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I ran a one shot of daggerheart. I really hope it does well, but this is not the game for me as a GM. Like I personally have never hated running a game in any system that I've played in more, as a player I can seeing it be fun tho.

I think Drizzt would love how Optimus also has long internal monologues and gets mopey.

It's interesting to me that Hasbro owns GI Joe, Transformers, My Little Pony, and Power Rangers, but they have RPGs for all of them through Renegade Studios instead of through WotC themselves

As someone who started D&D and GMing in 5e for my then 7 and 10 year olds, 5e is easy for kids to understand. As long as you explain what each skill does, it's super simple. Their first module was ToA. They enjoyed it and at that age, role-playing was the easy part.

Megatron and Strahd... just playing chess.

35:40 While that's a great thought, setting up something like that opens up a massive can of worms that WotC doesn't want to deal with. If CR lets the Vox Machina/Mighty Nein characters be modeled into Sigil and gets, say, even 50% of the money from the sale of those characters, then WotC is opening the door to making that deal with anyone that's made famous characters that are used in Sigil. Meaning suddenly the guy who made Drizzt is getting that same percentage any time a Drizzt model is sold (if he isn't already, I don't know how in-league with WotC that guy already is), and that Larian would get that percentage whenever a BG3 model is sold, and so on. It could open up a cool kind of store where people could make characters that they run through campaigns & then put up on D&D Beyond as purchasable NPCs, where the players get a cut of the money for their characters, and it could include the models and things they make for those characters, which would be really cool, but WotC would never do that because their parent company is greedy and doesn't want anyone but themselves getting any money out of the brand. It'd be cool if they weren't like that, but they are, as shown by all of the past couple of years' actions on their end, so I wouldn't trust them to ever make a deal like that, sadly.

For the discussion on AI DMs/GMs, I absolutely agree with Bob in that the argument will blow over way faster than the other creative AI stuff. The production industry and the general public wanting to take art and music and acting away from artists and musicians and actors because computers can imitate those things will potentially cost entire industries' worth of people their livelihoods if they're allowed to run rampant. That's why it's a big deal; it's basically saying that creative expression as a whole is worthless because we made computers that can do those things (which guess what, those same computers could do whatever the people saying that do for a living, and would probably learn how to do it way easier). AI GMs would be an option, but real ones would still exist, and like Bob said, the industry of professional DMs is so small that they aren't at risk of losing their work if they're good at what they do. Like, you're not going to leave a group you enjoy to go play with a bunch of computers just for the novelty of it; at that point, just play a video game.

The whole “how do I convince my friends” discourse seems crazy to me. When I was a fairly new player (3.0/3.5) one of my friends offered to run a campaign that wasn’t vanilla D&D* but instead Monte Cook’s Iron Heroes. It was from a different publisher and it had different rules (low magic, all different classes) but it was still a D20 game and still a recognizable as “D&D”. Right now there are SO many TTRPGs that utilize the “D20 Roll High” mechanic that, if you want to move away from vanilla D&D, you can easily talk about “variants” rather than “different games”.

6:40 I can understand that. The players' book probably contains well-known common knowledge about the locations found in the Forgotten Realms as sort of a quick guide to what they in-game would know, while the GM's book probably contains, like, the secret leaders of guilds or locations of hidden treasures that the players wouldn't know about or could come across by chance.

I actually think Project Sigil is more likely to include the D&D cartoon characters than the film characters - the characters from the film would require the likeness rights of the actors, and we know D&D has the rights to use those in some contexts (the NPC stat blocks on D&D Beyond) but we don't know if those rights include video games, and the VTT is close enough to that category that the actors' reps would DEFINITELY ask for a new contract if it wasn't included. (Source: I used to work in entertainment and we had actors cast in the MCU, Disney remakes, and the Power Rangers reboot, so I can tell you that likeness rights would be a whole thing lol)

I think the digital emphasis is a shame in a way. I get that it makes them money but I got into and stayed with D&D for the imagination and social aspects of the game. The closer it gets to being a video game I feel like both of those things are reduced. Personal opinion of course, there are reasons others are drawn to it more.

They may already be able to add them those characters to Project Sigil since Wizkids has produced the Critical Role Minis for Mighty Nein, Vox Machina, and campaign 3 too...not to mention thier two books Call of the Netherdeep and Explorers Guid to Wildemount

5E isn't too tough for kids...running Strixhaven campaign (Harry Potter like) for 13, 11, 9 and 6 year old...just needed a little help with character creation but having so much fun!

getting Vox Machina into Sigil depends on what deal Critical Role has with Obsidian, since the Vox Machina crew are all in Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire as a free DLC

They did a Forgotten Realms Boxed Set in 2E.

I ran 5e for 7-10 year olds (as a class) and once one player realized they had an skill in animal friendship they all forgot the mission and went off through the woods looking for pet bears and raccoons and deer.

Optimus Prime: Teos mentioned that on Mastering Dungeons, but it was a sort of eaaster egg preview i think

Listening into this (rather belatedly) and hearing Luke's comments on being a ranger hireling in the Hommlet adventure. Was he the original Elmo?

I tried destroying the like button, but now I have a hole in my monitor. Oh well. Get well soon, Grace! There are worlds out there in sore need of destroying!

I would love to see these "Skyrim" tables!

4:40 Oh, no - for horror in particular, there's no shame in writing down cool/creepy stuff as you think of it, to use for later. And even sketching out whole outlines for creatures/curses/locations/etc that your players might fall foul of. Horror gets a lot of its impact by building up dread and suspense over something which is unknown, but which _is_ a defined and substantive enough thing to be a clear danger or threat. It's a lot easier to build suspense over a thing, if you already know what the thing is - so horror works well with pre-planning. Look at _Frankenstein,_ _Dracula,_ or _Alien_ - they're at their scariest when the heroes are facing some implacable, unseen, unknown; making seemingly-reasonable assumptions, and then discovering things are worse than they wanted to believe was possible. That discovery is only _credible_ because, while the _characters_ may not know what they're up against, the _story_ does. Contrast this to something like... er, any long-running mystery or drama show that outlasts its original story plan, or has someone decide to throw the plans out the window halfway through and do something more interesting/crowd-pleasing. It's difficult to establish stakes for horror characters, while also having the established patterns of the universe they inhabit being 'anything can happen, provided it's cool enough'. Not _impossible,_ just difficult. (I know games aren't stories, but they can and do crib inspiration from them; there's a bit of shared creative space there. So I'm making the analogy, even if it's not always a perfect one.) (This is in contrast to things like comedy - which is almost 100% in-the-moment improvisation and timing - and character development, which only works well if it's done in connection with the character development from other players at the table - there's got to be some responsiveness and improvisation there. Perhaps not coincidentally, the people I've known who enjoy comedic and character-heavy games have also tended to be the ones who push the 'improv is everything, and everything is improv' angle. I did myself, for at least five years, before I realised that there were people whose tastes in gaming were very different to my own)

I think there is something of a false dichotomy with 5e - a lot of people seem to phrase it as playing other things means ditching 5e forever (different to ditching WotC). We don't get this with video games though. Just because I played baldurs gate doesn't mean i couldn't pick stardew valley back up again at another point. Of course there is always the chance that once you start playing other things you like them and you don't go back...but, unfortunately, enjoying yourself too much is just a risk you'll have to take.

I definitely sat up when the comment you read mentioned Animon Story - I'm currently running an Animon Story campaign loosely inspired by Digimon Tamers - So mostly set in the real world, PCs are hiding their animon from their parents, and balancing living an ordinary life with the stuff that comes with having animon partners. Really easy to run - only pain point is sometimes accidentally giving an animon stat when asking for a kid roll or a kid stat when asking for an animon roll. (Also currently in PbP games of Call of Cthulhu (1920s classic campaign) and The Warren (which is a PbtA game where you play as rabbits, inspired by Watership Down among other talking animal fiction), and in an RPG book club which plays various one shots of a wide variety of systems. The PF2e campaign I'm in is on hiatus atm, as is the Mausritter PbP (OSR/NSR about tiny mice going on adventures - Basically Redwall as an OSR (I think it originated as an Into the Odd hack?))

There is absolutely comfort in 5e. But if you've been playing it a while, I feel its like leaving a bad long-term relationship; I know I want out, but having invested so much already, it is hard to leave.

It reminds me of the Werewolve Story... The story itself was basically us failing to negotiate with some werewolf tribe and then intending, but failing, to genocide them. But the reason why some of the other players wanted to do that and why I was so uncomfortable involves some really dark real-life stuff beyond our control. The main conclusion I got out of it is that positive characters committing war crimes and child soldiers (especially as enemies) are hard lines for me; probably we all could handle it better, and there probably were more conclusions to make out of that situation, but I did my best. PS: the only other time my teammates tried to pull out something like that was sorcerer killing a non-hostile drow because she was standing in the way, but it was more of a murderhobo situation than a war crime situation, and also my artificer revived her after (before throwing some fists because the sorcerer really pissed her off; both had str 8, so no damage done); everything was mostly in good humor.

The trick to inter-party conflict is having everyone’s buy-in and making sure whatever their group goal might be is more important/intense than the Individual conflicts. I’ve run lots of games with some conflict, including PCs coming to blows, and everyone was down for it and had a great time.

If I was to play in an Underwater D&D Campaign I would play my: Chaotic Neutral Female Sea Elf Storm Sorcerer Far Traveler background Character!

I'd play Little Mermaid TTRPG lol

I didn't realize that the comments on that poll would be the ones chosen randomly to be read in the podcast. So i was just talking about how i was happy about the subject for the video, and about my game, without the intent to be something interesting to be read hahahah Sorry for the long comment without much substance to the topic XD And sorry for the bad english also hahaha Another great episode, made me think more about the importance of making the rules simple! And am excited for the next main channel vid!

With regards to choking: while an airway choke may take minutes, a blood choke takes only about 10-15 seconds to fully incapacitate. Source: army grappling training, where we got to "experience" being blood choked first hand.

I use a die next to a mini on a 2d map to mark every 5ft below water they are. It's not visually stunning but it works well at my table. I do keep track of food, water, and ammo that my players have. I get that most people who came in with 5e don't track stuff like that but it's something I keep a close eye on.

I won!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you sooooo much!!!!!!!! I'm not worthy!!!! You two are amazing!!!!!

Thank you for answering my question!!!!!!!!🎉😁😁😁😁

@ the Pope 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

You actually can swim in plate armor. People have done so on modern times with reconstructions.