#either dimension 20 or game grumps

[sanders-sides88]

Janus: Well, you know what they say. When God gives you lemons, get a new God.

[klysanderelias]

got a dropout.tv free trial just to watch misfits and magic, it fucking rules. Dunno if it's a switch away from dnd that makes it better, or if it was the specific cast members involved that I enjoyed more, but it really was enjoyable and well paced

just gonna grump for a bit under the cut about dnd podcasts

tried to watch a couple of other dimension 20 seasons again and I just slide off of it man, there's something about like an hour and a half of dnd combat where I'm just like, look, I get it. We're all struggling to stay engaged here. Dnd combat is kinda boring and hard to pay attention to when you're not 100% at the table, and your whole goal is to keep people entertained, but making everything over the top and hyperviolent ain't it, chief. Like, putting aside that attempting to describe everything in gory detail reduces the overall impact of your descriptions as well as clutters up the podcast's soundscape with snarling voices and piped in sound effects, it also just takes longer.

Genuinely, if your descriptions are like "you hit the monster and it goes 'blalalalalalargh' and your axe cleaves through it's sinewy flesh and hits bone and you hear a sickening slurping sound as it drops to the ground with a feeble 'rugughgh' and you wrench your blade from it with a pop and look to the sky in triumph" it really ain't that much more interesting than 'you do five damage and kill it.' What is the narrative goal of your description? Is it just skinnerbox for your players so that they feel better about rolling the big number? Like, seriously, examine the reason you're doing this and think about what you're gaining. I 100% believe that it's okay to do the skinnerbox glory kill description if that's what people at the table want, but you gotta interrogate that.

Anyway i just kinda think that dnd as a medium has a number of baked in assertions that really are starting to drag down any podcast I listen to that involves it as a system because, like, I love dnd! I love playing dnd! But i hate what ends up in pretty much every podcast because either I'm sitting here like bro don't make them roll. this is not a roll. don't do this. do not. or it's like ah cool, here's another hour and change of grueling tabletalk as the party slogs through an encounter that can be charitably summed up as "the party scares off some insects" (i'm looking at you trials and trebuchets)

partially i think that dnd is much more rng based and it's easy to slide into clownshoes territory where you roll a 1 and suddenly your character shits and farts and throws up but also like, the more I try different game systems the more I come to realize that dnd has some radically wild numbers, man. Like, when you break down the actual percentages, it makes very little sense. the progression of AC vs attack bonus in general is nuts. The idea that a routine task is a dc 10? wtf. There's so much that really needs to be picked apart to truly understand what the fuck you're doing as a dm and there are so few resources for it because a lot of people aggressively advocate for terrible actions (shoutout to all the dms who are like 'oh yeah i kill my players just to keep them on their toes' and also the guy who wrote the 'top ten mimics to destroy your players' trust' article) PLUS you're trying to tell a semi-coherent story and react to your players' agency and it's just like...

I can't even say 'just play [game system]' because a lot of the simplified systems like blades in the dark, pbta, etc, are heavily one-sided and swingy because the dm doesn't roll, so as soon as the player fails a roll things go south hard because that's the only time the dm is allowed to make things bad (and arguably that's kind of true in dnd but at least there're more steps between 'you failed at what you were trying to do' and 'now a bad thing happens to you')

and to be fair to pbta that all depends on how mean the gm wants to be but the rules literally say 'the gm makes a move as hard as they want' which means that you are the only person who decides how bad things get, you can't point to the rulebook and be like 'look man I know this feels unfair but the stat block is right. here. This is how much damage it does because it's an appropriate encounter for your level' and so you really gotta have a level of trust and familiarity in the group so that no one feels like they're getting singled out or punished

anyway the misfits and magic system kind of runs pbta style where the gm doesn't roll hardly anything (from what I saw, it's possible aabria was playing fast and loose and if so I commend her) but there's the added feature of 'adversity tokens' where, when you fail a roll, you take a token that you can store to add to a later roll. It means that a) if things really start swinging against the pcs, they get tools handed to them to start to swing things back and b) for climactic and narratively appropriate moments, they can unleash banked tokens to push a failure into a success

of course, it's a polyhedral system so. loses a lot of points for that. [what I mean here is that the players have differently-sided dice for each stat, so they might roll a d20 for one stat and roll a d4 for another stat, which is perfectly fine in theory and in practice turns into a fucking nightmare]