, I just don't want to
talk to you ever again, and you know, we're not friends. And
I'm like, okay, you know, you take a deep breath and you
keep going yeah. And so it's a party. It's a it's a Saturday
night. My friends are the all everybody I know, and I'm like,
oh my god. There he is, like that's really weird. And I
try and say hi to him, and he completely ignores me. He blows
me off. I'm like, okay, fine, and acknowledging the fact that,
you know, drinking is happening. People are starting to get more comfortable
with each other. People are starting to get loosened up. And it's a
couple hours later into the party and I'm in the kitchen and my friend,
who hasn't said two words to me and said in years, he like stumbles
into the kitchen. It more or less traps me in front of the the
refrigerator and goes, hey, Graham, and I go, yeah, already
confused that, like he's speaking to you, right, and he goes apropos
of nothing out of nowhere. He goes, remember that Fallout game that we
used to play all the time where it turned out that we were on a
brain in outer space and we weren't even on Earth and it gave us psychic
powers. And I go, yeah, of course I do. I remember
every detail of that game, you know, was very meaningful to me.
And he goes, wait, we should finish it some time, and I
go, sure, man, let's do it. And he wanders off and
I saw him intermittently the next couple of years. Ultimately he finished his education
at the other college. And I remember like different friends coming out to me
that night and being like, who was that guy because they had never really
seen him before, Like he was kind of a big douchebag. And that
also kind of made me smile and laugh because I felt kind of vindicated,
because I felt like my heart had been ripped out from these these different friendships
and whatever. Yeah, but like what stuck with me was like we were
eighth grade, We're doing sleepovers, and I had this Fallout game and I
was experimented with all these like weird things. It was. It was psychological,
and you know, he like fought fought his father and a dream sequence
and like all this different stuff. And my big reveal was that it wasn't
the Apocalypse. They were on this satellite which essentially a brain matter ASTEROIDA and
then so that's why they were all like giddy, psyching stuff. And he
had written me off and decided he never wanted to talk to me again,
rebuffed multiple attempts over years to do it, and then sees me again.
We were both like twenty three, and that's what he wanted to talk about,
and also said, let's play again sometime, Let's finish that game.
And of course we never did, and of course we never talked about it
again. But like a like a splinter in his mind, it's stuck there
those sleepovers, and it mattered like he went off. Maybe he played DD
with other people, maybe he didn't. You know, I was still asking
like, oh man, how do I tell better stories in Vampire? How
do I, you know, really mess with people? And call cthulhum.
But this stuck with him for years, and I think that is truly what
I've seen over and over and over again over the years, why I love
tabletop role playing games, why I love making these sessions, why I'm doing
with those kids who ran around the back room high fiving each other, probably
gonna tell that story, and one reason or Anothery're gonna be like, you
had to be there. But we killed that dragon. That was real,
That really happened. When I fought that snake, that Elvin monk, that
was it's real. It happened like there's no difference between that and finding a
twenty dollars bill and that feeling pretty good right, the thing that happened in
my life and benefited it. Role playing games are real and they affect people
because of how we are as humans and narrative creative machines. I have seen
this alchemy occur over and over again where people love it. I mean,
people love terrible TV shows because they love the characters. When people love the
characters, they make across the table when they're like Trogdor, I feel,
I feel real emotion, feel something right. That is the most real thing
that we as humans get to experience. What I love about your story is
it cuts to the heart of why role playing games are great. And I
think while we're doing this episode at all, is there is something so visceral
and so perfect and so creative and so human about these fantasy worlds that we
make. And I think that's what has kept me coming back to RPGs in
general, whether it's Dungeons Dragons or Fiasco or Dread or After the Rain or
Under the Autumn Strangely or any of those right like, like, the games
that I keep thinking about are the games that connect me to other people.
And I think that's because, truthfully, that's why I play RPGs is I
want to connect to others, and that giving the opportunity to make those connections
with people who I do not maybe I know really well and I get to
know something or learn something more that's new about them, or maybe I've never
met them at all, and I get to get closer to them is such
a meaningful thing. And I can't imagine a better story to end on than
that one. Graham, so thank you for sharing that. That's awesome.
I'm sorry your friends are jerks. It was a very long time ago.
But you know I can, I can still be sorry except a former friend
confronts you in the kitchen to talk about your eighth grade sleep eight grade sleep
over the r But you never know what resonates with people. UM, you
know what, I don't know if I want to do a weird question or
not. I kind of want to leave it. I kind of want to
leave us with that story, and I think I'm going to UM. If
you have enjoyed this content, and I sincerely hope that you have, can
follow us in all of your favorite podcasting sites, Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
Joe Chavan, you can follow us whatever, Buy Copy After the Rain,
all that jazz. I'm actually gonna make a special ask everybody listening to this
episode, if you get the chance to go go play an RPG in the
next couple of days. Go go do it with somebody you know, Go
do it with somebody you love. Goes do it with somebody you'd like to
get to know a little better, and then maybe let us know what kind
of stories you create, because ultimately that's why Deskin doorcs exists. By Graham
and I are friends like it. Like you know, it's crazy to think
that like RPGs have given us both so much, but so so the last
game that you have written and have put out as a Fear Within, have
you gotten to make what are the monsters called? They're called They're called entities?
Entities? Yes, and so we met because you talked about Vessel,
and I really want to play Vessel because it taps into a lot of things
that I love about role playing and share with the people design. It's a
two person RPG where essentially you take turns role playing for each other as an
entity in somebody's head, and then the human tappied into this like et eleven
iron giant thing, which is great. Have you made an entity? I
have made an entities. If I think that's what I want you to tell
me about an entity you've made, I'll tell you about one and that will
be our all right? I love That would be a weird question. So
what again talking about connection, connection between players, connection between characters, And
so I have made two entities in the times that I have gotten a chance
to play. I Fear Within just great because I don't always get a chance
to play my own RPPs very or D and D very often two times maybe
three actually, But I use the same character for this from two adventures.
So like again, like as a writer theatery person, I loved writing,
directing, and acting, and for me, each one taught me something about
it. There's the thing about the Forever DM. But I love being a
PC and I love running games, and I going back and forth taught me
how to do the other one better. So I like playing RPGs. But
the thing is, I am always the one with the rule book, and
I'm always the one that is willing to take on the play gm less game
PREPA's Dead, or you could design a gm less game which desks and dirks
has one coming in the next year or two, which is really exciting.
But that's all I can say about that. So I have made two entities,
two monsters in my life for a Fear Within, and I want to
talk about the one that I did for the initial play test. So in
a Fear Within, entities are a reflection of the fears of their child and
a reflection of that character. And so my good friend Michael Whalen, who
was on the Rootless podcast, he plays a cat basically like a cat roning
in that podcast. Great dude, awesome guy, decided he was going to
make every Eric gorning team, it's going to make an edgy team, that
nobody wanted to talk, that he didn't want to talk to anybody. His
goal was can I blend into the background, and can I force people away
from me? Like his goal as a character was to keep people at arm's
length. But his theme, which is an aspect of the game. It's
think of it as like what your character needs to achieve to become the person
they're supposed to be, was to get over that fear. Was to realize
that not everyone is out to get you, and that maybe there's there's there's
a reason that there are connections between us. And so my entity having he
had this wonderfully fleshed out story, and for me, the second we had
finished that conversation, there was really only one entity that I could do,
and so I made a character called Beacon. And Beacon is a wraith like
figure composed right excellent point Beacon, Hello Beacan. Uh No, he's called
Beacon. So he's composed of the swirling bits of brass and glass from several
thousand sirens and fog horns and alarms, and Beacon's entire stick is that could
be loo, could be he could be cold, beuh. And so what
he does is he amps up the sensory to draw attention to some aspect.
So if it's noise, he can make people here, really here, to
the point their ears like bleed because everything is so loud. She can amplify
his voice. Um, but he has to have his kid. His power
is stronger the more the target of it knows about his kid. And so
at one point, like there was a really cool moment where he is being
pursued by a figure who has been possessed by the Fear, which is this
big, big bad that is consistent every game of a fear within, and
the Fear possesses a security guard and Beacon's powers are not enough to like overwhelm
this possessed security guard, and so it like he's freaking out. Beacon is
inside of his head trying to be like, dude, you gotta do something,
because this is we're gonna die. Both of us are gonna die.
We're gonna die. We're gonna die right now, right here, We're gonna
die. And it's this constant back and forth and shout out to Michael,
who just did a fantastic job of role playing this scene because at one point
he just stops and screams, I just want people to like me, straight
into the face of this guy, and Beacon is just like, there's silence
for the first time. He's like, you know what, get enough,
kid, and then all the dude senses pop off all at once, and
it was cool. It was a great moment. Shout out to Michael for
letting me do that, and shout out to you, Graham for I was
like asking me that question because I haven't thought about the entities that I got
to play in a while. Graham, tell me about your entity, because
yeah, I like it. I was thinking about it because you know,
you name drop your games all the time. But like, I am like
your friend, but I'm also a fan. There's things that happened there that
I think you're interesting. You have your stick, you run through it,
be sure to check after the rain destin georgs dot com. But it's all
very automated. And then today you said you hardly ever played D and D,
which to me part of the joy. The real joy is not just
like the character making, because you kind of reference that early on. There's
a lot of things, particularly with the crunchier D and D additions, with
people on message boards doing builds and then posting them, but then like not
you're like, oh this is overpowered. Oh this is underpowered, but like
put it into action again. It's the like fiction first stuff or like does
it really matter? And like what's happening? It's all gonna lead away anyways,
And so simple decisions that like really tell a lot are always more impactful
to me. These are the games that I am drawn to. And so
what I liked about the play test that I got to do with you was
the description of making the entity, which is appearance, hunger, power,
and limitation. And so it's back to the days of making your own character
sheet. And I just have a piece of paper in front of me,
and I write those things down and I say I'm done. I don't need
a three hundred page rule book. I don't need to look at these charts,
and I have complete ownership over this thing. And nobody told me what
I can and can't do. So I made ten thousand tiny razor sharp slugs.
That's his name. His appearance is ten thousand tiny razor sharp slugs.
His hunger is human hair. His powers a weird one. I love that
one. I'm sorry, I love that one. When you were doing your
character introduction for this latist, I loved that hunger so much because it was
so unsettling. I was like, what's like hair? You know, I'm
a spooky lad. At one point, one of my PCs described my campaigns,
or my gram pains, as they said, as aggressively strange, which
I feel like I ought to be on my right the grand pain. Yeah,
also not mine, uh like uh, And they were referred to as
aggressively strange. So, you know, a shout out to the many really
really bizarre campaigns that have run over the years. So appearance, hunger,
human hair, it's power. Well, I'm ten thousand tiny Razor Sharp's slugs
and my limitation is salt tea food. That's it, and that's it,
and that's my character. And I've have it there in this little slab of
paper, and I'm like, I'm ready to go, like that. It
was not done, and I want to know more. That's that's tabletop role
plane and and that's and that is the true beauty of tabletop ARPGs. And
that's what I really love about it. And I think that's gonna be a
great place for us to end it. Thank you all so much for for
listening. If you still are listening, you're still tuned in. Um,
thanks for chilling out. Please let us know if this is an episode that
you would like us to revisit, because I have of I'm looking over at
my list. I have many, many, many, many many more stories
that we could share, but I am really interested in hearing your stories as
well. So desks and dorks or sorry, it's that it's desks and dorks.
Uh. For love of god, I should know my own email from
my own company, and it's do you know what? This is just the
picture of professionalism. Ah, I'm saying that this is not automated that you
always zip through this. It's just desks and dorks at gmail dot org.
Please please shoot un email or if you're watching this on YouTube, let us
know in the comments below because we do read those, um the ones that
we get. So again, thank you all so much, and um we'll
catch you next time. Please make sure you play in RPG this week at
some point with somebody you know. And that's been the greatest showman. And
I'm p t Barnum's goats. Goodbye, everybody in zippity zap z out Stay