When D&D Meets the Muppets | Black Lodge Games Podcast
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ส.ค. 2023
- UPDATE: We have largely made peace with the people mentioned in this video. Many of our points stand, but we appreciate their commitment to serious (if absurd) play and the general good nature and high testosterone that they exhibit. Previous description preserved for posterity:
There may not be a way to win at Dungeons and Dragons, but there is certainly a way to LOSE. This week we talk about the fruits of the #brosr gaming efforts and the principles behind them.
Some of the principles of the BrOSR style of play are legitimately interesting but it is put into practice with stoner-tier, "lol so random" world building and a commitment to dog-shitism. This is the trash game, the shit tier slop, the garmonbozia that we talk about. Check out the links below to videos we talked about:
GREAT video by @TheJoyofWargaming
• You Can Win at RPGs: C...
GREAT interview with @gelatinousrube on @RollinBones live show
• What is "The Grand Cam...
Incoherent ramblings by Jeffro Johnson that fail to explain a single thing of value:
- @TheBasicExpert: • Natural Ones 6/26/2023...
- @RollinBones: • Why is Conventional Pl...
- @InappropriateCharacters • The Inappropriate Char...
The dogshit BrOSR session report referenced in the show:
bdubsanddragons.blogspot.com/... - เกม
I think you guys are taking trolls seriously.
Yes.
@@blacklodgegames lol
People don't understand that making an emergent world filled with complex people with their own desires who act apart from the party is not the same thing as "story gaming" where the DM determines the whole outline of the game from the top down. Good campaign worlds are designed to have interesting things in them that players will try to move or try to move the players.
100% agree. "Story gaming" is thrown around too loosely by people.
This is like when you would do improv in theater class in Elementary School and everyone was having fun and then one kid goes “I TAKE OUT MY DEATH RAY AAAAAAAAH!”
As long as the death ray is RAW it is all good 😎
@@blacklodgegames I swear I can’t see that term without hearing a certain loveable madman screaming, “DRIVE THRU RPG! GO THERE NOW!” In my ear
From the beginning... with Holmes for me... then AD&D... we had ALWAYS looked at RPG rules as guidelines with our gaming groups back in the 80's. Every GM had their own rules according to their worlds.
I like RAW to see how well designed the game is and I usually only make minor changes unless something is truly egregious, but I am a spiritual rule zero enjoyer
"the problem is that these guys are all on Twitter..." Yes
glol
I'm surprised you didn't highlight one of the lines from the session report that seems to sum up a lot of the BrOSR philosophy: "Deadly serious session and stakes with the stupidest themes possible!"
I was not going to subject myself to the entire thing, it's like if Moldbug wrote a session report
I’m pretty sure that playing in that style is in violation of both the Lake Geneva conventions and the fuckin’ Geneva Conventions. It’s a war crime under both criteria 😂
100% true
Your reaction to the session report was freaking hilarious. It made my day better. Thanks!
You're very welcome!
My view is this. Even if you do stupid shit in your game you gotta take it seriously and act in character. I would have no issue with a murderous muppet attack as long as everyone stayed completely in character and didn’t screech laugh and repetitively say “da muppets?! DA MUPPETS?!”
Well. I would have an issue with it. But it wouldn’t be nearly as bad
It's just a sign of bad taste to have the muppets in the game to begin with. I don't really care if they are taking it seriously, it's just stupid.
@@blacklodgegamesfair. But if they took it seriously it would be marginally less bad
I don’t have a lot of experience with RPGs but thought the concepts in BROSR would be useful for creating campaigns in a real world historical setting as a companion to my wargames…yet they are playing Muppets ??
Please tell me the Muppet thing is just a massive troll and not some group thinking this is somehow profound.
Not a troll. They play this way. I'm sure they consider it a troll in some sense on people who take things "seriously" but it's just evidence of bad taste.
You guys should make a video about how to facilitate role-playing and immersion via game mechanics and game-mastering techniques
It's on the list
I personally don't see anything wrong with a land of muppets in the middle of your fantasy land. Especially with the veritable zoo of species in a lot of games. I think the quality of the content comes down to something you guys brought up in another episode: sincerity.
Anything done with sincerity can be a good and enjoyable time.
I don't know these brosr guys enough to give them that level of benefit of the doubt, but I don't think the concept in a vacuum makes your game worse for having it.
We have largely made peace with the BrOSR and quite like some of them. Muppets aren't my cup of tea but we did misjudge them.
The bros take the hobby very seriously, just from a different starting point than us. They do, however, focus on excellence and a deeper satisfaction in the game experience than mere amusement, which is commendable.
Excellent! I'm glad common ground was found.
While I understand that you do like like the BroSR's world, session reports, character names, etc. Is it still possible to extract good out of the Bros message about the game and how it should be played? I do not really like muppetland, and the idea of everything goes in the campaign if a player thought it up, but the core concepts of the BroSR I can get behind: RTFM. Play it RAW. Get it to the table. Play in gaming clubs.
I also know that you do not like the dive into dungeons to get loot part of the game, just rolling the dice, and playing the dungeon dive as a wargame/board game. I know that you guys have a stance of roleplaying should be roleplaying, but my view is that the patron play is the roleplaying for the BroSR, and that the fighter, cleric, magic-user going into the dungeon are just tools of the patron to further the patrons goals. That the BroSR is treating the party that goes into a dungeon like a piece of equipment.
I bring that up, because that is exactly what the Dune RPG does. Dune is heavily influenced by patron play, with each player being a major player in the house hierarchy. This is where the high level roleplaying is done between these house members. Each member has assets available to the character, up to and including a core of spies, or fighters on the ground, etc. The house member can deploy these assets on the ground to gain control of a patch of desert for spice harvesting, moving the fremen off the land (as an example).
Play would then zoom in on the platoon or squad of house fighters, which each player assuming a role in the squad, but those characters are not the main characters. The squad gets the mission done, reports back to the house member, and the Master of Spies of another house now reports to his house leader the goings on in court.
What happened down on the planet was not the main game, it was just a PART of the game that was happening in court. The roleplaying for the squad was not the point of the game, but to further the goals of house, and stop the advance of another house, and the victory or failure of the squad on the planet influences the roleplaying of the house members.
I hope that this example makes sense.
I think we actually mention how you could use this style of play in Dune's setting but I'm not familiar with the game itself. The hostility we have is not about the actual principles of play which *are* interesting, rather toward the implementation which is extremely juvenile and presented as the peak experience and One True Way™️.
We'd be willing to ignore it if Jeffro and others simply argued that silliness is fun and that they liked playing that way, but they often argue that rejecting silly names or out of milieu concepts is limiting player agency or railroading/story gaming.
That is not only false, it is an assault on taking the game seriously as such. The focus on taking the rules seriously on a meta level while having essentially no rules or coherence in the imaginary world is a contradictory position and will produce an experience that is fundamentally broken. Taking the game seriously is actually what we strive for, and it requires having some sincerity and putting yourself in the shoes of someone who lives in a coherent world. If the world is totally incoherent, it's impossible to be sincere, and impossible to take seriously. That is breaking the entire experience imo
We are also not against RAW at all (unless it's with a game that is poorly designed) and while club play is not our preferred way, I know that's just a matter of preference.
I hate the zany stuff. However, the first 40-60 sessions on BDubs reports are straight ACKS world game play and are very enjoyable. It has the realism of Autarchs world and mechanics and patrons. It’s great. As he moved to more zany my interest in following along dropped off precipitously.
They are pushing the hobby in a couple directions. One is silly and the other is good (patron play). In listening to them you need to be able to eat the meat without choking on the bones.
I actually quite like BDubs now. The gonzo stuff gives me aneurism, but the BrOSR has the correct mindset and take their games seriously.
59:50 the social fabric still exists. And you're not invited 🤣
Muppetlantis is myth. There is no way that something so glorious could ever be!
...
Know your group and things tend to work out,,,waaaay better.
As always, choosing your players is the most important factor in the success of a game. I just refuse to believe this sort of terrible world is something to envy or hold up as the pinnacle of the RPG experience.
...yuck@@blacklodgegames...your refusal is futile. Your hair-dye ritual will commence shortly. YOU WILL BE ONE OF US! ... sorry, i dont know what just happened...yeah fuck that, yuck. There's so much room to improve (with or without the "e"). PS...still waiting for my GOD DAMN episode of Cyber...dammit.
I find the idea of 1 to 1 time a little interesting (obviously within reason).
I'm sure it can be improved by just using a good downtime system though.
The time issue seems a sticking point for a lot of people. We have a few questions we haven't found answers to yet, but it's the least offensive aspect of the game imo.
@@blacklodgegames My friend brought it to my attention that the only reason I want to play in real-time is so I can justify playing roleplaying games for a week straight. This is true, and outside of this context, it's far less interesting.
1 to 1 time keeping is such a crapshoot on every level, and it's obvious that they don't even follow the rule themselves. If the dungeon is two days travel away, do they end the session and come back on tuesday? If the pizza shows up in the middle of the encounter, do the goblins get to keep attacking while they're eating? Do the dungeon denizens reset the traps, relock the doors and call for reinforcements when the partys off chilling in their base camp between sessions? I bet they don't.
The time thing is actually the part that I think matters the least and the thing I have thought the least about.
Muppetlantis... the participants of this BRoSR game are 11-13 years old right? that the only way I could imagine this makes sense.
I cannot imagine tweens coming up with something so stupid.
When I was 11, I wanted to kill orcs in bloody battles to the death, not fight the muppets or cartoon characters
I was surprised with the Muppet thing. I thought the BrOSR supposedly represented serious, "real" men who do masculine things like lift weights and such. Am I correct that they describe themselves in this way and all others are just not "man" enough to handle the most authentic and correct way to play D&D? Then they play Muppets?! Seems incongruous. Is a My Little Pony campaign up next?
Am I missing some nuance or is this just as silly as it sounds? I thought the BrOSR were supposed to be the most hardcore of the hardcore?
This episode reminds me again that setting is much more important than system.
An entertaining show gentlemen. Thanks!
@@Tablerunner You are not missing any nuance. Some of them, at least, love the idea that incoherent game worlds are superior to a well defined and high quality setting.
I have been trying so hard to get a serious game going and I feel like I always end up with people like this. It feels like most people can't be serious anymore or at least my players can't take the game seriously.
I find the worst is people who say "I don't like combat I just want to roleplay" these people are always lying.
I had a group of friends that loved playing back in the day, one of them was a total shitposter. One last time I tried to run a game for them, his LEGIT character concept was "A cyclops minion...like the yellow movie minion and x-men". The others were okay
@@nicolascamargo4514 That's so weird. Yeah I also tried with a group of my friends who I thought would be serious but they just always acted like idiots, I've got tired of trying. I feel like these days a lot of people just act weird.
@@MrBsberzerker Yeah, good players are THE find for game runners. You find one that jives well with your style and you have memorable sessiions guarateed.
Sadly RPGs aren't for everyone, and not for the reasons one would've thought, but mostly because some people can't be earnest about "being silly".
I hope you find a good group, man
Well, I guess I know why he never explained it better. That being said there are some real issues with social isolation out there.
It's true but I think a lot of it is self imposed. Meetup.com has tons of activities for people and they don't even look.
What's strange about the social dance thing is that he's focused on meeting girls, but not any of the next steps such as dating, courtship and marriage. It's honsetly the same pattern of immature behavior that leads to Muppetlantis and the like. All that matters is the breadth of experience and nothing else.
I kind of agree with him on this though. If you don't know how to meet women, dance is one of many ways to start and kick off chemistry. It's a numbers game for men, so you have to meet a lot of women if you want to find a good one and lock one down.
I imagine he would disagree but this is also why dating apps are useful if you're single and in a good market. Courtship doesn't matter if you can't even get your foot in the door
@blacklodgegames He's not wrong per ser. But the way he approaches it is short sighted. There is a next step after meeting women, but Jeffro has said that even married men should be participating and taking their wives to these events. He, and the wider brosr idolize the forms but not the functions.
@@FloodedRealms that's a good way of putting it
You know there’s actual OSR-ish game with muppets, right? Like actual game. It’s called Electric Bastionland.
I liked Yoda in Jedi. It didn’t seem stupid or silly. I don’t think I would ever describe a muppet in my games, but it worked in Star Wars.
In fact, if a player tries to introduce anything that breaks immersion in my world, I veto it immediately.
36:53 I saw a gaming store that did the whole shared world thing. If you had to leave before your characters got home then your characters enter a "Lost" state. You take 20% of your loot and leave it as a finder's fee to whatever party rescues you. If another party makes it to the room you are lost in they get the finder's fee and you go home. Even if nobody actually rescues you before you show up next weekend you still start back home -20% of your loot under the assumption that you got out somehow.
The whole idea looked interesting but it kinda played like Diablo 1. It was one massive mega dungeon map they had posted on the wall with higher level monsters further out from the dungeon entrance, so you had to kind of find rooms in the right CR radius from the front door for your party. You'd run into a few rooms and just do as much as you could before everyone decided you needed a long rest. Then you were done for the day, sessions lasted around 2 hours but you could gas out in half an hour of one tough fight. Took forever to level up too.
+1 for Fires Just Happen.
thank you for acknowledging this fundamental truth of Adventure.
Lmao I couldn't stop laughing at how stupid the setting was. I would think you guys were just trolling me if you didn't post receipts.
Toon is already out there!
You guys should see the Mad Hatter stats block.
I always feel like I'm missing something with the BROSR
Because in the same breath they tell you to play exclusively RAW (which is fair enough imo) but then tell you the game should rely on Braunstein Faction play that... doesn't to my knowledge have written rules?
My understanding is that Braunstein play is implied in the rules and that people have sort have forgotten this because TSR changed the style of the game when it became clear that modules would sell well
@@blacklodgegames It isn't. What the DMG discusses is that as players reach name level and have domains they will get less involved in dungeon and wilderness delves and much more involved in politics as a natural development of the campaign over time. Patrons are a Monty Haul attempt to "cheat" and get that right away without the years of play.
@@RickStump That doesn't bother me all that much. I come from the World of Darkness games where even low level play is highly political, so having experienced players skip ahead and play faction leaders to spice up a game with a large number of players sounds fun.
The problem, as we said in the video is that in the same way that the large number of players creates a sort of compounding or exponential growth in the interesting player driven changes to the world, the growth in the problems stemming from having *bad* players also explode exponentially.
@@blacklodgegames I agree. I like faction play in such games and it is common at every level in my AD&D campaign. I just don’t understand giving people very high level characters to do it, myself
Im kinda behind the gun on this whole issue, but I am intreated by the whole on going campaign with several groups playing in the same world at the same time and if you don't play for a week a weeks time goes on in the world, as for playing as written we wouldn't have multiple editions if they were perfect, the rest of it just seems to reinforce the one of the many reasons im not on twitter.
Yeah the massively multiplayer always on campaign sounds very cool. The BrOSR has largely moved on from that though so this episode is a time capsule
You may not like it, but Muppetlantis is peak D&D.
Disinfo
Sine Nomine Faction Turn (Worlds Without Number), but instead of GM solo play between sessions, each faction is controlled by an individual player. See also: Matt Colville on the Diplomacy board game.
They reinvent _Birthright_ domain-level actions and act like they've discovered fire.
Bugs Bunny was in the, written-as-comedy, adventure Castle Greyhawk.
On the topic of Jeffro, and why he won't explain the concepts of Jeffro-Gygaxian play, is because he wants you to buy the book. If he explains it to you, then you have no reason to buy the book. It's a simple explanation, but probably the correct one.
Maybe that's just a bad sales tactic for people like me. I generally buy books after seeing someone talk about their ideas and I want to know more
That can't be the reason. As mentioned in this video, guys like The joy of wargaming and gelatinousrub are just better at explaining it then jeffro. It's come up in interviews with jeffro.
The first session report I read was a jeffro one where half the report was him complaining and describing an argument he had with his players because they're interacting with doors in a way he didnt want them to.
Muppetlantis sounds cursed
th-cam.com/video/YvUbbYX9BMs/w-d-xo.html
I feel like in so many games the joke never ends. Like at some point a joke is over and we play a real game but when do we reach that point?
(around 15:00 ) I hate to break it to y'all, but the archaeology on 1-1 Time is done and dusted. Jeffro's detractors have had 5 years to provide the slightest shred of evidence that 1-1 time was widely used and promoted at any point before his writings and play reports on the matter.....and all anyone provided was a smattering of small blog posts about how folks didn't get it. Y'all are welcome to give it your best shot though!
Sounds like Drinking & D&D?!
Cracks me up that the broSR, supposedly is more faithful to the original than the OSR has character "Safe Spaces" are there characters can't be hurt or attacked. Feels kind of woke to me.
To be fair, I don't actually know if these are truly safe zones, that is just an assumption I am making based on the similarity to things like west marches games where town is a safe zone
Have you played in one of their games?
No. We've played in a large scale Vampire the Masquerade game that did very similar things a decade ago so the concepts aren't foreign, but the details are a bit different (which is to be expected as it's a different game).
So this whole thing with them is stupid and gross, but it does make me wonder about playing a more comedic, maybe even Muppet-movie like game. Role-playing as characters in some Jim Henson esque adventure story. Ideally you'd be playing goofy, light-hearted characters..... but playing them seriously. As in leaning into the comedy and fun. Get into insane fight scenes were you get tossed around like rag dolls with comical circumstances, have puzzles that get solves with relative absurdity, even make room for some pop culture references *in character*. Like you guys said before..... sincerity can get you a long way as far as immersion, and I wonder if that'd extend to goofy shit.
Course, this is just me playing devil's advocate. But I do think that something like that would be far more fun and fulfilling than what these dorks are doing with their half heart, stick shit to the wall play-style crammed with sarcasm and irony.
Edit: This is coming from a Dark Medieval Fantasy writer with a lean towards the very stories that inspired the old guard of D&D in the first place. Fritz Liber, Robert E Howard, Micheal Moorcock, etc
He couldn't explain things 20 years ago.
It reminds me why I usually don't want to hear people's campaign and character stories. 9 times out of 10, it's some stupid shit involving a cheesy pop culture reference that only the person telling it thinks is the most hillarious tale ever told in human history. Yawn.
Correct
Nerds getting mad at how other people play pretend is quickly becoming my favorite genre.
This is the channel for you.
I feel like you never saw Muppet Treasure Island with Tim Curry. I don't get the hate for Muppetlandia specifically. Sure, it's an acid trip of a game, but Gary Gygax wrote scenarios that took place in Wonderland from Alice in Wonderland. Acid trip settings are baked into the hobby.
Is there a Lolita at the table that the DM is trying to groom with this child daycare game mechanic?
This is grown men guffawing over muppets, nothing more.