Jocat: "I don't have that many games under my belt as a GM." Also Jocat: GMs some of the loveliest actual plays I've seen. Like, Jocat, if you are reading this, you are an amazing and wholesome GM, everything else aside it always feels like you have a very positive and friendly atmosphere at your tables when running, which is 110% aspirational.
My absolute FAVOURITE storytelling trick that I use as a DM is this: 1. Have your players write out/give you their backstory Then 2. As the DM take that backstory, and add to it. What this essentially creates is a player who knows their character’s backstory from their character’s perspective, while you, as DM know the backstory from an omniscient perspective. There were parts to the story that the character didn’t see, and part of the campaign can be that character learning about those extra details
This one time our DM said _okay I want everyone of you to write a summary of the backstory_ and after everyone did so he rolled a few times and then switched the backstories between us and said _I hope none of you wrote something too traumatising..._ Well... playing a Barbarian who grew up being raised by a bunch of housecats wasn't on my agenda, but it was fun 😂
In one campaign I was in, one of the players had a somewhat vague backstory that mentioned something, but didn't give any details, so the GM used that as a plot hook for a major plot event. For my own characters, I tend to have a general idea of the character's backstory, but I leave a lot of it open for the GM. Though GMs should get permission from the player before adding to a character's backstory like that.
I'm screenshotting this comment to send to my players because one of my players has been "reworking their backstory" for about a year now and I'm being slash jay passive aggressive about it.
Since this comment actually ended up getting some traction I should elaborate. - this works best when the player gives a 3/4 fully fleshed out backstory (if you’re getting more than a page or two from the player there kinda isn’t enough room to add anything) - This REQUIRES that your players are cool with you adding some details - You do not change anything, only add more context - This works best when your additions are used to either link the character to the world, the main plot, or another player character. Since that can get the player more invested in the game as they follow the mysteries you added.
I heard Austin's voice and it took me a moment that 1. It wasn't Blue speaking, and 2. The voice sounded familiar because of RWD Let it be known that "everyone of X gender on the pod sounds the same" is no longer only a curse for the women
For indigo's point about charisma checks, it's worth knowing that how persuasive someone is equally about how that is received. Someone charming can just as easily come across as cocky if it's received badly, and often that can be influenced by how the receiver is feeling that day. All this to say if you want to roleplay your persuasion attempt, that is awesome, but you should still roll your check to see how it's received. A great speech can come across as preachy and someone awkward can come across as really genuine.
I think it depends on the situation. What really bothers me is when the player asks if they can make a certain kind of roll instead of describing what they want to do. It's fine if they go "can I roll X to do [insert action and desired outcome]" but when someone tries to like convince a selfish character to help I need something more than being persuasive. I follow like an old school philosophy I guess where I want to challenge the players, not their characters. Tldr back in the old days (before my time) dnd was like actually a survival game and the players had to be clever to live and get loot from a dungeon. I don't take it quite that far. I prefer if the dangerous heroism is the player's own decision and selfless so then they get the cool feeling of bailing from a fight once they realized the hostage was elsewhere saving precious time they needed at the cost of the hp they spent getting away. Similarly I love when players get a selfish npc to help them by offering up info or a mission that furthers their aims🤭 Always feels better if the problem and/or solution is caused by previous players.
That intro reminds me how old I am compared to the OSP crew and their friends. I'm probably closer in age to Red's parents and started with AD&D, but I love that TTRPGs have only grown in popularity and social acceptance. Great job, y'all!
Oh the Jocat discussion on doing nothing. Had a situation once. Dm: You're trapped, make a strength save to break out. Me: I rolled 15 (I forgot the roll.) Dm: You're still trapped and you can't cast magic. Me, a level 14 sorcerer: Okay I'll do...nothing then.
My third character is a circus performer because of him. Although, normally I'm the nice religious one, so ironically my nightcrawler esque character is the time I'm not doing that lol
To side with Jocat's hot take, I played a 5e game that was using 1st edition crit tables, and on the first turn of a 4 round combat (it lasted an hour and a half) I rolled a natural 1, had to roll on the fumble table, and was stunned for 8 rounds. So for an hour and a half, I got to do nothing. The dm felt so bad that he ditched the 1st edition rules and instead found a new table to use and made sure there was not a possibility of just being taken out of a fight.
Stunned for 8 rounds, geezus. Might as well have gotten 1HKO'd. Then at least you could have been working on a new character all that time.. long crowd control (deliberate or accidental) on the players is the worst.
@evrfreez There was a chance to instantly die on the table! The rules got brought out in a one shot later, and if not for someone wearing an armor that canceled crits they would have instantly died within the first 20 minutes of the session
@@DParkerNunya Good times all around =D I mean there is fun to be had with devastating crit and botch tables, but it always must needs be balanced against the possibility of a player just effectively being done for the evening. Maybe GMs should let players run monsters, if they get taken out, I've seen that done sometimes..
It's interesting how the designers of 5e identified three "pillars" of play as social interaction, exploration, and combat, because I think those pillars actually do a better job of describing various RPG play-styles and table-cultures than, for example, the old Forge models (like gamist / narrativist / simulationist). If a game emphasizes social interaction, you're going to get a play-style that resembles those actual plays, where the emphasis is on playacting and storytelling and character arcs. That's trad style (like AD&D 2nd edition) if the DM is taking a firm (some would say railroady) hand in guiding where the story goes, or neo-trad (like a lot of 5e games) if there's more emphasis on player collaboration and making arcs grounded in personal backstories and contrived spotlight moments happen. (It roughly corresponds to Forge narrativism/"story now", except that D&D doesn't have mechanics for making stories and character beats happen, where lots of Forgist narrativist and post-trad indie storygame type games do have mechanics for that. So D&D tends to place that burden on DMs alone, or on DMs collabing with players.) If a game emphasizes combat, then you're in tacti-trad or skirmish wargame territory, like 3e or 4e or the Pathfinders. The point of a game like this is optimization and builds and balanced combat challenges. (This way of playing roughly corresponds to Forge gamism/"step-right-up", but again it's a bad correspondence, because gamist games are supposed to, well, function out of the box. Whereas modern WotC d20 D&D tends to encourage DMs to fudge and rubber-band and do whatever other kind of subtle cheating is necessary to maintain the illusion of that balanced challenge, to keep the combat-as-sport-not-war vibe from collapsing under the weight of complex and breakable game mechanics. But if a DM does cheat and hides it, and the players figure it out anyway, it sucks to be those players.) Finally, you have the exploration pillar, which loosely matches up to what Forge theorists called simulationism/"right-to-dream" (i.e., the fantasy of inhabiting the verisimilitudinous fictional milieu). This way of playing best matches up with OD&D (including 3LBB and BXCMI), AD&D 1st edition, and OSR, because these games are all about exploring dungeons and countrysides. The combat mechanics are quick, so fights are decisive and don't eat up table time. They can be deadly, so you often want to avoid fights altogether or subvert them with clever tricks and plans. (This is "combat-as-war-not-sport.") And instead, most time at the table is spent on interacting with the environment, like a combination of survival game (it's only survival horror at low levels, it's worth pointing out) and point and click puzzle adventure game, but with the ability to use your own wits to solve puzzles any number of ways (instead of relying on a pre-programmed video game's moon logic). This is where your roguelike, sandbox, West Marches, and old-school massiviely multiplayer campaign styles live, and if you've never played D&D this way, do yourself the favor and try it sometime, because it's awesome.
On the discussion of Ranger and its lack of a niche in 5E: The observation that 5E doesn't really support the style of play that the class is designed for is pretty spot on. Though I would argue that people very much do play that kind of game, they just aren't part of the modern D&D community because wilderness exploration has been neglected in D&D since Wizards of the Coast took over, along with other subsystems like realm management, mass combat, and hirelings. The people who are playing those games are using older versions of D&D, OSR games, or systems from different design lineages. There is still demand for those kind of games given the success of most recent iteration of Traveller, and Free League's hexcrawl focused Forbidden Lands and Twilight 2000 4th edition, for example. (Side note, the comment about actual plays influencing the way people play RPGs is spot on, and kind of troubling. The "actual play style" is designed to make entertaining recordings for an outside observer, and does not necessarily correspond to any best or intended way to play an RPG. People exclusively playing the highly narrative, lightly scripted actual play style are missing out on a huge space of possible gameplay)
My first D&D character was a gnome fighter named Dribvik. While helping a farm family fight off goblin raiders, he was offered a seat at their breakfast table. In true gnome fashion, I went with the goofiest response I could think of: "Breakfast is my middle name!" One Futurama joke later, and now the character is more frequently remembered by his nickname, Breakfast Rodriguez.
I love the advice that we should make room for growth in our characters. What I heard was "the fastest way to give your character cognitive dissonance is to have them all figured out in a world they dont control"
OMG... The first character that I made myself as opposed to a pregen handed to me was circa 1988. It was a half-elf rogue... named Kurt and I was also chasing Nightcrawler. Dang 😅
The second Jocat started talking about persuasion checks, I was like oh man he's saying that 5e works like Fallout 3 speech, but he wants it to work like Fallout New Vegas speech. And yeah speech checks based on the actual skill it's related to makes a lot of sense
My biggest advice is to separate what your character *can* do from what they *want* to do. I have atrocious dice luck (one table actually ruled I was only allowed 3 nat 1's per session), so I optimize to avert JoCat's "lost turn problem", but then I always ensure that my character's interests don't align with what they are already *good* at. That brings in both opportunities for growth and for you to bring other characters into your own story arcs. Also Hi JoCat! I missed you and I'm glad that you're both back and took time to take care of yourself.
My first character was a 2e Human Paladin named Alcair Novall. He was absolutely lawful stupid, but eventually grew out of it because he had to cope with the lunatics in the party (and lemme tell ya, they were about as bad but opposite side of the alignment chart). The whole LG part was made funnier in retrospect because to save me coming up with another name, I went with the villain in the book I was writing at the time. Alcair has since been rerolled and reappeared many, many times, to the point that he and his brothers have kids kicking around in stuff. Also, zomg, Victor Quibbles origin story! I dont remember if it came up during any of the Hildibrand parts Durmin's playthrough, but I love that he lives on like that in ff14.
Less than a minute into this video, I hear JoCat’s amazing (and relatable) pitch to adapt characters from other media for DnD sessions, and a X-Men: Evolution shoutout. I am SATISFIED. ❤
The longest single, unbroken session of D&D for me was 30 hours back in High School and by the end of it it was basically madness cause we were all so sleep deprived.
Our weekly session was theoretically 8 hours, often rant to 12, and on at least one occasion reached 22. We often discussed the fact that we didn't like the amount of time it consumed but once it was going none of us wanted to stop.
Unrelated to ttrpgs, but related to time consumption: dakrest dungeon is a game I open thinking "No way it's that fun" and I wake up six hours later with my pyramid of needs crumbling. I assume that's how drugs work.
JoCat and OSP talking for over an hour about D&D? Well that's my evening sorted. I'm genuinely going to get a takeaway, a nice bottle of wine and make an evening of it after the latest episode of The Korean War by Indy Neidell.
fun thought from Jocat's hot take: from a game design perspective, one can argue a turn is the (second) shortest "loop" in a trpg, with a lot of time typically between turns, where, on top of trying to do well, your brain is learning to observe the way your *direct actions* update the game state and not only does a null turn basically tell the player "you didn't do well", thus making said player feel like whatever they did was not good but also on a more meta-loop level, the more you realize that the way to avoid this is mostly creating a *totally different character*, which also feels bad, and typically it's not actually that much better an archetype
one thing I heard on critical role ( I think it was Abria DM ing ) she said " I believe in failing forward " ex : you missed all three attacks, so I'll say it's because you spotted this thing or recognized X situation, that will lead to new options. I loved that.
hey guys just wanted to say love ur miscellaneous myth videos and like the greek places explanations and all.Also love ur greek mythology vids truly just great explanations
My first D&D character was Issac (I forget his last name) a dragonfire adept (3.5 class) and he ended up being the only sane man and party face. Dragonfire adepts were great- the mechanics were a reskin of the 3.5 warlock where instead of getting spells they got infusions, basically spell like abilities, so they only got a handful but they could use them forever. The big thing was that instead of eldritch blast, they got breath weapons (minus the 1d4 rounds between use that monsters with breath weapons had to deal with) which could be buffed by metabreath feats, I only got far enough to have 2 different ones, fire and ice, but I got the feats to have the breath attacks linger, cling and entangle foes. So I could basically napalm areas with debuffing elemental energies. The first infusion I got was one that let me make my allies immune to them. With that and his high charisma, and constitution(the stat the breath weapon damage scaled from) I always had something to do. My favorite moment was when the party split, most of us going after a witch that had been kidnaping local kids, and making an army of scarcrow minions, the issue is that they left 2 people behind, me, Issac, the walking napalm maker, and our cleric, who had been getting drunk. In character I sobered him up by dunking him in a horse trough, and then talked to the locals to find out where the rest of the party went. At the same time they were slowly loosing to the army of scarecrows, and I got to go "wait they left to fight a witch with an army of straw stuffed minons, and they left they guy who breaths fire behind!" and then Issac ran after them with the cleric. I got there in time to help turn the tide and to see a magic item we had run out of uses and then regenerate into the troll it had been made out of, in the witch's hut. The witch did not survive.
Hes been back friend-o Check his Stream channel, hes got some stuff in the works right now, and a few “hey heres what ive been up to” vids I especially enjoyed his “JoCat direct”
The more I learn about D&D and MTG, the more I want to play. But my group of friends has fractured all over the world, and I´ve lost so many social skills... This sounds so fun. T.T
Playing using virtual tabletops (like Roll20) with voice chat (like Discord) might be of interest to you, since they let you play with anyone anywhere in the world. Same goes for playing MTG over webcam or in Tabletop Simulator.
I basically grew up with vague knowledge of D&D. I know when I was a little kid my late brother used to play the game. Growing up I thought it was for nerds and dorks, but then around high school, I fell in love with fantasy and adventure stories and video games. That's when I found out I am a nerd and a dork and there's nothing wrong with that. It wasn't till after I graduated high school that I decided to learn more about D&D with some help from TeamFourStar at the table. That's when I learned how fun and hilarious the game can be. I started really playing around 2021. Since I didn't have any friends that play the game, I just played by myself and wrote down the events that happen like an author of an epic tale of adventure and mischief. I hope someday to join a session with others in person.
On the equipment list as improv guidelines: I was playing a Half-Orc Bard in Pathfinder and had a lot of carry capacity left that I wanted to fill, so I decided to pick up two portable rams. In the first session with that character, the party was faced with a locked, reinforced door. While most of the characters were focused on the door, I did an Investigation to find a weak spot in the wall and just wailed on it with two friggin battering rams. Guess who got in first.
I'm not a big fan of podcasts but I enjoyed this one a lot. I liked hearing everyone's different opinions on the multitude of topics. I leave with a new perspective on how I run my games and play ttrpgs in general, and that's just sick!
Have you guy heard of the TTRPG world called The World Of Darkness? It is a gothic punk setting with urban decay, and modern fantasy. You may be more roleplaying heavy with some combat or vise versa. There are many game lines like Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Mage: The Ascension, Hunter: The Reckoning, Changling: The Dreaming, Wraith: The Oblivion, ect. You might have to balance your normal life with the mystical, you might have to erase memories if you are able or you might just have to stand in line and pay for wipes to remove stains you currently have while in said line after a battle with a possessed serial killer.
The first AP I listened to was TAZ Graduation. But I have listened to a bunch since then. And what I've found is that the system can cover so many genres. You have Heart of Elynthi and Rolling With Difficulty with well thought out character beats and arcs. Then you got Critical Botch which is basically a recorded home game with Brandon Cutler showing his fellow wrestlers DnD, some first time players. And that's awesome.
I like 3.5s ability to let you play lots of the same theme but with different game mechanics. Like knights can be knights, fighters, paladins, soulborns, crusaders, psychic warriors, samurai (either OA or CW), hexblade or some others.
one of my first ever dnd characters was a ranger in 3.5 that focused on dual wielding in melee and I decided "oh, one of the options for favored enemies is goblins. they're a good low level threat, I'm sure I'll get lots of mileage out of this choice." and so the GM retroactively replaced every single goblin in his campaign with Kobolds deliberately to make sure I never could use the class feature. He also made the entire campaign take place in hazy flashbacks making it literally impossible to have time between dungeons to buy new equipment or actually spend any loot ever.
yknow, there's all the waaah waaah about AI, and a lot of it's pretty reasonable, but one of the various reasons i use chatgpt is when im planning d&d for my players, i actively balance the numbers around their builds, hp, etc.. it's insanely useful to be able to crunch the numbers, update them in real time, and all of that, all while the ai has the entirety of d&d under its belt and ready to call on. it saves so much time too, which i can only assume was your dm's concern, since that's a substantially sized penny of damage you were building. the last part just sounds like he failed to pull off something he wanted to. it sounds like a really easy remedy, just have gaps in the flashbacks and have you guys buy your equipment/upgrades out of game or something if he didnt want the shops to be part of the flashbacks... so odd.
@@ExceptionallyUndersizedThanos it's because we were like 13 year olds and like most teenagers all of us were malicious little shits. the one person in the group who knew how to play was much older and demanded that instead of running longsword/shortsword and a dual wielding setup with a d8/d6 damage dice I go with a mace and dagger (d6/d4) instead claiming that somehow it would be better. The actual reason he wanted to do this was so that he could literally rip my exact class setup and play it better to overshadow me since he knew how to character build better than me.
A few thoughts of my own in response: - One of my early characters (back in the bad old days of 2E) had Bracers of Spider-Climb and dual-wielded Whips of Grasping, so used to crawl on walls and ceiling and swing from the whips in order to get around. Not Nightcrawler (nor any other X-Man) but oddly reminiscent of some other superhero... - From a DM's perspective, the "coat of plot hooks" idea is very much a mixed blessing - on the one hand, it gives you carte blanche to hook that character into whatever adventure you want to drag the party into, giving you more freedom to create the world you want to create and populate it with the characters and factions you want. On the other hand, it means the player doesn't have to do any of the world-building. Character backgrounds are an opportunity for the GM to get players to create part of the world - to begin collaborating in the story even before it starts - and take advantage of having multiple perspectives from the start. Of course, it does also depend on what sort of game you're going for - if you're going for an action-heavy wargame-lite dungeon crawler, a) you might want to pick up 4E, and b) character backstory and motivation is a lot less relevant. If you're going for a character-driven emergent story-telling game, then you want that backstory and motivation to be front and center, and part of that is having players take ownership over the details. - Mental stats have always been a bit tricky. Players are generally controlling their characters' minds - making decisions, having conversations, solving the GM's puzzles - so the clean separation between player and character that's there for physical stats doesn't exist for characters' mental stats. And the game rules have waffled a bit on the subject too - it's not uncommon to see suggestions that a player who makes an actual inspiring speech at the table should get a circumstance bonus (or advantage in 5E) on their Cha check, or for players to be allowed to solve riddles for their characters without needing to make any sort of Int check.
>Red's first character was a 3.5e character with a monster template who was totally overpowered because they ignored the ECL system so they were on pace with normal characters with ECL 1 That was my first D&D experience too. I'm glad not to be alone in having done that. (In my group's case it was because none of us understood the ECL system, and everyone in the group did the same "take monster template while ignoring ECL" nonsense so it kind of worked out once the DM adjusted to make things harder).
Love the idea of non-min-max and just playing the game, not just hinge-ing stats and win conditions. Sometimes the story is the best meat and potatoes of it. "The most interesting parts of your character should happen during the game not before it." - Truth that most forget too.
thinking about a nightcrawler character, one of the many teleporting elf types, fey touched, shadow monk/twilight cleric. you've got ProfB+1 misty steps per day, 1 minute of unlimited 30ft BA teleports per rest, then all the teleports you want wherever there's any darkness.
53:22 Final Fantasy 14 ttrpg is fantastic! I played black mage in the starter kit oneshot, and it was a blast. base effects were so nice. even if you fail all your rolls in that game, you still get to contribute a lot, which feels good. Also, the way reactions work in that game is also incredible. Getting constantly throw some type of wrench into enemies gears feels good and dynamic. I am really looking forward to the full release of the book, and I'm glad the game got mentioned here.
God I have to be the guy who says this but so SO many of these complaints can be fixed by the simple fix of “play a different system I beg you” JoCat seems like he’d absolutely adore OSR or Wildsea type of games, focused on the low level fantasy and scrapping together what you can while still being heroic, with narrative rolls where there’s always an effect. Austin seems like he’d love games like ICON or Draw Steel where you have the same tactical crunch at all levels with that power fantasy mixed with some level of challenge. Red sounds like she’d enjoy games like Savage Worlds or 13th Age where there’s a limited number of distance measurements so you’re not spending the whole encounter getting to the action. Or games like Lancer where trying to get closer to the action isn’t your entire turn and that’s a *guarantee.* Indigo… ok I’ll be honest I’m having difficulty thinking of games she wouldn’t enjoy. Loot, that game she was sponsored by? Loot. And the thing is 5E is such a bad hodgepodge of game design run by a sinking ship of developers and Corporate executives setting it ablaze while taking all the riches they can from it before it drowns, and everyone is focused on fixing it rather than jumping ship. Don’t get me wrong, I love 5E when it’s at its best, and I know how to make it work at its best. Everyone here does. But the thing is even at its best, we still can’t escape our worst gripes with it. There are heroic fantasy games out there that satisfy what everyone here wants, and they hardly get factored in. I get this is a D&D episode and that’s the desired focus, I understand that. But what I kept hearing every time other systems came up was “I liked it a lot, maybe more than D&D.” And it gets drowned out by going back to D&D. I’m not saying don’t play 5E. But maybe focus less on trying to fix it, and focus more on finding something that does what you want out the box. It’s not worth your time, energy, or money anyway. Maybe don’t try so hard to rework the equipment, KO system, character creation, etc, and find a game that does what you like about 5E and fixes what you dislike. Go to 5E when you want 5E. Not when you want something else.
I like the idea of using the improv to ad or subtract circumstance bonus' in charisma. In other words, if you just wanna roll, you don't need to make the inspiring speech, but if you put in the effort to make an amazing speech, give the person some sort of bonus.
As for the non-persuasion skills for persuasion, what if you used them interchangeably. It'd be fun to have a low charisma character roll a contested check against a high charisma character and if they win it's just them dunking on the high charisma character about how what they said isn't right because migratory birds don't work that way
Fully agree with the "don't make your players pass the charisma check irl," I'd say except in a case where the dm doesn't think it's at all possible to convince the npc to do what you want but is open to it if you have a really good argument. Because otherwise either persuasion rolls jerk npcs around like a puppet on a string or you have npcs that don't respond to things like real people would
Red, i am so glad to hear someone say Dnd was meant to be a power fantasy, because its getting a bit bothersome how everyone in the OSR crowd seems to think we all used to love dying in one hit "back in the day". i don't remember those days, and i go back as far and ad&d before second edition edited. no one i knew liked dying, no one i knew liked being a weakling for 3-4 levels, and everyone was hungry for things that make they powerful (magic back in the day, and now class features... and magic!)
My first character for a During Lunch highschool game (no idea why we thought this would work) was a klepto rouge gnome (rouge but has extreme difficulty not stealing) technically chaotic neutral (should have been evil if my dm was honest). She pushed the paladin into a spike pit cuz their was gold at the bottom. No she was not smart. I think she had a 8 int or something. I know her wis was criminally low.
My DM starting a new campaign with some established characters gave each a simple motive, yet one tailored to their character. One was being offered political power, one would fight any Evil they were pointed towards, one was being offered money, but my favorite reason was the simplest - "You owe him a favor". My family has essentially always been into roleplaying, long before it was an actual thing. When playing games like Risk we would adopt an accent and use rhetoric to reflect the empire we were now ruler of. I remember as a very small child playing Clue (I was the youngest kid in the neighborhood and the others would include me so I wasn't the only one left out) thinking that if the piece that I was using turned out to be the killer I should have know that from the start and been trying to prevent the others from figuring it out. I wasn't playing a board game, I was ROLEPLAYING as Colonel Mustard, and if he was the killer I should know. So I don't really have any advice for how to build a character, as it is just something that I have always done. I actually prefer minimal backstory. In the first Grand Theft Auto 3 what you know about your character is that you were robbing a bank with a woman you were in a relationship with and she shot you and left you for dead, and now you want revenge. Okay, you're the kind of person who would do that and would react that way - take it from there. I love that different people came up with so many different versions of who that guy is.
46:10 One of my favorite character concepts that I came up with has exactly the kind of long, tragic backstory you might expect from a stereotypical Rogue with the Noble background. Born a prince, family overthrown and murdered in a coup/revolution, forced to live on the streets and learn how to steal and con to survive, etc. etc. But this character is a 50-year-old Monk. His mission in life is to travel the lands, teaching the discipline and wisdom that saved him from a life of hatred and revenge after he was taken in by a monastery. So, instead of an edgelord Noble Rogue seeking retribution, he's an Urchin Monk trying to better the world left behind by his noble family. 1:08:04 Oh, man. That's a fantastic idea, JoCat. Especially since you couched it with the phrase "People who play Fallout New Vegas will know what I'm talking about." Plus, just like FNV, it would give more uses to slips that don't necessarily get a lot of play otherwise, like Animal Handling.
Pathfinder 2e does a really good job of making the "null turn" issue much, mich less common by giving you A) more actions and B) more control over your defensive options. Like shields - in dnd just holding a shield is +2 AC and thats the entire thing. In pathfinder you take an action to raise gour shield to get the boost, plus you can use a reaction to block an attack and make the shield take some of the damage for you. Now even if I missed my attacks that turn, i have still done something to hedge my bets and reduce the impact.
The "Donning the coat of plot hooks" thing Red mentions is something I'm doing in my newest campaign. I have no idea what happened when my character's sister-in-law disappeared! I have no idea whether his brother is in this devil deal willingly or not! I have no idea how deep the corruption runs in the family! I don't know what his arch-nemesis' actual plan is! And it's great!
When I started d&d (3.5, then Pathfinder which is the system I prefer up to this day), I told my DM I wanted a caster who can do elemental magic. Fire, ice and the like. They suggested I make a druid... Needless to say, I didn't make the character I had in mind. My character miraculously survived until the campaign's end (died once but got reincarnated).
1:05:20 Reminds me of the time my artificer had to explain some complex social structure to a hill giant and I just went "*I* don't know how to say this in a way that they'd understand, but *she* should." and I think I rolled a raw intellect check.
I'd love this to me a long-running series of y'all just sharing TTRPG stories, hot takes, etc. I think it was Indigo or Red who mentioned that a player needs to at least somewhat consider the game mechanics when building a character, since "The character is the tool through which you play the game". Does anyone else struggle with getting PAST this point to connect with their character on a deeper level? I've only been playing for about three years, and at this point I can whip up a mechanically-functional character in a few minutes. But playing them feels more like a videogame PC than inhabiting a character for roleplay.
About what Jocat said about turns where nothing happens, you might want to give Dungeon World a try! It just does away with turns completely, which may get some getting used to, but it makes it so that whatever the enemies do is more of a "reaction" to what the players do, so there is always consequences to what the players do! So, as an example, you might be fighting a dragon and the DM might say: DM: "You all see how the dragon inhales as it is preparing to burn you all with its fire breath, what do you do?" Player 1: "Well I'm gonna run up to it and use the momentum to just jump in the air and stab him in the head with my spear!" Player 2: "I think I'm just gonna try to hide behind a wall and prepare to cast a spell as soon as the fire goes out" Player 3: "Before P1 runs to their death, I'm going to take a rope from my bag and use it to lasso the dragon's mouth shut" DM: "Okay, I'd say for P2 that'd be a dex roll, for P3 that's definetly a strength roll with minus 2, and for P1 that's an attack" P1: "Actually, I have the Jump skill that allows me to choose from these effects when I jump onto an enemy from height" DM: "Sure, roll that then" *they all roll 2d6, P1 gets a result between 2 and 6, P2 gets a result between 7 and 9, and P3 gets a crit, which goes down to 10 because of the -2* DM: "Okay, P3, you manage to close the dragon's mouth, but then you see how P1 stabs him right through that rope. P1, you'll still roll for damage, since P3 left the dragon perfectly positioned for you to stab him, but as soon as the mouth opens you fall to the ground, and you'll take the brunt of the fire, which deaaaaals *rolls damage* 8 damage. P2, you were quick to get to cover, but not quick enough, so you0ll have to choose, do you take half of that damage? Or does the fire burn a bit of your bag and makes you lose a random item?"
1:07:52 as a Paladin main I 100% agree. It's weird that I have to convince the thug that we're capable of stealing stuff instead of letting our rogue do it.
After a whole year playing D&D thinking ttrpgs are a misterious and secret and niche and one day my mom comes up and says "Oh I used to play Vampire all the time!" and I was like WHY HAVENT YOU TELL ME BEFORE
Indigo is absolutely right about the hot take and that's been ome of my hot takes for YEARS. And i have a real life high charisma. I still dont always have a joke or a good persuasive argument and often tell my DM, "hey this id what im trying to do and the general provess i use to try to do it."
Phew, I was getting really nervous no one would say they want Magic Initiate irl. I'd pick Bard and grab Mage Hand, Prestadigitation and Cure Wounds. It may not be the most often applicable levelled spell, but when you need it you _need_ it. Or heal paper cuts, that works too
Wow yall made me realize my first character, a horizon walker (teleporting while stabbing) with big ears and a rapier is incredibly similar to nightcrawler
I'm also trying to make character creation more fun. There's the Novus system that gets you from lvl 0 to 1 in 4 tableaus, which came close but not quite bc you still needed to do homework before starting to play.
"no character survives contact with the campaign" SO TRUE my first fighter began as literally talion from the middle earth games and currently he is traveling the multiverse after a death knight who is trying to bring back a lich(both of wich are former party menbers of him) while somehow getting into trouble with every single dragon god he can find
Indigo really speaks to how I make characters. There's a good chance that if you start high concept, the rules aren't going to necessarily play nice with your exact idea, and introducing a bunch of house rules to make the square peg fit in the round hole has pitfalls all its own. Otherwise, you make concessions to make your grand vision fit within the rules framework to the point that so many concessions have been made that they're not really the character you envisioned anymore and you lose investment. So I like to start with what seems mechanically fun and interesting, and work my way backwards with "okay, what life path led someone to this endpoint I have created, and then what motivates that person to be a part of this campaign?" Looking at a character sheet and discovering who the character is by asking yourself "why?" to it I feel can make some interesting character that are both fun to game play and fun to role play, sometimes even moreso if you can reach a point where you're asking yourself those "why?" questions partway through creation in a way that informs further creation decisions.
As someone who's played DnD since 3rd edition, my hot take is that 4e is the best edition DnD has ever had. No one can convince me otherwise. While I will readily accept that it wasn't for everyone, and that it's not without it's problems, most notably it was weak on the roleplay side of things, I still loved it and I found it to be so much more fun and interesting than 3rd, 3.5 or 5th. It does so many things that the other editions don't and is fun to play all the way from 1st level to 30th level with clear progression rules that apply to every class. And, as someone who plays Fighter a lot, it has the distinct advantage of letting you be useful even if you didn't use the one perfect build that lets you be useful like you have to do in 3.5 and in 5th. I have at least a dozen different fighter characters in 4e and all of them work very differently and all of them are viable builds. Oh, and on the persuasion checks thing, I agree with Indigo. Players should always have the option to use a different skill or stat if it makes sense for the character or situation. Though I think Persuasion should still be a skill for when you don't have the relevant skill or you suck at the relevant stat.
My first character was a Blue Dragonborn, Oath of the Ancients paladin, working to defend the circle of druids that raised him. His name was Prompto Dranglic.
I have been using 2 rules when writing backstories for my characters: 1: no more than 2 paragraphs 2: no more than 3 sentences usually how this ends up working out is I have 1 paragraph made of 2 sentences that give a very macro overview of the character before going off adventuring, then a single statement as its own paragraph that establishes why that 1st paragraph is no longer the case I also enjoy making characters that tried to be the hero/champion that saves the day against a BBEG, but got their arse handed to them on account of being 1st level. It gives the GM a possible future bad guy to throw at the party, but also they aren't obligated to use said bad guy
“Character building isn’t fun…” May I recommend OSR systems where the characters are simple and fast to build- “…and neither is dealing with equipment.” Nevermind then.
JoCat! Welcome back ❤
Clicked on the video just to say i was happy too see jocat on my feed again!
he's been back for a bit! there's quite a lot of heart of elynthi if you like his dming
I legit cried when he left. So happy to see him back
So happy JoCat is back!
More happy that he seems to be doing better.
Jocat: "I don't have that many games under my belt as a GM."
Also Jocat: GMs some of the loveliest actual plays I've seen.
Like, Jocat, if you are reading this, you are an amazing and wholesome GM, everything else aside it always feels like you have a very positive and friendly atmosphere at your tables when running, which is 110% aspirational.
My absolute FAVOURITE storytelling trick that I use as a DM is this:
1. Have your players write out/give you their backstory
Then
2. As the DM take that backstory, and add to it.
What this essentially creates is a player who knows their character’s backstory from their character’s perspective, while you, as DM know the backstory from an omniscient perspective. There were parts to the story that the character didn’t see, and part of the campaign can be that character learning about those extra details
That sounds fun, I don't know how I can use that by myself, but I like it.
This one time our DM said _okay I want everyone of you to write a summary of the backstory_ and after everyone did so he rolled a few times and then switched the backstories between us and said _I hope none of you wrote something too traumatising..._
Well... playing a Barbarian who grew up being raised by a bunch of housecats wasn't on my agenda, but it was fun 😂
In one campaign I was in, one of the players had a somewhat vague backstory that mentioned something, but didn't give any details, so the GM used that as a plot hook for a major plot event. For my own characters, I tend to have a general idea of the character's backstory, but I leave a lot of it open for the GM. Though GMs should get permission from the player before adding to a character's backstory like that.
I'm screenshotting this comment to send to my players because one of my players has been "reworking their backstory" for about a year now and I'm being slash jay passive aggressive about it.
Since this comment actually ended up getting some traction I should elaborate.
- this works best when the player gives a 3/4 fully fleshed out backstory (if you’re getting more than a page or two from the player there kinda isn’t enough room to add anything)
- This REQUIRES that your players are cool with you adding some details
- You do not change anything, only add more context
- This works best when your additions are used to either link the character to the world, the main plot, or another player character. Since that can get the player more invested in the game as they follow the mysteries you added.
Yooo, JoCats Crap Guide to dnd is what got me into dnd. Much love to the dude
saaaaame!
SMITE!
And that's how you play DnD you're welcome.
@@MorePower8679 FIREBALL!
FIGHTER MAN FIGHTER MAN
I heard Austin's voice and it took me a moment that 1. It wasn't Blue speaking, and 2. The voice sounded familiar because of RWD
Let it be known that "everyone of X gender on the pod sounds the same" is no longer only a curse for the women
It's BEEN a curse for the men. Took me a solid year of listening to a podcast with 3 male voices before I could figure out which was which.
Yay, JoCat is back on TH-cam, I love him.
For indigo's point about charisma checks, it's worth knowing that how persuasive someone is equally about how that is received. Someone charming can just as easily come across as cocky if it's received badly, and often that can be influenced by how the receiver is feeling that day. All this to say if you want to roleplay your persuasion attempt, that is awesome, but you should still roll your check to see how it's received. A great speech can come across as preachy and someone awkward can come across as really genuine.
I like only rolling if the roleplayed speech wasn't persuasive on its own. More like a backup
I think it depends on the situation. What really bothers me is when the player asks if they can make a certain kind of roll instead of describing what they want to do. It's fine if they go "can I roll X to do [insert action and desired outcome]" but when someone tries to like convince a selfish character to help I need something more than being persuasive. I follow like an old school philosophy I guess where I want to challenge the players, not their characters. Tldr back in the old days (before my time) dnd was like actually a survival game and the players had to be clever to live and get loot from a dungeon. I don't take it quite that far. I prefer if the dangerous heroism is the player's own decision and selfless so then they get the cool feeling of bailing from a fight once they realized the hostage was elsewhere saving precious time they needed at the cost of the hp they spent getting away. Similarly I love when players get a selfish npc to help them by offering up info or a mission that furthers their aims🤭
Always feels better if the problem and/or solution is caused by previous players.
@@solsystem1342 agreed!definitely feels more immersive for me and my players
That intro reminds me how old I am compared to the OSP crew and their friends. I'm probably closer in age to Red's parents and started with AD&D, but I love that TTRPGs have only grown in popularity and social acceptance. Great job, y'all!
Yeah, JoCat said, "graduated college in 2016" and my bones turned to dust.
I am the same age as D&D. We both turned 50 this year.
Oh the Jocat discussion on doing nothing. Had a situation once.
Dm: You're trapped, make a strength save to break out.
Me: I rolled 15 (I forgot the roll.)
Dm: You're still trapped and you can't cast magic.
Me, a level 14 sorcerer: Okay I'll do...nothing then.
Like Indigo and I think Austin, my very first D&D character was a Tiefling Paladin I based on Nightcrawler.
This is getting out of hand. Now there are two of them
The Nightcrawler effect is *real* and there is no escaping it
I have a tiefling paladin character, but she wasn't based on Nightcrawler. She was a spoof of Sailor Moon.
My third character is a circus performer because of him. Although, normally I'm the nice religious one, so ironically my nightcrawler esque character is the time I'm not doing that lol
*Tiefling
it throws formal wear^^
it is a german word that could be translated as "deep ones"
Its great to see Austin and Jo both here for the DnD special, but also Red with Sunny and Indigo with Plug!
I love that the Weird Little Dudes are here
To side with Jocat's hot take, I played a 5e game that was using 1st edition crit tables, and on the first turn of a 4 round combat (it lasted an hour and a half) I rolled a natural 1, had to roll on the fumble table, and was stunned for 8 rounds. So for an hour and a half, I got to do nothing. The dm felt so bad that he ditched the 1st edition rules and instead found a new table to use and made sure there was not a possibility of just being taken out of a fight.
Stunned for 8 rounds, geezus. Might as well have gotten 1HKO'd. Then at least you could have been working on a new character all that time.. long crowd control (deliberate or accidental) on the players is the worst.
@evrfreez There was a chance to instantly die on the table! The rules got brought out in a one shot later, and if not for someone wearing an armor that canceled crits they would have instantly died within the first 20 minutes of the session
@@DParkerNunya Good times all around =D I mean there is fun to be had with devastating crit and botch tables, but it always must needs be balanced against the possibility of a player just effectively being done for the evening. Maybe GMs should let players run monsters, if they get taken out, I've seen that done sometimes..
It's interesting how the designers of 5e identified three "pillars" of play as social interaction, exploration, and combat, because I think those pillars actually do a better job of describing various RPG play-styles and table-cultures than, for example, the old Forge models (like gamist / narrativist / simulationist).
If a game emphasizes social interaction, you're going to get a play-style that resembles those actual plays, where the emphasis is on playacting and storytelling and character arcs. That's trad style (like AD&D 2nd edition) if the DM is taking a firm (some would say railroady) hand in guiding where the story goes, or neo-trad (like a lot of 5e games) if there's more emphasis on player collaboration and making arcs grounded in personal backstories and contrived spotlight moments happen. (It roughly corresponds to Forge narrativism/"story now", except that D&D doesn't have mechanics for making stories and character beats happen, where lots of Forgist narrativist and post-trad indie storygame type games do have mechanics for that. So D&D tends to place that burden on DMs alone, or on DMs collabing with players.)
If a game emphasizes combat, then you're in tacti-trad or skirmish wargame territory, like 3e or 4e or the Pathfinders. The point of a game like this is optimization and builds and balanced combat challenges. (This way of playing roughly corresponds to Forge gamism/"step-right-up", but again it's a bad correspondence, because gamist games are supposed to, well, function out of the box. Whereas modern WotC d20 D&D tends to encourage DMs to fudge and rubber-band and do whatever other kind of subtle cheating is necessary to maintain the illusion of that balanced challenge, to keep the combat-as-sport-not-war vibe from collapsing under the weight of complex and breakable game mechanics. But if a DM does cheat and hides it, and the players figure it out anyway, it sucks to be those players.)
Finally, you have the exploration pillar, which loosely matches up to what Forge theorists called simulationism/"right-to-dream" (i.e., the fantasy of inhabiting the verisimilitudinous fictional milieu). This way of playing best matches up with OD&D (including 3LBB and BXCMI), AD&D 1st edition, and OSR, because these games are all about exploring dungeons and countrysides. The combat mechanics are quick, so fights are decisive and don't eat up table time. They can be deadly, so you often want to avoid fights altogether or subvert them with clever tricks and plans. (This is "combat-as-war-not-sport.") And instead, most time at the table is spent on interacting with the environment, like a combination of survival game (it's only survival horror at low levels, it's worth pointing out) and point and click puzzle adventure game, but with the ability to use your own wits to solve puzzles any number of ways (instead of relying on a pre-programmed video game's moon logic). This is where your roguelike, sandbox, West Marches, and old-school massiviely multiplayer campaign styles live, and if you've never played D&D this way, do yourself the favor and try it sometime, because it's awesome.
Ditto
On the discussion of Ranger and its lack of a niche in 5E: The observation that 5E doesn't really support the style of play that the class is designed for is pretty spot on. Though I would argue that people very much do play that kind of game, they just aren't part of the modern D&D community because wilderness exploration has been neglected in D&D since Wizards of the Coast took over, along with other subsystems like realm management, mass combat, and hirelings. The people who are playing those games are using older versions of D&D, OSR games, or systems from different design lineages. There is still demand for those kind of games given the success of most recent iteration of Traveller, and Free League's hexcrawl focused Forbidden Lands and Twilight 2000 4th edition, for example. (Side note, the comment about actual plays influencing the way people play RPGs is spot on, and kind of troubling. The "actual play style" is designed to make entertaining recordings for an outside observer, and does not necessarily correspond to any best or intended way to play an RPG. People exclusively playing the highly narrative, lightly scripted actual play style are missing out on a huge space of possible gameplay)
My first D&D character was a gnome fighter named Dribvik. While helping a farm family fight off goblin raiders, he was offered a seat at their breakfast table. In true gnome fashion, I went with the goofiest response I could think of: "Breakfast is my middle name!" One Futurama joke later, and now the character is more frequently remembered by his nickname, Breakfast Rodriguez.
I wish this was longer. I love these types of talks/pods
I guess you could say the DMs were *Rolling With Difficulty*
I love the advice that we should make room for growth in our characters. What I heard was "the fastest way to give your character cognitive dissonance is to have them all figured out in a world they dont control"
Ok TH-cam chat, roll for initiative.
27 thanks to my dexterity and the alert feat
… I rolled a 2
13 let's go
Nat 1, I have a +4 modifier but it cant help me here
I rolled a 19 chat! 😆
OMG... The first character that I made myself as opposed to a pregen handed to me was circa 1988. It was a half-elf rogue... named Kurt and I was also chasing Nightcrawler.
Dang 😅
The second Jocat started talking about persuasion checks, I was like oh man he's saying that 5e works like Fallout 3 speech, but he wants it to work like Fallout New Vegas speech. And yeah speech checks based on the actual skill it's related to makes a lot of sense
I love that jocat is back doing stuff. That guy helped me get some of my friends into d&d with his funny guide videos.
My biggest advice is to separate what your character *can* do from what they *want* to do. I have atrocious dice luck (one table actually ruled I was only allowed 3 nat 1's per session), so I optimize to avert JoCat's "lost turn problem", but then I always ensure that my character's interests don't align with what they are already *good* at.
That brings in both opportunities for growth and for you to bring other characters into your own story arcs.
Also Hi JoCat! I missed you and I'm glad that you're both back and took time to take care of yourself.
I love that almost all of them have their appropriate critters; Red with Sunny, Austin with his owlbear and Indigo with Plug
My first character was a 2e Human Paladin named Alcair Novall. He was absolutely lawful stupid, but eventually grew out of it because he had to cope with the lunatics in the party (and lemme tell ya, they were about as bad but opposite side of the alignment chart). The whole LG part was made funnier in retrospect because to save me coming up with another name, I went with the villain in the book I was writing at the time. Alcair has since been rerolled and reappeared many, many times, to the point that he and his brothers have kids kicking around in stuff.
Also, zomg, Victor Quibbles origin story! I dont remember if it came up during any of the Hildibrand parts Durmin's playthrough, but I love that he lives on like that in ff14.
3:01 until this moment, I've not heard one single mention of reds parents, kinda thought she popped outa someone's head like athena
Very Athena coded
Lmao
Less than a minute into this video, I hear JoCat’s amazing (and relatable) pitch to adapt characters from other media for DnD sessions, and a X-Men: Evolution shoutout. I am SATISFIED. ❤
The longest single, unbroken session of D&D for me was 30 hours back in High School and by the end of it it was basically madness cause we were all so sleep deprived.
Our weekly session was theoretically 8 hours, often rant to 12, and on at least one occasion reached 22. We often discussed the fact that we didn't like the amount of time it consumed but once it was going none of us wanted to stop.
Unrelated to ttrpgs, but related to time consumption: dakrest dungeon is a game I open thinking "No way it's that fun" and I wake up six hours later with my pyramid of needs crumbling. I assume that's how drugs work.
JoCat and OSP talking for over an hour about D&D? Well that's my evening sorted. I'm genuinely going to get a takeaway, a nice bottle of wine and make an evening of it after the latest episode of The Korean War by Indy Neidell.
Thanks For this Guys! All your content is awesome ❤❤❤
fun thought from Jocat's hot take:
from a game design perspective, one can argue a turn is the (second) shortest "loop" in a trpg, with a lot of time typically between turns,
where, on top of trying to do well, your brain is learning to observe the way your *direct actions* update the game state
and not only does a null turn basically tell the player "you didn't do well", thus making said player feel like whatever they did was not good
but also on a more meta-loop level, the more you realize that the way to avoid this is mostly creating a *totally different character*, which also feels bad,
and typically it's not actually that much better an archetype
one thing I heard on critical role ( I think it was Abria DM ing ) she said " I believe in failing forward " ex : you missed all three attacks, so I'll say it's because you spotted this thing or recognized X situation, that will lead to new options. I loved that.
So good to see Sunny Plug and the weird lil dudes made it to the podcast!!!
hey guys just wanted to say love ur miscellaneous myth videos and like the greek places explanations and all.Also love ur greek mythology vids truly just great explanations
My first D&D character was Issac (I forget his last name) a dragonfire adept (3.5 class) and he ended up being the only sane man and party face. Dragonfire adepts were great- the mechanics were a reskin of the 3.5 warlock where instead of getting spells they got infusions, basically spell like abilities, so they only got a handful but they could use them forever. The big thing was that instead of eldritch blast, they got breath weapons (minus the 1d4 rounds between use that monsters with breath weapons had to deal with) which could be buffed by metabreath feats, I only got far enough to have 2 different ones, fire and ice, but I got the feats to have the breath attacks linger, cling and entangle foes. So I could basically napalm areas with debuffing elemental energies. The first infusion I got was one that let me make my allies immune to them. With that and his high charisma, and constitution(the stat the breath weapon damage scaled from) I always had something to do.
My favorite moment was when the party split, most of us going after a witch that had been kidnaping local kids, and making an army of scarcrow minions, the issue is that they left 2 people behind, me, Issac, the walking napalm maker, and our cleric, who had been getting drunk. In character I sobered him up by dunking him in a horse trough, and then talked to the locals to find out where the rest of the party went. At the same time they were slowly loosing to the army of scarecrows, and I got to go "wait they left to fight a witch with an army of straw stuffed minons, and they left they guy who breaths fire behind!" and then Issac ran after them with the cleric. I got there in time to help turn the tide and to see a magic item we had run out of uses and then regenerate into the troll it had been made out of, in the witch's hut. The witch did not survive.
Man I miss JoCat , happy to hear ya
Hes been back friend-o
Check his Stream channel, hes got some stuff in the works right now, and a few “hey heres what ive been up to” vids
I especially enjoyed his “JoCat direct”
The more I learn about D&D and MTG, the more I want to play. But my group of friends has fractured all over the world, and I´ve lost so many social skills... This sounds so fun. T.T
Playing using virtual tabletops (like Roll20) with voice chat (like Discord) might be of interest to you, since they let you play with anyone anywhere in the world. Same goes for playing MTG over webcam or in Tabletop Simulator.
I basically grew up with vague knowledge of D&D. I know when I was a little kid my late brother used to play the game. Growing up I thought it was for nerds and dorks, but then around high school, I fell in love with fantasy and adventure stories and video games. That's when I found out I am a nerd and a dork and there's nothing wrong with that. It wasn't till after I graduated high school that I decided to learn more about D&D with some help from TeamFourStar at the table. That's when I learned how fun and hilarious the game can be. I started really playing around 2021. Since I didn't have any friends that play the game, I just played by myself and wrote down the events that happen like an author of an epic tale of adventure and mischief. I hope someday to join a session with others in person.
Needed this today, thank you! Hope everyone's doing well!
So much Colvillian Wisdom on the podcast today :D
The inclusion of Plug and Sunny in the art is precious
On the equipment list as improv guidelines: I was playing a Half-Orc Bard in Pathfinder and had a lot of carry capacity left that I wanted to fill, so I decided to pick up two portable rams. In the first session with that character, the party was faced with a locked, reinforced door. While most of the characters were focused on the door, I did an Investigation to find a weak spot in the wall and just wailed on it with two friggin battering rams. Guess who got in first.
I'm not a big fan of podcasts but I enjoyed this one a lot. I liked hearing everyone's different opinions on the multitude of topics. I leave with a new perspective on how I run my games and play ttrpgs in general, and that's just sick!
Have you guy heard of the TTRPG world called The World Of Darkness? It is a gothic punk setting with urban decay, and modern fantasy. You may be more roleplaying heavy with some combat or vise versa. There are many game lines like Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Mage: The Ascension, Hunter: The Reckoning, Changling: The Dreaming, Wraith: The Oblivion, ect. You might have to balance your normal life with the mystical, you might have to erase memories if you are able or you might just have to stand in line and pay for wipes to remove stains you currently have while in said line after a battle with a possessed serial killer.
The first AP I listened to was TAZ Graduation. But I have listened to a bunch since then. And what I've found is that the system can cover so many genres.
You have Heart of Elynthi and Rolling With Difficulty with well thought out character beats and arcs. Then you got Critical Botch which is basically a recorded home game with Brandon Cutler showing his fellow wrestlers DnD, some first time players.
And that's awesome.
I like 3.5s ability to let you play lots of the same theme but with different game mechanics. Like knights can be knights, fighters, paladins, soulborns, crusaders, psychic warriors, samurai (either OA or CW), hexblade or some others.
one of my first ever dnd characters was a ranger in 3.5 that focused on dual wielding in melee and I decided "oh, one of the options for favored enemies is goblins. they're a good low level threat, I'm sure I'll get lots of mileage out of this choice." and so the GM retroactively replaced every single goblin in his campaign with Kobolds deliberately to make sure I never could use the class feature. He also made the entire campaign take place in hazy flashbacks making it literally impossible to have time between dungeons to buy new equipment or actually spend any loot ever.
yknow, there's all the waaah waaah about AI, and a lot of it's pretty reasonable, but one of the various reasons i use chatgpt is when im planning d&d for my players, i actively balance the numbers around their builds, hp, etc.. it's insanely useful to be able to crunch the numbers, update them in real time, and all of that, all while the ai has the entirety of d&d under its belt and ready to call on. it saves so much time too, which i can only assume was your dm's concern, since that's a substantially sized penny of damage you were building. the last part just sounds like he failed to pull off something he wanted to. it sounds like a really easy remedy, just have gaps in the flashbacks and have you guys buy your equipment/upgrades out of game or something if he didnt want the shops to be part of the flashbacks... so odd.
@@ExceptionallyUndersizedThanos it's because we were like 13 year olds and like most teenagers all of us were malicious little shits. the one person in the group who knew how to play was much older and demanded that instead of running longsword/shortsword and a dual wielding setup with a d8/d6 damage dice I go with a mace and dagger (d6/d4) instead claiming that somehow it would be better. The actual reason he wanted to do this was so that he could literally rip my exact class setup and play it better to overshadow me since he knew how to character build better than me.
@@burnin8able that's even worse lmao jesus
@@ExceptionallyUndersizedThanos the fact that some of my first TTRPG experiences were that awful and I still love and play them to this day is wild.
A few thoughts of my own in response:
- One of my early characters (back in the bad old days of 2E) had Bracers of Spider-Climb and dual-wielded Whips of Grasping, so used to crawl on walls and ceiling and swing from the whips in order to get around. Not Nightcrawler (nor any other X-Man) but oddly reminiscent of some other superhero...
- From a DM's perspective, the "coat of plot hooks" idea is very much a mixed blessing - on the one hand, it gives you carte blanche to hook that character into whatever adventure you want to drag the party into, giving you more freedom to create the world you want to create and populate it with the characters and factions you want. On the other hand, it means the player doesn't have to do any of the world-building. Character backgrounds are an opportunity for the GM to get players to create part of the world - to begin collaborating in the story even before it starts - and take advantage of having multiple perspectives from the start.
Of course, it does also depend on what sort of game you're going for - if you're going for an action-heavy wargame-lite dungeon crawler, a) you might want to pick up 4E, and b) character backstory and motivation is a lot less relevant. If you're going for a character-driven emergent story-telling game, then you want that backstory and motivation to be front and center, and part of that is having players take ownership over the details.
- Mental stats have always been a bit tricky. Players are generally controlling their characters' minds - making decisions, having conversations, solving the GM's puzzles - so the clean separation between player and character that's there for physical stats doesn't exist for characters' mental stats. And the game rules have waffled a bit on the subject too - it's not uncommon to see suggestions that a player who makes an actual inspiring speech at the table should get a circumstance bonus (or advantage in 5E) on their Cha check, or for players to be allowed to solve riddles for their characters without needing to make any sort of Int check.
>Red's first character was a 3.5e character with a monster template who was totally overpowered because they ignored the ECL system so they were on pace with normal characters with ECL 1
That was my first D&D experience too. I'm glad not to be alone in having done that. (In my group's case it was because none of us understood the ECL system, and everyone in the group did the same "take monster template while ignoring ECL" nonsense so it kind of worked out once the DM adjusted to make things harder).
Love the idea of non-min-max and just playing the game, not just hinge-ing stats and win conditions. Sometimes the story is the best meat and potatoes of it.
"The most interesting parts of your character should happen during the game not before it." - Truth that most forget too.
Well if it isn’t my favorite dorks having a crossover episode!
THIS IS GOING TO BE AWESOME
thinking about a nightcrawler character, one of the many teleporting elf types, fey touched, shadow monk/twilight cleric. you've got ProfB+1 misty steps per day, 1 minute of unlimited 30ft BA teleports per rest, then all the teleports you want wherever there's any darkness.
Loving the Plug cameo in the drawing, and is Austin wearing an I heart ‘Gil shirt?! I am living for this drawing lmaoo
And a Sunny too!
I love how the colors of the people at the table make a rainbow~
Austin and Jocat, is this christmas????
It’s better, it’s Hogswatch.
53:22 Final Fantasy 14 ttrpg is fantastic! I played black mage in the starter kit oneshot, and it was a blast. base effects were so nice. even if you fail all your rolls in that game, you still get to contribute a lot, which feels good. Also, the way reactions work in that game is also incredible. Getting constantly throw some type of wrench into enemies gears feels good and dynamic. I am really looking forward to the full release of the book, and I'm glad the game got mentioned here.
JoCat! That makes me happy enough, everything else is icing.
God I have to be the guy who says this but so SO many of these complaints can be fixed by the simple fix of “play a different system I beg you”
JoCat seems like he’d absolutely adore OSR or Wildsea type of games, focused on the low level fantasy and scrapping together what you can while still being heroic, with narrative rolls where there’s always an effect.
Austin seems like he’d love games like ICON or Draw Steel where you have the same tactical crunch at all levels with that power fantasy mixed with some level of challenge.
Red sounds like she’d enjoy games like Savage Worlds or 13th Age where there’s a limited number of distance measurements so you’re not spending the whole encounter getting to the action. Or games like Lancer where trying to get closer to the action isn’t your entire turn and that’s a *guarantee.*
Indigo… ok I’ll be honest I’m having difficulty thinking of games she wouldn’t enjoy. Loot, that game she was sponsored by? Loot.
And the thing is 5E is such a bad hodgepodge of game design run by a sinking ship of developers and Corporate executives setting it ablaze while taking all the riches they can from it before it drowns, and everyone is focused on fixing it rather than jumping ship. Don’t get me wrong, I love 5E when it’s at its best, and I know how to make it work at its best. Everyone here does. But the thing is even at its best, we still can’t escape our worst gripes with it.
There are heroic fantasy games out there that satisfy what everyone here wants, and they hardly get factored in.
I get this is a D&D episode and that’s the desired focus, I understand that. But what I kept hearing every time other systems came up was “I liked it a lot, maybe more than D&D.” And it gets drowned out by going back to D&D.
I’m not saying don’t play 5E. But maybe focus less on trying to fix it, and focus more on finding something that does what you want out the box. It’s not worth your time, energy, or money anyway. Maybe don’t try so hard to rework the equipment, KO system, character creation, etc, and find a game that does what you like about 5E and fixes what you dislike.
Go to 5E when you want 5E. Not when you want something else.
I like the idea of using the improv to ad or subtract circumstance bonus' in charisma. In other words, if you just wanna roll, you don't need to make the inspiring speech, but if you put in the effort to make an amazing speech, give the person some sort of bonus.
As for the non-persuasion skills for persuasion, what if you used them interchangeably. It'd be fun to have a low charisma character roll a contested check against a high charisma character and if they win it's just them dunking on the high charisma character about how what they said isn't right because migratory birds don't work that way
The sloth analogy is why nature is a wisdom check.
Fully agree with the "don't make your players pass the charisma check irl," I'd say except in a case where the dm doesn't think it's at all possible to convince the npc to do what you want but is open to it if you have a really good argument. Because otherwise either persuasion rolls jerk npcs around like a puppet on a string or you have npcs that don't respond to things like real people would
I can't believe Red, player of Kyana and Billeig from Rolling with Difficulty, is on this podcast episode!
Red, i am so glad to hear someone say Dnd was meant to be a power fantasy, because its getting a bit bothersome how everyone in the OSR crowd seems to think we all used to love dying in one hit "back in the day". i don't remember those days, and i go back as far and ad&d before second edition edited. no one i knew liked dying, no one i knew liked being a weakling for 3-4 levels, and everyone was hungry for things that make they powerful (magic back in the day, and now class features... and magic!)
My first character for a During Lunch highschool game (no idea why we thought this would work) was a klepto rouge gnome (rouge but has extreme difficulty not stealing) technically chaotic neutral (should have been evil if my dm was honest). She pushed the paladin into a spike pit cuz their was gold at the bottom. No she was not smart. I think she had a 8 int or something. I know her wis was criminally low.
AT-AT the Funk is a (possibly unintentional) genius Star Wars pun, and you should not be ashamed.
My DM starting a new campaign with some established characters gave each a simple motive, yet one tailored to their character. One was being offered political power, one would fight any Evil they were pointed towards, one was being offered money, but my favorite reason was the simplest - "You owe him a favor".
My family has essentially always been into roleplaying, long before it was an actual thing. When playing games like Risk we would adopt an accent and use rhetoric to reflect the empire we were now ruler of. I remember as a very small child playing Clue (I was the youngest kid in the neighborhood and the others would include me so I wasn't the only one left out) thinking that if the piece that I was using turned out to be the killer I should have know that from the start and been trying to prevent the others from figuring it out. I wasn't playing a board game, I was ROLEPLAYING as Colonel Mustard, and if he was the killer I should know.
So I don't really have any advice for how to build a character, as it is just something that I have always done.
I actually prefer minimal backstory. In the first Grand Theft Auto 3 what you know about your character is that you were robbing a bank with a woman you were in a relationship with and she shot you and left you for dead, and now you want revenge. Okay, you're the kind of person who would do that and would react that way - take it from there.
I love that different people came up with so many different versions of who that guy is.
46:10 One of my favorite character concepts that I came up with has exactly the kind of long, tragic backstory you might expect from a stereotypical Rogue with the Noble background. Born a prince, family overthrown and murdered in a coup/revolution, forced to live on the streets and learn how to steal and con to survive, etc. etc.
But this character is a 50-year-old Monk. His mission in life is to travel the lands, teaching the discipline and wisdom that saved him from a life of hatred and revenge after he was taken in by a monastery. So, instead of an edgelord Noble Rogue seeking retribution, he's an Urchin Monk trying to better the world left behind by his noble family.
1:08:04 Oh, man. That's a fantastic idea, JoCat. Especially since you couched it with the phrase "People who play Fallout New Vegas will know what I'm talking about." Plus, just like FNV, it would give more uses to slips that don't necessarily get a lot of play otherwise, like Animal Handling.
Whole episode worth it just for that Persuasion take, everything else is a bonus.
Pathfinder 2e does a really good job of making the "null turn" issue much, mich less common by giving you A) more actions and B) more control over your defensive options.
Like shields - in dnd just holding a shield is +2 AC and thats the entire thing. In pathfinder you take an action to raise gour shield to get the boost, plus you can use a reaction to block an attack and make the shield take some of the damage for you. Now even if I missed my attacks that turn, i have still done something to hedge my bets and reduce the impact.
The "Donning the coat of plot hooks" thing Red mentions is something I'm doing in my newest campaign. I have no idea what happened when my character's sister-in-law disappeared! I have no idea whether his brother is in this devil deal willingly or not! I have no idea how deep the corruption runs in the family! I don't know what his arch-nemesis' actual plan is! And it's great!
When I started d&d (3.5, then Pathfinder which is the system I prefer up to this day), I told my DM I wanted a caster who can do elemental magic. Fire, ice and the like.
They suggested I make a druid... Needless to say, I didn't make the character I had in mind. My character miraculously survived until the campaign's end (died once but got reincarnated).
I see JoCat in thumbnail -> I click
1:05:20 Reminds me of the time my artificer had to explain some complex social structure to a hill giant and I just went "*I* don't know how to say this in a way that they'd understand, but *she* should." and I think I rolled a raw intellect check.
JoCat!
I'd love this to me a long-running series of y'all just sharing TTRPG stories, hot takes, etc.
I think it was Indigo or Red who mentioned that a player needs to at least somewhat consider the game mechanics when building a character, since "The character is the tool through which you play the game".
Does anyone else struggle with getting PAST this point to connect with their character on a deeper level?
I've only been playing for about three years, and at this point I can whip up a mechanically-functional character in a few minutes.
But playing them feels more like a videogame PC than inhabiting a character for roleplay.
About what Jocat said about turns where nothing happens, you might want to give Dungeon World a try!
It just does away with turns completely, which may get some getting used to, but it makes it so that whatever the enemies do is more of a "reaction" to what the players do, so there is always consequences to what the players do!
So, as an example, you might be fighting a dragon and the DM might say:
DM: "You all see how the dragon inhales as it is preparing to burn you all with its fire breath, what do you do?"
Player 1: "Well I'm gonna run up to it and use the momentum to just jump in the air and stab him in the head with my spear!"
Player 2: "I think I'm just gonna try to hide behind a wall and prepare to cast a spell as soon as the fire goes out"
Player 3: "Before P1 runs to their death, I'm going to take a rope from my bag and use it to lasso the dragon's mouth shut"
DM: "Okay, I'd say for P2 that'd be a dex roll, for P3 that's definetly a strength roll with minus 2, and for P1 that's an attack"
P1: "Actually, I have the Jump skill that allows me to choose from these effects when I jump onto an enemy from height"
DM: "Sure, roll that then"
*they all roll 2d6, P1 gets a result between 2 and 6, P2 gets a result between 7 and 9, and P3 gets a crit, which goes down to 10 because of the -2*
DM: "Okay, P3, you manage to close the dragon's mouth, but then you see how P1 stabs him right through that rope. P1, you'll still roll for damage, since P3 left the dragon perfectly positioned for you to stab him, but as soon as the mouth opens you fall to the ground, and you'll take the brunt of the fire, which deaaaaals *rolls damage* 8 damage. P2, you were quick to get to cover, but not quick enough, so you0ll have to choose, do you take half of that damage? Or does the fire burn a bit of your bag and makes you lose a random item?"
18 hours straight is the longest i've ever played dnd,
1:07:52 as a Paladin main I 100% agree. It's weird that I have to convince the thug that we're capable of stealing stuff instead of letting our rogue do it.
After a whole year playing D&D thinking ttrpgs are a misterious and secret and niche and one day my mom comes up and says "Oh I used to play Vampire all the time!" and I was like WHY HAVENT YOU TELL ME BEFORE
The collab we've all been waiting for.
Indigo is absolutely right about the hot take and that's been ome of my hot takes for YEARS. And i have a real life high charisma. I still dont always have a joke or a good persuasive argument and often tell my DM, "hey this id what im trying to do and the general provess i use to try to do it."
Aaaa Jocat! So much coolness packed into a single video!
Phew, I was getting really nervous no one would say they want Magic Initiate irl. I'd pick Bard and grab Mage Hand, Prestadigitation and Cure Wounds. It may not be the most often applicable levelled spell, but when you need it you _need_ it. Or heal paper cuts, that works too
Wow yall made me realize my first character, a horizon walker (teleporting while stabbing) with big ears and a rapier is incredibly similar to nightcrawler
I'm also trying to make character creation more fun. There's the Novus system that gets you from lvl 0 to 1 in 4 tableaus, which came close but not quite bc you still needed to do homework before starting to play.
love to see jo and everyone talking about dnd my beloved ❤
"no character survives contact with the campaign"
SO TRUE
my first fighter began as literally talion from the middle earth games and currently he is traveling the multiverse after a death knight who is trying to bring back a lich(both of wich are former party menbers of him) while somehow getting into trouble with every single dragon god he can find
Plug and Sunny my beloved
Indigo really speaks to how I make characters. There's a good chance that if you start high concept, the rules aren't going to necessarily play nice with your exact idea, and introducing a bunch of house rules to make the square peg fit in the round hole has pitfalls all its own. Otherwise, you make concessions to make your grand vision fit within the rules framework to the point that so many concessions have been made that they're not really the character you envisioned anymore and you lose investment. So I like to start with what seems mechanically fun and interesting, and work my way backwards with "okay, what life path led someone to this endpoint I have created, and then what motivates that person to be a part of this campaign?" Looking at a character sheet and discovering who the character is by asking yourself "why?" to it I feel can make some interesting character that are both fun to game play and fun to role play, sometimes even moreso if you can reach a point where you're asking yourself those "why?" questions partway through creation in a way that informs further creation decisions.
As someone who's played DnD since 3rd edition, my hot take is that 4e is the best edition DnD has ever had. No one can convince me otherwise. While I will readily accept that it wasn't for everyone, and that it's not without it's problems, most notably it was weak on the roleplay side of things, I still loved it and I found it to be so much more fun and interesting than 3rd, 3.5 or 5th.
It does so many things that the other editions don't and is fun to play all the way from 1st level to 30th level with clear progression rules that apply to every class. And, as someone who plays Fighter a lot, it has the distinct advantage of letting you be useful even if you didn't use the one perfect build that lets you be useful like you have to do in 3.5 and in 5th. I have at least a dozen different fighter characters in 4e and all of them work very differently and all of them are viable builds.
Oh, and on the persuasion checks thing, I agree with Indigo. Players should always have the option to use a different skill or stat if it makes sense for the character or situation. Though I think Persuasion should still be a skill for when you don't have the relevant skill or you suck at the relevant stat.
I thought this said dad special
That’d be a fun idea. Red and Indigo bring their dads onto the OSPod and ask them their thoughts on various things.
@@EternityKingdomsHeadHonchoYes! That would be so cool and wholesome 🥰
My first character was a Blue Dragonborn, Oath of the Ancients paladin, working to defend the circle of druids that raised him. His name was Prompto Dranglic.
A Tuesday Podcast?! Amazing!!
Eyyyyyy, it's JoCat! Always lovely to hear of him.
I have been using 2 rules when writing backstories for my characters:
1: no more than 2 paragraphs
2: no more than 3 sentences
usually how this ends up working out is I have 1 paragraph made of 2 sentences that give a very macro overview of the character before going off adventuring, then a single statement as its own paragraph that establishes why that 1st paragraph is no longer the case
I also enjoy making characters that tried to be the hero/champion that saves the day against a BBEG, but got their arse handed to them on account of being 1st level. It gives the GM a possible future bad guy to throw at the party, but also they aren't obligated to use said bad guy
JoCat? What a welcome surprise!
The Warlock as it is percieved in 5e with a patron as power source, was created in 4e, and it had other options then Infernal Pact from the begining
Some of Red's description of 3.5 sounds more like 4th ed. But she did say it was a house ruled version of 3.5
“Character building isn’t fun…”
May I recommend OSR systems where the characters are simple and fast to build-
“…and neither is dealing with equipment.”
Nevermind then.
On the other hand, equipment might feel less tedious when it actually matters, like in OSR games