DawnSomewhere

Dungeon Men, Part 2

During this episode, I forgot that Lawry couldn't read. I'm pretty sure that the character he's based on wasn't able to read either, but it was common for the player to forget, so the character went back and forth between reading fluently and refu...

Dungeon Men, Part 1

So after a month of inactivity, let's just hit it and start moving with all the content I had time to figure out!

I've been excited to get started on Dungeon Men, because the game wound up with some really fun character dynamics. In fact, ev...

Chosen Ones, Part 21

Well I almost didn't get anything done this month at all, but here is the finale for Chosen Ones! It turns out, it was COVID making me so exhausted, and then once the respiratory symptoms set in, they lingered. In fact, if you listen very...

Forecast: Sick?

Hey, guys!

So my family is sick, and I have been fatigued to the point of blistering oppression for like two weeks. It might be because I'm sick as well, but I'm not sure. When it turns out you're allergic to everything and your immune syste...

Chosen Ones, Part 20

The best way to approach horror is to be a little ambiguous about the details, and I think in this case I've got the idea pretty on the nose. But while ambiguity is good to make an atmosphere scary, it can also be nice with creating tension over h...

Chosen Ones, Part 19

All the heroes need to do now is return home! It's as simple as that, if anything were ever simple.

I enjoy setting a weird or unsettling atmosphere, but it's tricky, especially in a roleplaying game. The players have to cooperate with it a ...

Chosen Ones, Part 18

We'll get one more in before the year is up!

Often, in a game like this, I find players can occasionally get too wrapped up in something an NPC said, to the point where if they're given contradictory signals or misinformation, they wind up t...

Chosen Ones, Part 17

This one is just a minute or so shorter than usual, but the name reveal for Zubo's father felt like a good place to stop it! At least, if you get the reference - if you didn't, then it's a dramatic note that probably doesn't ring that clearly. The...

Chosen Ones, Part 16

Hey! An early one! Finally!

Even in good roleplaying groups, player characters are hilariously sociopathic. They never stop to really consider their body count unless you ask them to, and realistically, for most people if you'd killed three ...

Chosen Ones, Part 15

Elvis goes insane, and truth to be told, like most good actors, he's probably just putting a lot of himself in his character.

With this episode, I originally planned on doing a bit of a spoof on the episode where Katara wasn't allowed to wat...

Chosen Ones, Part 14

Sometimes a GM is a little bit adversarial towards the players, but getting that correct is an extremely fine line. If they get defeated too many times, they become discouraged and may even give up, basically waiting until the GM gives them a clea...

Chosen Ones, Part 13

Our real game group actually quit playing "Chosen Ones" just a little before departing to the Earth Nation, so most of this material has been made up from the whole cloth. However, the "wait a minute, how did we get here" segment of this episode d...

Motivating Passive Players: Bumbling Bosses

This bit of roleplaying advice isn't as broadly useful. It has to do more with getting passive and risk-averse players to take some initiative and get involved more with the plot, but these things are so individual that I don't know if this idea w...

Chosen Ones, Part 12

This is now roughly twice the length of any past arcs! And we've still got some ways to go because we have two more nations to see!

What I like about this episode is that, because I play Hero most of the time and it relies on the 3d6 bell cu...

Chosen Ones, Part 11

The day of the Earth Fighting Championship is here! And Lawry doesn't play things straight.

I think it's fun when you can come up with an excuse for an enemy to lose that's unconventional, and in particular social. When it fits and the NPC c...

Roleplaying Rules: Empathy and Sympathy

I've been reminded again I can put these on Patreon early!

This episode is more in the vein of writing and playing actual characters. It's about empathy, what it is, and how it helps shape all your character interactions, and how it differs ...

Chosen Ones, Part 10

The group is one step closer to pounding Bingle! Party plans are often unusual, but I like it when they work out and the group feels encouraged to come up with things that are a mix of unlikely and insane. Partly because, as a GM, I really enjoy p...

Chosen Ones, Part 9

To the Earth Nation our heroes go! 

I've done arena competitions with players in the past, and the lesson I've taken away from it is that those even tests of power can be a tad boring and one-sided unless the characters have a lot of wa...

Why Do We Play DnD? They're the Mechanics You Know

Most of you who play DnD know that we play DnD because it's something everyone is already familiar with. We don't have to drag out friends over to a new system or teach them anything new. This much, is not too insightful. But why are these mechani...

Chosen Ones, Part 8

In "The Last Airbender", one funny element of Air Bender society they bring up is that the women and the men live separate from one another, on separate mountains. They're depicted like serene Buddhist monks, but I feel that the only way ...

Battle for the Table's Soul: The Golden Girls War

I plan to do a video a little more about mechanics, but winding up to that, I'm going to do some stuff related to why the mechanics work differently for narrativist and gamist groups. Specifically, the "3d6" blog got the usual pushback of "we need...

Chosen Ones, Part 7

I think the "shipping wars" are my favorite part of the Avatar fandom. Not to be a part of them, but just at how seriously some people at the time took a relationship between kids who, if we were being realistic, might break up before they turned ...

Chosen Ones, Part 6

These are winding up being pretty long! No episodes of the past were based on actual campaigns rather than one-shots, and I have to be honest, the set up for this bit took a whole roleplaying day just because we had to ask all those essential ques...

Antagonize Your DnD Table: Insist on 3d6

Artisan asked if I would post the upcoming week's rant to Patreon early so that he and others can hear it, and honestly I probably should! I'll start a new tag for "Roleplaying Blog" and be more diligent about sharing these here.

Not everybo...

A blog!

Hey guys! This is just an update to assure you I am not dead. I am merely dying from this obscene heat recently. The way I do my recording is I throw a blanket over my work space to damp out echo, but I live in the Midwest where this oppr...

Chosen Ones, Part 5

It's a long one! I can't recall if the actual game took more than one session, but it's got a lot going on.

In the actual game, the party got less into the... unexplained elements of the mines, mostly because the guy Paul represents had a lo...

Chosen Ones, Part 4

By this point in the game, we picked up a new player and the real game is now a bit on the large side, with five total players when everyone can make it. Bingle's survival is a bit difficult, as a result, but the group has had some fun ideas. In p...

Chosen Ones, Part 3

A complicated drawback to having the premise of "this kid must escape the party" is that your players aren't always thinking like human beings. There's often one who's played enough DnD to assume any time the party is in "initiative", it means no ...

Chosen Ones, Part 2

Insomnia has been striking again, unfortunately, though the symptoms are a lot more mild than they have been. I think I grew complacent and slacked off too much on the house cleaning regiments.

Good news is that this podcast arc is now once ...

Chosen Ones, Part 1

This arc has not been playtested by a live group! Though that may not remain the case indefinitely. Part of the reason is because it involves more working pieces and specific abilities, and the whole concept is still being workshopped. Starting th...