For real, i didn't even know Greg was uploading on the main channel again. i was just following his spotify uploads, this just happened to pop up on my recommended.
Agreed wholeheartedly tbh. I've learned so much about storytelling and am seeing things from an angle I hadn't previously considered. It's really great
With your first story, I experienced the exact opposite when i first gave dnd a shot. I was trying to roleplay as my character, but the GM wasn't doing anything with it. It was always we go to point A, then point B, the back to the tavern to rest and call it a day. I quickly got bored, but the other players were happy with all of this. Out of pure desperation for something interesting to happen, I had my character kick a sleeping goblin(I think this was the moment I realized I couldn’t play a typical 'good guy'). The party members got mad at me and managed to ease the goblins anger with some money. Just from that simple dumb action, I manage to get some in character conversation happening. Hell, the GM even had that goblin be a regular at the tavern we always went to, and the goblin was still very upset with me. I finally got a taste of what I expected Dnd to be. But nothing else ever happened. This was the height of the campaign, and so I left that group. My character was a cleric who had just become old enough to explore on their own, so i wasn't playing as an overviolent/overly horny archetype. My in character reason for me kicking the goblin was that I never saw one before and I panicked. I just wanted some character interaction!
I DM'd for a group that was the "run and hide" sort. But I made it very clear from the start that the villains are allowed to be smart and grow ever more powerful, and the world will not wait around for the party. They actually grew into a "run and hide and concoct masterful schemes to topple overpowered villains" group. I've never been more proud in my life.
Speaking of passively good characters, I recently started a campaign where I was playing as an empath, and my primary motivation was to help people around me. When I first made the character they felt very bland and I didn't realize what was wrong, but I feel like it was because I was trying to be passively good. While I have considered most of my characters as "good", and they felt just fine, but they all had major goals and motivations that would drive a lot of their actions so I didn't give it much thought past helping the people that obviously needed it. I started enjoying my character more after I started spending almost all of my time roleplaying thinking about the other characters. I think every character I've made would save an orphan girl in a burning building, but doing something like finding out and helping the other characters with their goals or even something as simple as going out to get a gift for another player feels much more genuinely good.
I never turn on my notifications. I have for the first time for this. I really like your art and comedy. Oh wtf you haven't been showing up in my subs.... WTF TH-cam
the "playing dnd by refusing to play" attitude is the main reason why i'm not friends with my most of my group any more; long story short, in all campaigns i ran the entire group would at some point STAND IN A BURNING ROOM and "calculate" that they could brute force whatever they are doing and then get pissy they they didnt roll high enough to survive the choice to be emolated. and then blamed me, the dm.
I think the passiveness of players is not quite that much of a problem unless they are ALSO resentful towards people who want to take a more active role. My first groups were extremely passive, but they were all amicable people and I guarantee you we all would've welcomed the kind of entertainment your antics would've brought into the group. For the first decade or so I personally was like "I want to do more roleplay because I want to contribute more, but most of the time I don't know how to and I'm too shy to do it anyway". Regarding the party that went into the swamp: I guess as a DM I would've just said: "Ok, out-of-game talk: This is supposed to be a Lord of the Rings spoof where I prepared a lot of stuff for you in the "not Mines of Moria", so can you just please go in there? I promise I'm not going to kill you (on purpose)."
I think they were just bad at the role part of roleplaying. idk what the exact reason was but if they're adventurers they probably literally could not afford a months long detour through a swamp, this stuff is usually a bit time sensitive. also the presumption that the swamp would be the safer route is purely based on the players knowledge that they're in a story, not because the characters had any reason to believe it
Wanna echo what a lot of other folks are saying and tell ya that it's great to see some videos from you again! I got into tabletop roleplaying in part because of your campaign recap videos nearly a decade ago now, always love to hear you talk about this stuff
"If a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound?" As my physics professor once said, that depends entirely on how you define sound. Do you define sound as the vibrations that come from motion disturbing air, or do you define sound as our brain's interpretation of said vibrations?
Oh, man. I have stories out the wazoo about a game I used to run. Granted, I was new to RP and not really experienced enough to be running a game yet, and I definitely didn't understand the difference between an on-rails adventure and a sandbox game and as a result I tried to make something more like a video game where I had specific locations and characters pre-written. I went so far as to build actual dungeons out of foam from a hobby store, and every single freaking time I did something like that, the players would INTENTIONALLY go "oh, this place looks dangerous, let's not go in here. Let's go back to the town and find another quest." They were metagaming the fact that I spent a weekend building a literal set-piece to assume it meant I was trying to trick them into some elaborate trap. And the weird thing is, as much as they kept treating me like I was some monster GM who was out to get them and who needed to be stopped, I went way too far in the other direction of making things too easy because I wanted the story to progress. I never actually killed a player. Once, when we were playing a d20 Star Wars game, I built a full-sized two deck ship map out of hobby foam and started the adventure with them stuck on a world with that ship being the only way off, so they would take it and have a ship as their main vessel. First thing they do is tell me they want to sell it. I'm still so damn mad about that. I eventually told them "this is the game we're playing, and if you don't want to play it, don't ask me to run it." I've since realized that what was going on was the guy who usually ran our games (who was a pretty decent GM) was a narcissist and he did that sort of thing to sabotage any game he wasn't running. That's what he would do to my game. We had another guy who sometimes ran games, and the narcissist would nitpick every bit of it. Like, imagine a kid at a haunted house kicking over decorations and saying "this is cardboard." That's how that guy acted in the other guy's games. We eventually had a massive fight over it where I got sick of him bullying the other GM and told him off for it. That was the last time I saw him, but I kept playing with the other GM, and his games were a lot more fun without someone constantly trying to ruin them.
Heya, dawnsomewhere. wanna say that yeah, this is helpful and does make me reconsider a good few of the ways I handle stuff. Its not that your method is sacred or even that you lay out a true concrete method, its just I wanna try to have these sorts of games and my acts both trying as a dm and player are falling into some of those pitholes. So yeah, It is helping me just reconsider with a new mindset. thanks
Ran into these sort of world building things in a game my brother GM'ed of Changeling given that both I and one of our friends had really strong ideas for which way we wanted our characters to go that were entirely at odds. Our friend wanted to basically sell his soul for increasing power with no consideration for consequence and my character wanted to help the woman who owned our boarding house and NOT GO BACK TO PRISON. This eventually split the party in half and had us all playing two characters across two different plots, with my character and our resident hippie globetrotting through a network of hidden airports, looking for a way to bring the woman's daughter back from the dead (or make a copy of her) and our friend's waterborn staying at home, picking a fight with the king of Summer and getting killed in one of the hands down most impressively planned fights I think I've ever seen. My brother's anxiety unfortunately ended the story before the world trotting plot finished, but it's still one of the best games I think we've played and I don't just say that because I had a build that let me kill people with my own coat.
@27:00 This is the most important part. In a lot of these videos and such on the internet, people look down on hack or munchkin. But the reality is, the best games are where the GM and the players are on the same page. And if everyone wants to play hack-and-slash munchkin games, then go ahead, and have fun. There is nothing wrong with that. Just make sure you are on the same page.
I remember how fun averse that party was when you were so obviously trying to make it fun and I had to bail on that shit because it gave me PTSD from my previous shitty Roleplayers. They had no imagination.
A good DM recognizes when the rules make no sense and adjusts. Good players recognize when the game has gotten out of hand and reign it in. I've been fortunate enough to be a part of both at the same time. Our group is starting a new campaign in a new game with new rules where we've all agreed to the insanity. I'll be collecting many cowboy hats.
as someone that makes video games and game master's tabletop games; this was interesting to hear. the stuff you said really makes sense to me. i ran games for people that just wanted me to run a video game for them. they wanted to get X task for Y minutes and get Z reward. i really hated it. if i wanted to run a video game, id just tell them to play a video game. the whole point of TTRPG is that a story can evolve and change and that really seems like what you are getting at with this video. my most recent TTRPG ended because the players were interested in time travel magic, they spent in game months researching it, and then they did it. they traveled back in time to "fix" the problem. i explained that the problem wasnt just "travel back in time and shoot the villain in the head". the problem was something that happened (or didnt) millennia ago. so the 2 people that traveled back in time ended up destroying the world. now i am working on a new setting with a new system to show how they fundamentally changed everything. the time travelers are going to have sparks of memories and guilt. i made sure that some important people that they came to love no longer exist to anyone except them and it drives them a little crazy.
I just gotta say I love this video dog. It's an excellent discussion of cooperative story-telling that transcends just DnD and I really didn't expect to watch what amounts to a podcast so attentively. Subscribed!
idk how long ago this was, but I've heard compelling arguments that with the rise of live plays and whatever a lot of people kind of don't WANT to play games so much as they want to have a narrator give them the Critical Roll experience. they want the illusion of being involved but without actually ever being at risk of things going off track
Optimizing the fun out of the game is why most PbtA games specifically reward either failure, or trying things you're bad at. As a player I specifically try to play into whatever the DM is planning just to prevent others from ruining the campaign.
Same with Dungeon World. I think both are good games to try with new players. To teach them that by doing stuff, asking questions, and giving answers. They shape the world. And that even a failure, is not the end of their character.
Regarding the players choosing to go through the swamp and how you describe their reasoning, all I can think of is that they are not being players at that point. They are just managers, in the sense that they are just overseeing the characters and making use ether get from point A to point B with the most cost-effective return on investment. They want to objective without considering their characters as people. "They may be miserable for three months of this travel, but we the players consider that ok."
You still alive buddy? I like your stuff and would like to see more of it, but I have no idea how scheduling or time management works for making videos cause I've never done it, but every one i like takes forever and a day. Anyway, hope you're doing okay, financially or otherwise, and I hope to see something new soon. Or eventually. Or whenever, like I said, I don't know how long these take to make or put out.
This reminds me of the character creation thought experiment one of the DMs I played with brought up. "There is a corked jar on a table in the middle of the woods, how does the character you're making react." The idea behind the thought experiment is that the only wrong answer is that your character does nothing about the scenario. They should have some form of reaction that isn't either intense fear(I hide and run away from the thing) or apathy about a somewhat odd scenario, otherwise the character is probably a boring character.
The game needs the story and the story needs the game. Without a risk of failure there is no narrative tension. Without a narrative, the game actions are just that, game actions.
Man, hearing about the players who don't want to do stuff confuses the hell out of me, what are you playing for? The numbers? It kinda reminds me of Arin Hanson's aversion to D&D games cause he feels things grind to a halt when combat happens. Bring your character to the fight. If you're a dancing bard, pirouette around the enemies to confuse them or something. I dunno, his reasoning didn't make sense to me. My Good character from last time has made it to this Hellish world of war & blood & eldritch abominations. And she's a barbarian healer from a kind of soft eldritch world, so all the horrors don't affect her as much. She feels sorry when coming across a feral hell hound with tentacles all over its back, she sneaks healing spells on to refugees that spurn her healing potions cause they don't trust outsiders, I'm having all kinds of fun with her, really hope to bring home one of those hell hounds as a pet once this leg of the campaign is over. o(>w
I'm a bit of a munchkin myself, but of a very particular sort. Your classic munchkin has a belief that there is some singular absolute ideal build for a character, or group of characters, that will be maximally effective in a given situation, and that your strategic goal should always be to strive to that pinnacle. Like any munchkin, I'm very fascinated with the mathematical puzzle of exploiting D&D mechanics, but I find this line of thinking to be monotonous and ultimately boring. What I try to do instead is to think up weird, counterintuitive concepts, and figure out how to make them work regardless. For instance, a recent one was this orc wizard who used necromancy and folk remedies for healing. He was basically a hitpoint battery.
Ok DM. Here is what I want to do... I want my character to pick up and throw the party's sentient Pony into the armored Space Marine so that he will tip over and fall on the big boss and knock him out so I can steal his magical aftershave. Can I do that?
That one guy from the old group: "What a liar. Our characters were all great, HE was the one who was slowing down the game by asking a lot of dumb questions. WE'RE the players. It's our JOB to BEAT. THE. GAME. Not everybody needs to write a NOVEL to have fun, jeez." (proceeds to speedrun Minecraft)
"Munchkin" usually refers to a player character that is exceptionally optimized to break the game system. Something like a D&D 3.5 "Cancer Mage" that has the ability to ignore the negative effects that diseases would normally inflict on a person, then gives themselves a disease would normally boost their Strength while draining their mental stats until they die at 0; but the mental stats never go down so you get infinitely-increasing Strength as long as you're "sick."
Not sure if you're asking about his specific definition, but munchkin pretty universally means a character that is trying to "win" rather than roleplay. They will typically have the most broken character possible, and do whatever is optimal to acquire the most gold and power.
i do horroble bootleg DND in discord DM's with my friend where he nods and says "yes" to everything. i even made a map in mspaint to base lore on and ue AI generation for art of stuff or just google pics
The issue is what do you think is good. And what law even chaos has a law is more what you are trying to do fallow the leader or be true to yourself. Good is just as bad as evil and evil can be just as good as you want it to be. The out come of your life makes you what you are. And that is fun for the game to me. No matter the system
"The system is good. I'm part of the system and I'm good, therefore the system is good" Yikes. That's some clear cut authoritarian bootlicker mentality. It would be one thing if it was just roleplaying... but I get the feeling that player was projecting their ideology to the game.
First off, let me say that did sound uncomfortably small-minded so I understand where you're coming from. It sounds like they don't tolerate ambiguity or complexity well. Now, that could be them being very young mentally or chronologically, that could be about some spectrum disorder issues that make it very difficult to deal with uncertainty so they're rejecting it as a coping mechanism. It could be as you suggest, that they have some sort of desire to submit to and praise an impressive powerful organization or leader. Or, it could be that they simply hate having to think in their recreation time, want to pick a team, just root for them and have the other guys simply be the enemies so they can be ethically uninhibited and beat the snot out of them. There's nothing wrong with having a morally simplistic game. You don't get angry at people in WoW because they didn't have a refined understanding of good and evil. You got angry when they didn't pay attention in a raid boss battle, missed the phase change, stood in fire and pulled all the adds. Because those idiots will take away the healers focus from the tanks, The tanks will go down and then the whole raid will wipe. ANYWAY. In the context that we heard it, they sound like an absolute tool, and kind of an idiot.
Oh I skipped a dungeon on a friend once. But I learned enough about myself that I just want a video game so it was like one of two sessions I had with that character.
Hey Greg, as much as I love these rp nuance videos (and I really, really do) are you still going to do any more of the "We will not play DnD series? I'm more than happy with whatever you put out. I just like that series and am curious.
The Patreon has episode on for free in parts as well. They'll come here once the whole thing is complete and combined, but if you want content quicker.
Swamp.. easy.. then gm made it easy hagz plagues. Going off course do to eating the wrong mushrooms. It would have been a year for then to go thrue a swamp lol
Here's advice for you: always adapt the content you made. Your players choose to not fight the American ghosts? They go travel to tell their king in England? Well because they didn't help fight the ghosts, the problem has spread to England as well. Don't be stagnant with the content you've made. Make it malleable.
Everyone who's sleeping on these videos are missing out on gold. Each and every one of these are fantastic
These videos are my sleep, since it's more like a podcast. 😋
Fr
For real, i didn't even know Greg was uploading on the main channel again. i was just following his spotify uploads, this just happened to pop up on my recommended.
Agreed wholeheartedly tbh. I've learned so much about storytelling and am seeing things from an angle I hadn't previously considered. It's really great
I’ve never heard of someone trying to speed run dnd
"I were trying to tell a story with them."
They were trying to solve a logic puzzle.
With your first story, I experienced the exact opposite when i first gave dnd a shot. I was trying to roleplay as my character, but the GM wasn't doing anything with it. It was always we go to point A, then point B, the back to the tavern to rest and call it a day.
I quickly got bored, but the other players were happy with all of this.
Out of pure desperation for something interesting to happen, I had my character kick a sleeping goblin(I think this was the moment I realized I couldn’t play a typical 'good guy'). The party members got mad at me and managed to ease the goblins anger with some money.
Just from that simple dumb action, I manage to get some in character conversation happening. Hell, the GM even had that goblin be a regular at the tavern we always went to, and the goblin was still very upset with me. I finally got a taste of what I expected Dnd to be.
But nothing else ever happened. This was the height of the campaign, and so I left that group.
My character was a cleric who had just become old enough to explore on their own, so i wasn't playing as an overviolent/overly horny archetype. My in character reason for me kicking the goblin was that I never saw one before and I panicked.
I just wanted some character interaction!
I DM'd for a group that was the "run and hide" sort. But I made it very clear from the start that the villains are allowed to be smart and grow ever more powerful, and the world will not wait around for the party.
They actually grew into a "run and hide and concoct masterful schemes to topple overpowered villains" group. I've never been more proud in my life.
The good ending.
Speaking of passively good characters, I recently started a campaign where I was playing as an empath, and my primary motivation was to help people around me. When I first made the character they felt very bland and I didn't realize what was wrong, but I feel like it was because I was trying to be passively good. While I have considered most of my characters as "good", and they felt just fine, but they all had major goals and motivations that would drive a lot of their actions so I didn't give it much thought past helping the people that obviously needed it.
I started enjoying my character more after I started spending almost all of my time roleplaying thinking about the other characters. I think every character I've made would save an orphan girl in a burning building, but doing something like finding out and helping the other characters with their goals or even something as simple as going out to get a gift for another player feels much more genuinely good.
It's amazing that someone can be told they're the MAIN CHARACTER OF THE STORY and they proceed to behave like an NPC
A lot of people don't actually like D&D, they just play it because they're involved in nerd culture and feel like they should.
I never turn on my notifications. I have for the first time for this. I really like your art and comedy.
Oh wtf you haven't been showing up in my subs.... WTF TH-cam
DnD stories are always so much fun to listen to somehow 😆
the "playing dnd by refusing to play" attitude is the main reason why i'm not friends with my most of my group any more; long story short, in all campaigns i ran the entire group would at some point STAND IN A BURNING ROOM and "calculate" that they could brute force whatever they are doing and then get pissy they they didnt roll high enough to survive the choice to be emolated. and then blamed me, the dm.
I think the passiveness of players is not quite that much of a problem unless they are ALSO resentful towards people who want to take a more active role. My first groups were extremely passive, but they were all amicable people and I guarantee you we all would've welcomed the kind of entertainment your antics would've brought into the group. For the first decade or so I personally was like "I want to do more roleplay because I want to contribute more, but most of the time I don't know how to and I'm too shy to do it anyway".
Regarding the party that went into the swamp: I guess as a DM I would've just said: "Ok, out-of-game talk: This is supposed to be a Lord of the Rings spoof where I prepared a lot of stuff for you in the "not Mines of Moria", so can you just please go in there? I promise I'm not going to kill you (on purpose)."
I think they were just bad at the role part of roleplaying. idk what the exact reason was but if they're adventurers they probably literally could not afford a months long detour through a swamp, this stuff is usually a bit time sensitive. also the presumption that the swamp would be the safer route is purely based on the players knowledge that they're in a story, not because the characters had any reason to believe it
Wanna echo what a lot of other folks are saying and tell ya that it's great to see some videos from you again! I got into tabletop roleplaying in part because of your campaign recap videos nearly a decade ago now, always love to hear you talk about this stuff
"If a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound?"
As my physics professor once said, that depends entirely on how you define sound. Do you define sound as the vibrations that come from motion disturbing air, or do you define sound as our brain's interpretation of said vibrations?
seriously some of the best dnd content on youtube
Oh, man. I have stories out the wazoo about a game I used to run. Granted, I was new to RP and not really experienced enough to be running a game yet, and I definitely didn't understand the difference between an on-rails adventure and a sandbox game and as a result I tried to make something more like a video game where I had specific locations and characters pre-written. I went so far as to build actual dungeons out of foam from a hobby store, and every single freaking time I did something like that, the players would INTENTIONALLY go "oh, this place looks dangerous, let's not go in here. Let's go back to the town and find another quest." They were metagaming the fact that I spent a weekend building a literal set-piece to assume it meant I was trying to trick them into some elaborate trap. And the weird thing is, as much as they kept treating me like I was some monster GM who was out to get them and who needed to be stopped, I went way too far in the other direction of making things too easy because I wanted the story to progress. I never actually killed a player.
Once, when we were playing a d20 Star Wars game, I built a full-sized two deck ship map out of hobby foam and started the adventure with them stuck on a world with that ship being the only way off, so they would take it and have a ship as their main vessel. First thing they do is tell me they want to sell it. I'm still so damn mad about that. I eventually told them "this is the game we're playing, and if you don't want to play it, don't ask me to run it." I've since realized that what was going on was the guy who usually ran our games (who was a pretty decent GM) was a narcissist and he did that sort of thing to sabotage any game he wasn't running. That's what he would do to my game. We had another guy who sometimes ran games, and the narcissist would nitpick every bit of it. Like, imagine a kid at a haunted house kicking over decorations and saying "this is cardboard." That's how that guy acted in the other guy's games. We eventually had a massive fight over it where I got sick of him bullying the other GM and told him off for it. That was the last time I saw him, but I kept playing with the other GM, and his games were a lot more fun without someone constantly trying to ruin them.
Heya, dawnsomewhere.
wanna say that yeah, this is helpful and does make me reconsider a good few of the ways I handle stuff.
Its not that your method is sacred or even that you lay out a true concrete method, its just I wanna try to have these sorts of games and my acts both trying as a dm and player are falling into some of those pitholes. So yeah, It is helping me just reconsider with a new mindset.
thanks
Ran into these sort of world building things in a game my brother GM'ed of Changeling given that both I and one of our friends had really strong ideas for which way we wanted our characters to go that were entirely at odds. Our friend wanted to basically sell his soul for increasing power with no consideration for consequence and my character wanted to help the woman who owned our boarding house and NOT GO BACK TO PRISON. This eventually split the party in half and had us all playing two characters across two different plots, with my character and our resident hippie globetrotting through a network of hidden airports, looking for a way to bring the woman's daughter back from the dead (or make a copy of her) and our friend's waterborn staying at home, picking a fight with the king of Summer and getting killed in one of the hands down most impressively planned fights I think I've ever seen. My brother's anxiety unfortunately ended the story before the world trotting plot finished, but it's still one of the best games I think we've played and I don't just say that because I had a build that let me kill people with my own coat.
@27:00 This is the most important part. In a lot of these videos and such on the internet, people look down on hack or munchkin. But the reality is, the best games are where the GM and the players are on the same page. And if everyone wants to play hack-and-slash munchkin games, then go ahead, and have fun. There is nothing wrong with that.
Just make sure you are on the same page.
Just got done with part 7 of the last WWNP DND on Spotify, man these only get better and better Greg.
Plain kickass, can't wait for the next ones.
I remember how fun averse that party was when you were so obviously trying to make it fun and I had to bail on that shit because it gave me PTSD from my previous shitty Roleplayers. They had no imagination.
A good DM recognizes when the rules make no sense and adjusts. Good players recognize when the game has gotten out of hand and reign it in. I've been fortunate enough to be a part of both at the same time.
Our group is starting a new campaign in a new game with new rules where we've all agreed to the insanity.
I'll be collecting many cowboy hats.
as someone that makes video games and game master's tabletop games; this was interesting to hear. the stuff you said really makes sense to me. i ran games for people that just wanted me to run a video game for them. they wanted to get X task for Y minutes and get Z reward. i really hated it. if i wanted to run a video game, id just tell them to play a video game. the whole point of TTRPG is that a story can evolve and change and that really seems like what you are getting at with this video.
my most recent TTRPG ended because the players were interested in time travel magic, they spent in game months researching it, and then they did it. they traveled back in time to "fix" the problem. i explained that the problem wasnt just "travel back in time and shoot the villain in the head". the problem was something that happened (or didnt) millennia ago. so the 2 people that traveled back in time ended up destroying the world. now i am working on a new setting with a new system to show how they fundamentally changed everything. the time travelers are going to have sparks of memories and guilt. i made sure that some important people that they came to love no longer exist to anyone except them and it drives them a little crazy.
I got so happy when this showed up in my notifications, so glad you're still making stuff
I just gotta say I love this video dog. It's an excellent discussion of cooperative story-telling that transcends just DnD and I really didn't expect to watch what amounts to a podcast so attentively. Subscribed!
I love your videos. Always interesting perspectives you bring.
idk how long ago this was, but I've heard compelling arguments that with the rise of live plays and whatever a lot of people kind of don't WANT to play games so much as they want to have a narrator give them the Critical Roll experience. they want the illusion of being involved but without actually ever being at risk of things going off track
Optimizing the fun out of the game is why most PbtA games specifically reward either failure, or trying things you're bad at. As a player I specifically try to play into whatever the DM is planning just to prevent others from ruining the campaign.
Same with Dungeon World. I think both are good games to try with new players. To teach them that by doing stuff, asking questions, and giving answers. They shape the world. And that even a failure, is not the end of their character.
@@lilmagi unless I'm missing something from the context here, dungeon world is pbta.
9:50 - 10:05
Just finished watching Witch Hunter Robin, put me in the mood to listen to this lecture again.
Regarding the players choosing to go through the swamp and how you describe their reasoning, all I can think of is that they are not being players at that point. They are just managers, in the sense that they are just overseeing the characters and making use ether get from point A to point B with the most cost-effective return on investment. They want to objective without considering their characters as people. "They may be miserable for three months of this travel, but we the players consider that ok."
You still alive buddy? I like your stuff and would like to see more of it, but I have no idea how scheduling or time management works for making videos cause I've never done it, but every one i like takes forever and a day. Anyway, hope you're doing okay, financially or otherwise, and I hope to see something new soon. Or eventually. Or whenever, like I said, I don't know how long these take to make or put out.
This reminds me of the character creation thought experiment one of the DMs I played with brought up. "There is a corked jar on a table in the middle of the woods, how does the character you're making react." The idea behind the thought experiment is that the only wrong answer is that your character does nothing about the scenario. They should have some form of reaction that isn't either intense fear(I hide and run away from the thing) or apathy about a somewhat odd scenario, otherwise the character is probably a boring character.
The game needs the story and the story needs the game. Without a risk of failure there is no narrative tension. Without a narrative, the game actions are just that, game actions.
Great video!
Man, hearing about the players who don't want to do stuff confuses the hell out of me, what are you playing for? The numbers? It kinda reminds me of Arin Hanson's aversion to D&D games cause he feels things grind to a halt when combat happens. Bring your character to the fight. If you're a dancing bard, pirouette around the enemies to confuse them or something. I dunno, his reasoning didn't make sense to me.
My Good character from last time has made it to this Hellish world of war & blood & eldritch abominations. And she's a barbarian healer from a kind of soft eldritch world, so all the horrors don't affect her as much. She feels sorry when coming across a feral hell hound with tentacles all over its back, she sneaks healing spells on to refugees that spurn her healing potions cause they don't trust outsiders, I'm having all kinds of fun with her, really hope to bring home one of those hell hounds as a pet once this leg of the campaign is over. o(>w
I enjoy this. Reminds me of old Counter Monkey.
WOOOOOO!
ah the LotR spoof i recall that skellingrim
I'm a bit of a munchkin myself, but of a very particular sort. Your classic munchkin has a belief that there is some singular absolute ideal build for a character, or group of characters, that will be maximally effective in a given situation, and that your strategic goal should always be to strive to that pinnacle. Like any munchkin, I'm very fascinated with the mathematical puzzle of exploiting D&D mechanics, but I find this line of thinking to be monotonous and ultimately boring. What I try to do instead is to think up weird, counterintuitive concepts, and figure out how to make them work regardless. For instance, a recent one was this orc wizard who used necromancy and folk remedies for healing. He was basically a hitpoint battery.
Ok DM. Here is what I want to do...
I want my character to pick up and throw the party's sentient Pony into the armored Space Marine so that he will tip over and fall on the big boss and knock him out so I can steal his magical aftershave. Can I do that?
This is why I love listening to your roleplay stuff but have absolutely no interest in even trying to roleplay myself.
That one guy from the old group: "What a liar. Our characters were all great, HE was the one who was slowing down the game by asking a lot of dumb questions. WE'RE the players. It's our JOB to BEAT. THE. GAME. Not everybody needs to write a NOVEL to have fun, jeez." (proceeds to speedrun Minecraft)
Turns out acting like sane, cautious people makes for boring adventures, who knew?
I am so wildly curious to know what he means by “munchkin”
"Munchkin" usually refers to a player character that is exceptionally optimized to break the game system. Something like a D&D 3.5 "Cancer Mage" that has the ability to ignore the negative effects that diseases would normally inflict on a person, then gives themselves a disease would normally boost their Strength while draining their mental stats until they die at 0; but the mental stats never go down so you get infinitely-increasing Strength as long as you're "sick."
Not sure if you're asking about his specific definition, but munchkin pretty universally means a character that is trying to "win" rather than roleplay. They will typically have the most broken character possible, and do whatever is optimal to acquire the most gold and power.
This isn't Rainbow Dash Presents
but what about the trees, why were they falling over, i don't understand
i do horroble bootleg DND in discord DM's with my friend where he nods and says "yes" to everything. i even made a map in mspaint to base lore on and ue AI generation for art of stuff or just google pics
Black mold from the dungeon carpet 😷
The issue is what do you think is good. And what law even chaos has a law is more what you are trying to do fallow the leader or be true to yourself. Good is just as bad as evil and evil can be just as good as you want it to be. The out come of your life makes you what you are. And that is fun for the game to me. No matter the system
"The system is good. I'm part of the system and I'm good, therefore the system is good"
Yikes. That's some clear cut authoritarian bootlicker mentality. It would be one thing if it was just roleplaying... but I get the feeling that player was projecting their ideology to the game.
First off, let me say that did sound uncomfortably small-minded so I understand where you're coming from. It sounds like they don't tolerate ambiguity or complexity well.
Now, that could be them being very young mentally or chronologically, that could be about some spectrum disorder issues that make it very difficult to deal with uncertainty so they're rejecting it as a coping mechanism. It could be as you suggest, that they have some sort of desire to submit to and praise an impressive powerful organization or leader.
Or, it could be that they simply hate having to think in their recreation time, want to pick a team, just root for them and have the other guys simply be the enemies so they can be ethically uninhibited and beat the snot out of them.
There's nothing wrong with having a morally simplistic game. You don't get angry at people in WoW because they didn't have a refined understanding of good and evil. You got angry when they didn't pay attention in a raid boss battle, missed the phase change, stood in fire and pulled all the adds. Because those idiots will take away the healers focus from the tanks, The tanks will go down and then the whole raid will wipe.
ANYWAY.
In the context that we heard it, they sound like an absolute tool, and kind of an idiot.
All hail the algorithm
Is it the trees?
Ilyyy
10 hours? Do you hate Australians Greg!?
Its always Night somewhere
Oh I skipped a dungeon on a friend once. But I learned enough about myself that I just want a video game so it was like one of two sessions I had with that character.
I may not enjoy being a part of games. But the function of them fascinates me
Over the second point
Hey Greg, as much as I love these rp nuance videos (and I really, really do) are you still going to do any more of the "We will not play DnD series?
I'm more than happy with whatever you put out. I just like that series and am curious.
@trinitylovesyou 😱
which of the...
what would you call them
...story arcs have you listened too?
i really love the Neville and Vampire parts
The Patreon has episode on for free in parts as well. They'll come here once the whole thing is complete and combined, but if you want content quicker.
@@fernandothatsonofabitch Endearing Nosferatu xD
The last part was I want to find to fix it
Brooo
Swamp.. easy.. then gm made it easy hagz plagues. Going off course do to eating the wrong mushrooms. It would have been a year for then to go thrue a swamp lol
Here's advice for you: always adapt the content you made. Your players choose to not fight the American ghosts? They go travel to tell their king in England? Well because they didn't help fight the ghosts, the problem has spread to England as well. Don't be stagnant with the content you've made. Make it malleable.
obligatory comment
You voice changer omg