Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Hello everybody. Welcome Back to the ones 220s podcast. My name is Ryan Adams. I will be your host. I'm a full time professional game master and I'm thankful that you would come and check it out and give it a listen. The goal of our podcast here is to create a space for game masters to discuss our jobs, our interactions, our past struggles, obstacles and challenges we have faced, and how we have learned and grown as game masters from them. Ideally, it will be in a beneficial and entertaining fashion for you.
And during our talk, the terms game master and dungeon master will be used interchangeably. Just for clarification.
Today I'm excited to share the conversation with a GM that I've had the pleasure of being a player in before and highly respect for or how they do things as a gm. And I think we're gonna have a good conversation. This is GM Joshua. Thank you for joining us.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. Ryan.
Yeah, you wanna, what should I call you? Is that GM Ryan?
[00:01:09] Speaker A: Oh, whatever works.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: Using our game master epithets here.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: We do have titles, not that we necessarily have to use them, but thank you for joining. Do you wanna introduce yourself a little bit on how you got started with GMing?
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Well, back in the early days when games were Monopoly and rollercoaster Tycoon, Pokemon games still came in black and white.
A friend, an older kid who I deeply respected, he was, he was wise in the ways of the world.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: I.
[00:02:00] Speaker B: Think probably 14 maybe, and he asked a friend and I if we'd ever heard of a game called Dungeons and Dragons.
We had not. And so he taught us in the playground behind the synagogue and we ran around and played as elves and dwarves and skeletons and changelings and dragons.
And eventually we learned that there were in fact books and not just the version of Dungeons and Dragons that this older kid had made up to entertain a couple of seven year olds.
And we dove into it headfirst and the rest is history.
Figuring things out, trying to learn to play with starter boxes and character creator demos on CD rom.
There was a lot of trial and error, I'll tell you that.
But I continued with it through middle school, through high school, through college.
Eventually it became my full time job.
[00:03:26] Speaker A: That's amazing.
It's crazy. I was reading a little bit about your bio, what you have on the website and you mentioned you've been GMing for nearly 26 years now. Is that right?
[00:03:41] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:03:42] Speaker A: Sounds like a long time, especially when that's about as old as I am.
[00:03:49] Speaker B: Look, I feel like when I started professional GMing. I felt like I'd cracked the whole, you know, Ash Ketchum job credentials. You know, folks are looking for a 10 year old with 30 years of experience.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: Right?
[00:04:08] Speaker B: There was no other job that I had decades of experience when I, when I started.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: Yeah, it's crazy how much experience a lot of professional game masters can bring to the table. The, the many years of, of history and background.
There's a lot that goes into it as much as any other hobby turned job. You know, someone might have a hobby as a, as a sport or some other activity that they enjoy and years down the line might, might be able to make it into a job, you know, that they get paid for. And so it's a really unique job that we get to have no matter how much, you know, years of experience, or in my case, I mean, I have several years, but for me it's more the numbers that I have within my years for sure.
[00:05:07] Speaker B: And make no mistake, it sure is a job.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: Sometimes it's a whole business. I even filed taxes as a independent business owner.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: Oh boy, did that come as a. Oh my gosh. I don't know if you worked, ever worked independently before becoming a professional gm, but boy howdy, did filing taxes independently catch me off guard. The first, the first year I did it, yeah, absolutely.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: I had not, I had always been employed up until the year that I dedicated to starting as a professional gm. And yeah, the different forms and the different process and tax deductions and all that fun stuff, I'm like, wow, this is, this is why I charge, because I don't want to go through taxes.
Not, not a fun experience.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: About a year into working as a professional gm, I was at an art fair downtown and there was a woman there selling art pieces of quotes and inspirational phrases constructed out of Scrabble pieces.
And one of the ones that I picked up that I keep next to my desk as a reminder to myself is a framed piece that says, know your worth and add tax.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: Right on.
Speaking of our early times as GMs, especially you, like you said, you have a long, rich history dating back to some really early days. And in your role playing games and D and D, what was your first real, like, adventure campaign that you ran as a GM or one of the first ones you ran?
[00:07:10] Speaker B: Oh, wow. Well, besides all the little adventures and explorations, in my earliest days, the first real campaign, or at least what was supposed to be, we had the 3.0 starter box and I'd invited some friends over and we'd gone over the rules and picked out pre made characters.
The campaign lasted 20 minutes.
[00:07:48] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:07:48] Speaker B: We had just gotten all our dice sorted out and picked the premades and read the opening box text about a unicorn that had been captured by goblins. And we were a group of adventurers that had been set out to the hillsides to find the goblins and rescue the unicorn.
And we'd reached the end of the box text, opened the door and seen these goblins in the first room.
And so we rolled for initiative and the wizard won and cast sleep.
So we went scrambling to look up what exactly sleep did the aoe, it turned out, was larger than the room.
The number of hit dice affected sizable. And goblins only had 1/4 hit point, so they didn't chew through it too quickly.
And then every single goblin made their saving throw.
And the entire party who was in the area of effect as well, and none of whom were elves, every single one of them failed.
And we had a moment of stunned silence as from the goblin's perspective, a group of adventurers had kicked in the door, said some magic words and all passed out on the doorstep.
And since it seemed like the right thing to do, the goblins slit all of their throats. And the three of us were staring at each other in stunned silence, processing what had just occurred.
And we were hooked. What a wild and unexpected thing that had happened. We immediately began writing new characters from scratch. Oh, that's crazy.
Yeah. We started a brand new campaign that then ran for three or four years.
[00:09:53] Speaker A: That's a bit better.
Wow. What a crazy first experience. As you prepared for the long journey ahead of you together, the many memories you would make.
And then you had to start over.
[00:10:09] Speaker B: Everybody died.
Round one.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: Round one. That's insane.
If you were to run into a similar issue today, if you were to start off an adventure in some cataclysmic luck gone wrong, or to create such a similar scenario in DND today or at a table today, what would you do? Would you let it run through the same way? Or do you think you would try to try to salvage it or anything or.
[00:10:41] Speaker B: Ryan. It really depends on the group because of course I have so many tools in my toolkit now. Ways I could justify it and spin it up into, you know, the goblins, capture the adventurers and loot them and they're left tied up. And when they wake up, they need to perform a jailbreak and steal gear and kind of figure out how to. How to get out of the situation from ground zero with a reverse dungeon crawl from the prisons to the door.
[00:11:17] Speaker A: That could be fun.
[00:11:18] Speaker B: But some, and especially if players have really invested a lot of time into characters and backstories and events, put stuff together to figure out the story they want to tell.
But some players actually would feel a little cheated by that, that this catastrophic luck, you know, should result in a catastrophic result.
And that killing off their characters, as the vicious goblins might do in that situation, would really make it feel alive for them. And yeah, we'd be scrambling and writing new characters, the new set of adventures who are gone off because not only a unicorn, but now also four heroes have disappeared.
[00:12:18] Speaker A: That's true.
[00:12:20] Speaker B: So yeah, it depends on the group. And this is actually something that I don't think enough GMs talk about with their players during session zero when they're setting up expectations and has it's. It's become a core part.
One of the core parts of my session zeros is to talk about expectations not just around tone and content, but lethality that, you know, are players expecting to finish this campaign with the same characters they walked in, or are they expecting real chance of their characters dying?
Just as for some players, the fear of their character being eliminated can pull them out of the game, reduce their engagement and enjoyment.
For other players, knowing that their characters aren't actually going to be at risk, that they, they might not die, can, can dull that, that excitement and disengage them.
And so when starting a campaign, we talk about what level of lethality, whether it's going to be none, that we'll find alternative consequences for situations gone wrong or low, where we'll avoid killing off characters unless it really makes sense for that character's narrative.
Or high, where really stop pulling my punches. Or even brutal, where I will actively go out of my way to try to destroy player characters. And that might sound absurd to you, but especially in certain convention circuits, players seek me out to run that kind of meat grinder game where if 25% of the party makes it out alive, that's considered a success.
[00:14:51] Speaker A: Yeah, some people love the challenge. Yeah. I had an opportunity to sub for a DM that I'm a player in currently. He had to go to mandatory real life work training for something he was doing.
And I took over for three weeks. It was fairly high levels already. We were level 13.
I was like, sure, let's. Let's run them through a challenging little mini adventure, whether or not it would be canon or not. But we had a blast doing it. And from the first session, the immediate feedback was a noticeable change in GM styles, which that alone is great. Great enough to know that they saw difference in just how the two GMs ran things. Even though it's the same characters, player characters.
But the immediate noticeability was, hey, your combats are a lot more intense than our other gm, which was not an issue, which thankfully but it was noticeable. And I thought that was really interesting and encouraging because that is what I strive for. But circling back to kind of what you were saying too though was what you learned from that initial catastrophe was a chance for you to work that into all of your games. Now is, hey, before we start, what happens if our characters die? Or if they even die, Right. That's more of the conversation you have is if they die, can they die? Are you expecting it? And that's a great learning experience from such an early experience you had that's carried with you since then.
[00:16:38] Speaker B: One of my games actually is what we have dubbed a high lethality no death adventure.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: Highly salady no death.
[00:16:52] Speaker B: Yes, it is a wild beyond the Witchlight campaign and the Feywild is a funny place and there's a lot of powerful entities out there who are willing to bargain and there can be consequences far worse than death and ways that people can be negotiated to brought back, be brought back.
And so we decided, you know, we wanted intense combat with real risk, but also it's a very character driven story. And so we pre negotiated that if and when character dies, there will be ready opportunity to make deals or pay costs to bring them back to life.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: Yeah, that's an interesting way to satisfy the desire of challenge, but still not actually lose the character. Yeah, that's interesting. That's a cool way to have it.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: I wanted to ask, when you were describing your combats as more intense, what does that mean to you? What does that look like? Is it larger numbers, closer margins of victory, more dramatic or focused or tactically demanding?
[00:18:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I was curious too. Me and the other GM both were curious on the same thing and we, we kind of followed up with, with the other players and we're like, hey, you know, what did you guys. What do you mean by that? You know, just so that we understand more where you're coming from from your perspectives. And I think the main thing that they were communicating with that and I think what does make mine a little more challenging is honestly just simply bigger numbers is typically what I run with. Not necessarily like more creatures in terms of quantity, although that is the case sometimes.
But I prefer just bigger numbers in terms of the creatures might be doing more damage or might have More deliberating effects that they can do things that might limit the characters a little more than they're used to, whether that be like a moment of anti magic or maybe it's a.
Some, some physical restraints, like they push the characters around. A good push can really change things up if you reposition some martial characters or.
But I think the thing that I go back to the most is bigger numbers and that usually translates to like damage numbers. And I think characters, I think players just seen their HP drop more, gets them. Gets their adrenaline running, gets them thinking more. Yeah, tactically in the sense of, hey, you know, this is actually more dangerous than I thought. I need to think, is it worth using some resources in this fight that I wasn't planning to or was hoping to save? I think that's what usually translates in my quote, more intense combat. Their direct correlation between the two DMs was that our other DM, the resident one, they kind of referenced him as someone who eases them into combat throughout the adventuring day.
And then me, they said you just jump straight in. You just give a challenging fight right off the bat.
And I think that was also interesting. Like I'm not gonna throw my level five party, like, hey, here's 10 zombies for this fight and go to another one. Hey, here's a mage for this fight. Likely it's more so that I'm gonna do both a mage and 10 zombies right off the bat and see what they do with it.
[00:21:02] Speaker B: I think there is of course a place for that fight against 10 zombies. I, of course, I very recently had this in.
In the game that the campaign you're. You're deeply familiar with that you played in, where a character fell into a pit trap with 10 zombies in it. These are level 11 characters or so. But a telephone booth fight with 10 zombies, like it wasn't particularly a challenge to deal with the zombies, but the.
[00:21:46] Speaker A: Situation made it more precisely.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: There was a darkness spell over the pit and so the people above couldn't quite tell what was going on below and down below it couldn't quite tell what was going on above.
But also sometimes it's just nice to let the players flaunt their spells and solve an entire encounter with one fireball and feel like high level characters.
[00:22:17] Speaker A: Oh yeah, I agree. And I do include those moments, I believe, probably just not as often as other demons might just kind of having the way I already explained. But I definitely do try to work in those moments sometimes. Or sometimes that happens because the dice decided needs to be that way for this fight, like I might plan a fight. I'm like, this should be a decent challenge. You know, got some interesting things going on here.
And then a bunch of failed saves and players hitting and the dice telling the story that, hey, actually this is not a challenging fight. Just let them have it. Instead of like going in reinforcements or doing something like that, then just let them have it. Yeah, if they dice are saying, yeah, go ahead and win this fight with ease, then okay, sure, there'll be a challenge later. I don't have to change it. Right now.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: In the moment, I want to circle back to what you said about large numbers making things feel more intense.
And something that I've started doing recently is when an enemy makes an attack, it's like a big juicy attack, a stone giant strike or a wyvern's sting or what have you, but it gets blocked by a shield spell or silvery barbs or cutting words.
And so this big hit turns into a miss. And it's, you know, it's one thing to just describe the giant's club smashing into the ground and shattering stone, or the wyvern sting hissing with poison whizzing inches from their face, but sometimes it's nice to also make an offhanded remark of rolling the damage anyways and being like, wow, that would have been 36 damage or whatnot. So to help them really feel both the threat level of what they're encountering, especially if it's an early attack and they haven't actually been hit by it yet, to help them with their threat assessment, or just to let them know what they got for their resource expenditure, because, you know, you make something amiss and nothing happens and combat continues, that nothing happens is hard to weigh.
You've expended resources to make nothing happen.
But getting a glimpse of how much could have happened, I find can really add a level of excitement even to an incident where no damage occurred.
[00:25:16] Speaker A: That's a great point. Yeah. I think being able to take advantage of those moments so that even misses can tell the story. Because we do want to reward the character in knowledge just as much as players sometimes. And yeah, like you said, I think there's an easy way to reward that in both ways. Because players determine threat by numbers and so they don't know how much they missed. That's an interesting perspective. Yeah. And then the character, it leads into the narrative of how close was it? How close did they feel? That could have been bad, right? Cuz sure. Stone giant club hitting the ground. That's a generic description. Like yeah, maybe it's just stone hitting the ground, but if it's stone hitting the ground with 50 points of mis damage, then both character and player can get an idea of what that would have meant.
That's interesting. Yeah, I like that.
Yeah, go ahead, Go ahead.
[00:26:21] Speaker B: I was just gonna say on a. On a similar note, I know some GMs like to conceal, you know, hit points or not have players talk about how much health, you know, they're missing or whatnot in character out of concern for breaking the immersion.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:26:42] Speaker B: But I actually find that having player hit points especially, especially be completely visible, helps maintain immersion even more because you don't have to spend time asking about or feeling around a qualitative description of how someone is doing. You can see that they're at 5 out of 143 health or 5 out of 5 barbarian, and you know, everyone as players can see that and understand it and save a lot of time giving descriptions of characters as people are trying to make decisions about offensive and defensive plays.
[00:27:28] Speaker A: Yeah, time is very valuable. Being able to help people make good use of the time in the midst of battle, I think is always important. And I agree that's one of the helpful ways that can happen, for sure.
I've recently, not recently, but for a while now, I've been using Foundry as my virtual tabletop of choice. And one of the most convenient modules that this made me think of, that I use is one where it. Whenever you hover over an enemy token, there's a word, just a brief description, one word description of how healthy or hurt that creature looks. It goes from, you know, unharmed to slightly injured, injured, bloodied, near death.
Kind of goes down this description value. And so I have found that that similarly helps to players they can gauge for themselves, oh, this one over here is barely hurt, this one over here is more hurt. And they can make their choice for what they need without having to ask. And just being able to make that decision for themselves, I think is good for both time and decision making. Yeah, there's a lot that goes into running D and D. We've talked a lot about how combat has become something that needs a lot of attention and rightfully so. D and D at its core, is a combat focused game. There's space for other pillars areas of the game. What would you say that you've improved in the most since you first started GMing? When it comes to what we call the four pillars of D and D, the role playing, the combat, the exploration and the puzzles, trap side of things, is there one of the four that you've kind of looked back on and seen some significant changes over time.
[00:29:31] Speaker B: Well, considering that the early GMing experiences I look back on are those of a young kid figuring out D and D from first principles, of course.
But I think that one of the areas that I've grown very discreetly and had very explicit evolutions in is in the way that I run combat.
Because when I started, of course, I ran some very boring combats of what you might call a numbers buffer fight between the two sides of each side hitting the other with numbers until one of the sides loses.
But I grew up watching a lot of action movies, especially Jackie Chan movies.
And when I got access to the Internet, one of the most formative pieces of media that I discovered was video series called Dead Fantasy by Monty Ohm, who most folks know of from his later work doing choreography work for Red versus Blue and for being the creator of rwby.
And I think it is one of the greatest losses that we lost him so early because I can only imagine what he would have created in the future.
But it really opened up my eyes to what choreography and fight scenes can look like and to think about each combat as a chance for art, for characters to engage in a beautiful and vibrant dance and to tell a story about these characters and the way that they approach conflict and engage with things.
And so over time, I have worked harder and harder to integrate dynamic situations and not necessarily, you know, micromanage and figure out how everything in a scene could be used, but to make sure that I'm setting fights in scenes with props and furniture and terrain that creates opportunities that is evocative to players, because I can figure out how these things can be used on the fly.
But to make sure that combats have those opportunities to excite and engage players beyond just the enemies.
I don't know if that was coherent.
[00:33:30] Speaker A: It certainly was. It is very important. Yeah, definitely Learning experience for GMs who run combats and enjoy having those moments to make them matter, to make them interactable and have them contribute to a bigger picture.
There's an interesting question from one of our patrons that is kind of the antithesis of that, but I'll get to that later.
But no, that totally makes sense, and it's a great thing to have learned over time. When I started, I was similarly running pretty simple combat, but it got to the point to where that's pretty much all I prepped for for a while was figuring out how to make fun fights for the players. And not that that's a bad thing. But it was bad that I spent so much time on it that I didn't really build on anything else. I remember our first, first homebrew game that I ran was with my friends. My first real D and D experience as a gm and it was just this custom world with a goblin overlord and a hobgoblin overlord. And they were kind of this resistance group that were on the rise to take out generals and eventually overthrow this evil king. Still a great plotline and I've kind of adjusted it since. But when I was doing it, I made things up as I went, as many of us did, and without a book to to go by, just kind of making it up. And it was always all right, I need more enemies for this next thing. I need more enemies. And I think what I've really learned over time, especially with some of the excellent players that sign up for these professional games, people who are willing to invest into it, they want more than just the simple fights. They want more than just a simple game. They want something that's actually going to mean something. They want something that they can be a part of. And the role playing side of things has really opened up last few years as I've continued to get these kind of players who are wanting the complete experience that something like this can bring.
Something that was encouraging from a from DM that I've of Plaid Wiz has a channel in his discords for each adventure that he runs is a separate channel where they can roleplay with each other outside of the session with, you know, some guidance. So it doesn't really disrupt what's actually happening in real time. But for the most part it's just conversations that characters have with each other.
And I started integrating it and sure, not every player uses it that is a little bit more involvement than some want, as it's throughout the week and goes into other time. But I have a handful of players who will love interacting in those and it helps them have more investment in themselves and the characters. And I think something like that and the mindset that it shapes for me is in and out of character. I need to be more open. I've become more open to just roleplay moments where if they just want to talk, if they just wanna interact with what's going on, then just to let them, there's no need to force a combat. I think that's a big thing that I've learned from combat to role playing is you don't have to force combat, you don't have to force them to fight something. There's always interesting ways that they can go about conflict solving. And I think that's one of the biggest things that D and D teaches role playing games teaches is there's multiple ways to solve a conflict. And that's something that I love.
The whole complete package of role playing games now is as much as I love the combat, as much as I love throwing big scary monsters and big enemies with powerful spells or abilities like that's all super fun, but it's not going to be the complete package if we don't get a chance to hear from these heroes and get to know them as characters and even players to some degree and interact with the world. So that's something that I think has learned from me over time for sure.
[00:38:11] Speaker B: I've got players like that who love to engage outside.
I've also got as a professional gm, some players who sign up for this sort of game and don't have a lot of time. This is their three hour getaway into the fantasy world.
[00:38:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:32] Speaker B: So they don't want that role play outside because they have this when this time window blocked off for it and the rest of they've got a busy week outside that.
[00:38:47] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:38:48] Speaker B: And I think that it really does come down to discussing and establishing expectations with your players during session zero and keeping the conversation going beyond that.
Because yeah, I've got games where we've gone multiple sessions without combat. Heck, I've had games we've gone multiple sessions without touching dice and I've got other groups that, you know, if we went a session without combat, they'd start to get a little antsy and so kind of feeling that balance and making sure that there is room for the roleplay is very important.
But to make sure that you're providing the experience that players want and are looking for.
Especially because one of the things that I've run into, especially with larger groups, even when they enjoy rolls play, they like to do it in combat where you don't have to worry about who's the most vocal player.
Everyone gets their six seconds to shine due to the initiative system. And something that I've learned and taken away from that is to make sure when doing out of combat roleplay to keep, especially in those large groups, to keep a tally of who is engaging and who hasn't yet and make sure to keep the puck moving and make sure that everyone has the opportunity they don't have to. Some players would like to sit silently and listen, but to make sure that they have the opportunity to Be handed the spotlight like they are in combat without having to take it.
[00:40:54] Speaker A: Yeah. A phrase that I've become a habit. A good habit is, as you say, checking with everybody. Those who haven't quite yet spoke up in a specific scene, it's just ask them, hey, is. What is John doing or saying or nothing at this time.
Sometimes it's nothing at this time and he's like, alright, cool, we'll go to somebody else. And other times it's a chance for them to speak up when they weren't sure when they could.
[00:41:25] Speaker B: Another question that I've started to ask in those situations when they're like, no, I don't really have anything to say is, okay, but what is Tom feeling or thinking in this situation? Give them a chance, even if they don't want to interact or engage, just to at least ask themselves that question and maybe have a little moment internally. Because not all roleplay needs to be intra char.
Intra character. Inter character. I always mix those up.
[00:42:01] Speaker A: Yeah. External perhaps.
[00:42:04] Speaker B: Certainly.
[00:42:05] Speaker A: Yes. Now that's a great way to follow up on it too. And sometimes they take that bait themselves. Themselves. Like, are they doing or saying anything? They're like, no, they're just kind of standing back and. And watching and listening. And you're like, okay, they've contributed. We now know that this character is a listener. They like watching and they. They listen for things. And that's different than the player who's always asking questions to people. They're not a listener, they're a talker. And you've learned that difference just from that interaction.
What is something you think that even today you are closing in, at least on the website itself, and start playing games at almost 700 games.
And me too, I'm actually close to about the same. We've been running in tandem for a while now, roughly.
But what do you think is something that you're currently working on improving as a gm despite the growth that you've had over the years and even on the website and the time you've been here and such.
Are you thinking of a response or did I not?
[00:43:13] Speaker B: I'm think I'm thinking of a.
[00:43:15] Speaker A: No, you're good.
[00:43:16] Speaker B: I'm thinking of a response.
[00:43:17] Speaker A: No worries. Just making sure there's some empty space there.
[00:43:22] Speaker B: It's one of these things where when you've been doing this for a quarter of a century, more than a quarter of a century, you know, I.
I know what I'm good at. Yeah, I know what I'm not good at.
And I'm always continuing to push my range and try new things.
But I don't know that there's a specific sound bite answer that I have for that question.
[00:44:11] Speaker A: That's okay.
I mean, it's. It's an interesting question, even for myself.
[00:44:17] Speaker B: Because how would you answer it?
[00:44:20] Speaker A: Right.
[00:44:21] Speaker B: I'm sure you have in past episodes, but.
[00:44:24] Speaker A: No, that's fine.
I think it's an interesting thing to tackle because like you said, especially once we have these, these hundreds of games or even, you know, thousands of games, eventually for some of us, maybe even you, I'm sure you probably have well over a thousand off site.
[00:44:40] Speaker B: But I've done the. I've done the math and I'm in the next year or two, I'm going to hit my 10,000 hours. And that's. That's just counting GMing at the table, not counting playing, not counting prep, not counting research, not counting taxes, and no, not counting taxes, but 10,000 GM seed at the table hours.
[00:45:10] Speaker A: Right? That's incredible.
And like you said, after we get some experience under our belts and we get into somewhat of a routine, we learn what we're good at, we realize what we're, what we don't do as well. Like, I'm not gonna open up a curse of straw table that's heavily grim role play, deep lore and character involvement. That's. That's not what I'm good at. I'm not good at intertwining those kind of deep connections and having that grim atmosphere of Ravenloft. That's not me. I've even tried it and I'm like, nah, this isn't for me.
[00:45:45] Speaker B: And.
[00:45:45] Speaker A: And because of that, we become a little habitual. We become a little ritualistic with things we do and don't do.
And so something I've begun to integrate the last year or two is just to one, give myself a break, but also to break up the routine of what my players go through with my combats is to throw a puzzle in there every now and then. And I, as a player, I hate puzzles.
I don't. I don't. I would never want to volunteer to go through a puzzle as a player, but as a dm, I think it serves as a great tool on both sides. For me. It's a time to sit back and just listen and be a little bit more passive. Obviously, I'm still involved in giving hints and helping them with, you know, guiding them with the puzzle where they need it. But there's a lot more passive, a lot less dynamic when you're doing a puzzle and Their brains are just working and trying to figure out the solution to get through this door or open this chest or find the weakness in this structure or whatever it might be.
And I found that's a great way to even have them stop and, and highlight each other more. Some of them are much better thinkers than they are fighters.
And I think just finding places to put those in the right points too, not, not just to randomly put them in just because, but to have them have specific moments. I think that's something I'm always looking at improving is how to give them a little bit of a different experience. Because I've had some players who say that they never had a puzzle before and they might find one of my puzzles every, you know, five to 10 sessions or whatever it might be before the next one without one or two that they might experience. It's like, yeah, this is the only one I've ever done as a player. And I'm like, that's crazy to think about. If they have been playing for a while.
[00:47:51] Speaker B: When it comes to puzzles, I have to recommend an old book from 3rd edition D& D called the Book of Challenges, which is a. It's a paperback book by Wizards of the Coast, I think it was what written by Andy Collins, Stan Skip Williams, a bunch of other Gwendolyn Kestrel, Daniel Kaufman, Mike Slinker, lots of old third edition designers.
And it's a book of 21 puzzle trap combat challenges of varying mixes from encounter level one to 22. And I've not run in 3.0 in a good many years, but I still find myself going back to it and reading for inspiration and ideas of ways to combine enemies and terrain to incorporate puzzles into tactical situations.
And it's also just a reminder that a puzzle can be dynamic if in the genre of anime that I like to call Shonen Fight fighting, where you have characters who are constantly battling against overwhelming odds over and over again in their quest to become the best or save the world or what have you.
And there's only so many times you can have characters win a fight by screaming really loudly and passionately. And there's some shows that continue that path, but there's others, like JoJo's Bizarre Adventure for a popular example, that use what I like to call the puzzle fight, where everyone's got overpowered gimmicks and part you've got a high stakes fight where it's not just about defeating them because if you try to do it, they've got the advantage, but figuring out what their weakness is, how Their power works and how to avoid it. And you put a combat like that in D and D and you have a fight where the players start on the back foot.
But if they, when they figure out what set of rules the opponent is operating on, they can twist that to their advantage and not only can they turn the fight around, but they can feel damn smart doing so.
And that's how I incorporate most of my puzzles these days within combat encounters.
[00:51:18] Speaker A: Yeah, but I think short, short response, that's something I need to improve. Like an actual improvement is taken inspiration from from other and older sources outside of the immediate D and d or even just 5e circle, but that's just me.
[00:51:38] Speaker B: But the thing about a puzzle is it's not the problem, it's the experience the players go through.
Because you can have them approach a sphinx with a riddle or a box with a series of buttons on it and you can just accept the reasonable answer they give. Or if they pick a button, ask them for their justification. If it sounds good, it's good. And that's not so much a puzzle as a roleplay encounter with the trappings of a puzzle. True, but if you're not careful, a role playing encounter can turn into a puzzle. Like we all know the horror stories of over describing a door or a piece of furniture. And the players get so worked up trying to figure out and crack the secret there and the GM doesn't step in and stops them.
And suddenly you have players solving a puzzle. Not one you intended, but one that is happening.
And at that point you've got two options.
You can either continue to let them bang their head against a wall and spend or waste, depending on your view of it, everyone's time.
Or you can acknowledge that they're right, that this is a puzzle and that there is a solution to be found and let them find one.
[00:53:15] Speaker A: Excellent point. Yeah, to a certain degree you could consider the very nature of your DNS or your role playing game session of puzzle in itself. Having to make sure things are running smoothly and that answers are being found. People aren't stuck on something for too long. I think those similar micromanaging characteristics of a typical puzzle can just as well apply to run in the whole session as a whole.
[00:53:51] Speaker B: As for yeah, I was just thinking about this is tying back to something. We were talking way back about how jamming style has changed. So if you want to finish this thought before I jump wildly off script.
[00:54:10] Speaker A: I think we'll keep going then.
No worries though. I'd love to hear it after I was going to ask.
And maybe this does tie back, who knows? But one of the things we like to end with before any Patreon questions, I just have one this time. But something we want to include is if you could give advice to a newer GM or hypothetically your younger self, if that's easier to process.
What do you think would be an important advice to share or what would you want to share?
[00:54:50] Speaker B: Have more arrogance and more humility, both of them, because you can get so worked up worrying about whether you're doing stuff correctly. And the fact is, during your early jamming and even during your late jamming, you're not going to.
But the confidence that you carry with you, the players will feel that.
And so it's okay to make mistakes, just keep moving forward. Of course, I'm not advocating for, you know, getting into arguments with players and stepping on agency, but have more confidence even before you feel like it's founded, hence arrogance.
But also be humble because this, you are going to make mistakes and you can't let that trip you up.
And remember that, especially if you're not doing this as a job, you're one of the players too.
And it's important that you're having fun and that your players give you grace.
[00:56:11] Speaker A: Excellent points. Yeah, I agree. It's important to both even fake confidence, arrogance or fake confidence, because that's what a leader empowers their people with.
They might be offering these strange ways to conflict solve that you never expected. And we're just expecting like a big fight maybe, and instead of just staggering about like, oh, I don't know, maybe we could maybe do that, say, yeah, let's try that, and just encourage them and be like, yeah, let's see where this goes. I have no idea where it's going in my head, but let's find out.
[00:56:55] Speaker B: The second piece of advice I would give, which is probably even more important than the first, is maintain open and honest communication with your plot players and with yourself. If things aren't going well, be willing to pause the game and check in with everyone and possibly even debug or change course as needed, because it can be really easy to get caught in a spiral where you are trying to solve the problems within the game and the problems might exist outside of the game, people might be frustrated and sometimes you have to take a step back and solve the problems player to player rather than character to character.
And it's okay to be a little trigger happy about that because you can take a moment, check in, and everyone's like, yeah, we're Cool. And you drive back in.
[00:58:07] Speaker A: Yeah, the safety tools, there's a lot of safety tools out there that can help with that. But yeah, don't be afraid to take a. Take a step back and check on things. I think that's important.
And like you said, sometimes it's play player focused, not character focused. It just happens to be bleeding through. Awesome.
Well, thank you for spending some time out of your busy schedule and your creative mind and share some insights and thoughts with us. It was awesome to hear from you.
[00:58:42] Speaker B: Thanks for having me. I know it's been a nightmare and a half getting this scheduled as it is with anybody.
[00:58:50] Speaker A: Just me. We all have very busy lives. It's finding the right time and glad we had our time together.
Feel free to check out the description for our episode. You have links there that can send you over to GM Josh's games on start playing games as well as my own. If you're interested in seeing what we're like as we're running our games and giving us a try, or if you're looking for a game or you know anyone, free to send them our way. And we'll be sure to give you our best that we can give.
Thank you for listening.
[00:59:28] Speaker B: The setup for the plug there is for those of you with busy lives and not a lot of time to schedule.
Check out spg.
[00:59:37] Speaker A: That's an even better plug. We may not even have the schedule that you are looking for, but there are plenty of excellent GMs on start playing games that might just have what you're looking for, if not us.
Is that better?
[00:59:53] Speaker B: Yeah, that's good. That's good.
[00:59:54] Speaker A: That's better. Yeah. Okay, great. Well, thank you for listening everybody. Thanks again, Josh, and we hope to have you. See you in the next episode. Bye.
