RollPlay Presents: a 5E Roundtable Discussion (EP2)

hello everyone welcome to another roleplay presents of 5e roundtable discussion I'm JP McDaniel the creative role play and your host for it today we've got the same lineup of guests that we had from the first episode so we'll just kind of go around and introduce everyone real quick Matthew Mercer the critical role GM and popular voice actor how's it going mr. Mercer good but he be back folks and amongst fancy company thanks happy to have you here mr. Koval GM and host of popular youtube series running the game and also we're just gonna call you millionaire Matt from now is that okay so I prefer the term king of Kickstarter okay King up sorry I'm so sorry you're he recently started a kickstart well two days ago it's almost at a million we'll talk about that in just a bit oh we're just gonna mention it yeah Adam Coble GM here role play and rule 20 as well as the creator of the award-winning dungeon world I think that's your the tagline that I know okay the official the official name of the game is Adam Coble's award-winning tabletop role-playing game dungeon world featuring sage matura nice perfect perfect and Mike morals the co-creator of D&D 5th edition and the franchise creative director you currently at the wats the offices right now is that where you're located yes yes I am so if it will cloud your environment we have a very angry toddler at home Wow probably get some angry toddlers at wizards too we get started here though I do want to visit with each of you for a quick second mr. Mercer Congrats on campaign - is that the official name that you guys are calling it thank you for now I guess until they decide what their party name is I've been following you guys on Twitter for a while and the weirdest thing I've seen and I think the weirdest thing for you guys is all these billboards popping up across LA with your name and [ __ ] cool we finally this morning me Mercer finally went and saw them in person so it's as a person whose group is an actor coming to LA with you know bright eyes like one day it'd be great to be on these billboards I would never expect it would be for D&D and then that outfit so it's been a very wonderful surreal experience yeah if you guys haven't seen it I could check out Matt's Twitter I think today you posted a photo of it so you can kind of see yeah the billboards it it's kind of crazy to see that stuff here in LA right now going wait what yeah where's my agent I need it right now one of them is Pico right next to Sony's Sony Pictures and Fox and I'm just like all those he I could have to drive down there and ADA working she was some of them are trying to figure it out and going we got to have one of them has I think it's like [Music] has it happened yet where where someone's tuned into the show that you know haven't been like hey I saw the Billboard what what is this thing about is have you had that conversation yet we've had people who were like peripherally or really unaware of critical role in like the entertainment industry that work online games or the project said so I saw you on a billboard what is this for and then have the great conversation of like oh well it's not a television show or a well movie or a series it's um it's her Dungeons & Dragons game and that night brief live yeah well you can yeah does that awkward pause after them going did he say what I think he just said yeah yeah right it's gotta be a head spinner for sure but Congrats on like you said all the success king of Kickstarter saying that no it's all so long now Congrats on the Kickstarter did your two days in and what like eight hundred and fifty thousand I think is what sorry I'm 829 to be I don't I don't this is gonna sound like false hubris but I know I don't keep track of the number people shouted at me but I don't go to the page I focus on focused on getting the getting the everything ready to make the book JP you think Scrooge McDuck knows how many gold coins are in his mighty vault it's crazy it's crazy it's a lot of people are talking I see a lot of conversation online about what this means for the industry but really I don't know I'm not an expert on this yet but I feel like what you're seeing has a lot more to do with YouTube than it does with and anything else that is rare indeed certainly than it does with strongholds and followers and there's a lot more to do with YouTube and building and community building a community online building and community on the Internet and using YouTube as a platform to do that I think our YouTube channel is fantastic by which I mean the community like the comments are great it's not what you expect from YouTube and I think this is the result of that yeah for those they don't know that go to Kickstarter and just search strongholds and streaming and you'll you'll find it there it's all being linked in please if people are checking to help you up please give to it we want to make sure we get that awesome tender stretch goal we can get those back in the game he knows advertising he's got billboards this fan has a billboard billboard he knows what's a billboard told me what to do no other responsibilities there for me to comport and say no please no kender never come here so Cole are you just waking up the past Amarna just be like what the [ __ ] is my life like what what is this weird thing yeah oh yeah he slept okay I slept like a rock the night of the Kickstarter Xanax but apart from that it's been mostly just you know trying to keep up with engaging with the community I've seen other Kickstarter's succeed and then sort of falter at once they fail but falter because they had no plan for engagement and so just constantly being on reddit on the discord on the Kickstarter page engaging with people answering their questions making sure they're being heard and we have answers and I'm incredibly lucky that I've got a team of producers I take back every bad thing I ever said about producers because having people who are just like I just love making lists like so here's here's 300 entries of the most popular questions people have asked and we need to come up and answers for is it's gonna be making a huge boom so it's I that that's what I think about right now that's where my mind is yeah well good luck with the the continued success I'm sure of the Kickstarter and we're all eagerly awaiting to see the the book I'm sure that's good most restful situation when that and oh god we got to do this now we actually have to do I just really don't know well I mean a lot of the rules were already written by the way so it's the playtesters to hopefully we get a good team of play testers and get good feedback and we're able to produce a book that the people who backed it like that's the goal don't wanna let those people down awesome awesome stuff mr. Adam Coble it's me Adam I think you GM a game every single day now have you are you seven days a week is that where you're at I mean you know if somebody didn't make me play the indeed three out of eight days in the next eight days are you ready I play a lot of I play a lot of role-playing games on the internet it's true by the way I know I'm in a position if Adam were interested at some point in the future fly him down and yes we play the dune board game why wants to do it I do not under any obligation I'm putting you on the spot right here but gosh yes yes so for yeah for folks who maybe don't know the first thing that the king of Kickstarter and I bonded over was yon ancient yon ancient dune board game which is both of our favorite game board anyways so yeah I love it and I will take any excuse to play it I would love to if y'all happen that's gonna happen nice nice wall we'll all be looking forward to that for sure I can't wait to see Adam and Koval opposite ends of a board just pissed off at each other not least mr. Mike morals we're here to talk to you d but I want to talk to you you watched the overwatch League we actually have you Ange tweets about the overwatch League and I did not expect that at all yeah no it's been great and you know I'm a little like I missed yesterday yes I was busy all day but man there's like III just I know the results that I don't I mean it's still fun to watch matches it is I mean I really I'm horrible to overwatch I'm terrible but I really like playing it yeah the and and and it's fun to watch people play it well and it's really interesting how the game for me whatever reason it just it really Maps very well to like a sport it's really it's dramatic you know I love music as the payload approaches the end and all that stuff like it's just yeah and especially when you have a close match and it goes to overtime like that to me it feels like overtime like it's amazing yeah they yesterday was kind of crazy was like 13 hours yesterday straight I think oh yeah the team that end up winning played 14 matches over 11 hours or something yes I think yeah because they had to play they had like a regular season match then they had to play the intro match and then they had to play the championship match yeah yeah it's and you couldn't know what's what I loved about that was you couldn't do that in non eSports right you couldn't ask someone like play three soccer games in a day like that'd be crazy yeah like people literally get like horribly injured right right but but it's so it's kind of nifty to play with that you know and I know obviously I'm sure it took a toll on the guys playing but the but yeah I missed it I was like I was so like and my I'm a big Boston fans I'm a Boston sports guy but the and the uprising I really like the state that's thing is it's also been a good storyline watching the uprising start out everyone no one gave us a chance preseason right who are these guys nobody knows and then you can kind of see the team start to gel and then I leaned over the Spitfire and then everything since then has just been and like so close taking down Houston yesterday who's such aa but yeah so I'm really enjoying it I he sounds like he's talking about a real sport yeah I would say I would 100% I would fight you to say that playing overwatch he sports a real sports like buta living or even like it is because when you're watching someone like play and and you realize a lot of it I've always been a really big sports fan and I think that there is definitely a genius to knowing you know being when you think about someone like Michael Jordan when he's bouncing a ball and moving at full speed and jumping in the air making madera adjustments like that is genius like right that is absolutely yeah and I said Williams was a genius legit genius yeah so yeah I've been I've been it's great and it's actually it works out well cuz usually later on the day is my have desk time at work so I can fire up a web browser and watch twitch well I'm finishing stuff up so nice nice well we all are equally eagerly looking forward to your overwatch podcast talking about that so let's talk to Indy one of the major components for really the second episode was actually a Twitter conversation between yourself Mike and Adam and the conversation was primarily about you know talking about tabletop RPG streams and how if the cast is miserable because of the endgame actions whether it's player death or bad rolls or anything like that the audience is most likely loving that because it's kind of everyone celebrates the misery of the players on the in this world of streaming but there's also the opposite where you know if the players are just absolutely demolishing the encounter or getting through the puzzles whatever with ease the audience might be kind of bored so the primary focus of this roundtable kind of discuss and focus on the idea of streaming games of D&D and not the technical aspects if you want to know how to set up xsplit don't watch this we're not going to do stuff like that but really you know the future of the indie in this weird world of streaming tabletop games and future aspects of that and different aspects of that so to start off with let's talk about PC death and kind of the tabletop narrative and how that works in the world of streaming I think one of the most captivating aspects of D&D in general is this idea that death means something and it's not you don't just press X to restart like if you die in D&D save for a resurrect spell or whatever you're kind of you're dead you got to start over again right if you die in dungeon dragons you die Jack Jack laid it out we know how it goes yeah so don't it was hardcore it was a hardcore Mike I want to start with you and how do you and maybe by extension was there the coast how do you envision player death to be handled at the table well you know it's it's not something that we design-wise put a ton of thought into I'll be honest like because it is one of those things that's very cultural and as far as like you know at the table whatever table you're playing because it was when you look over the history of the game very early on in the 70s when Dini started there was this very strong sense that like winning Dungeons & Dragons was was gaining loss and losing was dying right like if you played in the campaign and you had a fifth level fighter that meant something that meant I am good at this game right like and it was a game that was very binary and a lot of its results right you if you fail the saving third you died right if you got dropped to zero hit points you were dead and so it has transformed especially the 80s from this marker of success and play skill because very much the game was yeah the play skill of DD was like I know to like you know look under the bed for a tress a treasure chest I know and I opened the chest you know we had a we had a moment like that recently in a 5e game where one of the players had played through caves of chaos they'd played through keeping the borderlands and one of the other players hadn't and the player who hadn't was searching through some some tents we were playing to annihilation is intense and they were like what is there just like gonna be a cobra in here that's gonna jump out and bite me and the player who had played it was like and I was like okay a cobra yeah that happened in my game ward they were in the swamp and someone fell off the thing into the swamp and one of the players said I hope there aren't leeches in there and I was like yeah but that's I mean that's a paradigm shift like you said ya know and it's something it's really evolved and as the game went the 80s and 90s and this idea of rather than it being this almost a very I mean it's it's a cliche but it's the wargaming roots versus this more storytelling direction the game went that death became like I know right in my own campaigns I try not to kill players because it's pay me ass right like I have to kill players easier to kill more tempted to kill a player than the character the but you know when you're building a world then you have these characters backstories and everything's tied together and then a character dies and now you have to work the new character in and it's just you're losing a lot of that sort of narrative coherence and the narrative weight you build right it used to be oh you died that means you suck so go back to first level haha and now it's like well why would your new character like a your four characters first level where 10th level why the hell would we take you into the dragon domain right that doesn't make any sense what we have to figure it out right and so there's a very natural tendency we won't make a tenth level character right you can you can see that that idea of level as skill marker having almost been completely erased how most people play the game one of the most frequently questioned free last questions we get is how do I make a character above first of all what's so right that's the thing that I wonder about that though is that the skill now seems to have been replaced in a lot of games with like you dying is not the indicator of failure but ending up at 20th level with a suboptimal character feels like more to like well why did you take this ability or why'd it take that level like there's no synergy between your abilities like I think there is still that player skill but it's shifted into building the characters rather than the play yeah yeah no I think it's definitely true you think in terms of like skill with the system but I think in a lot of ways now when people think of player skill it's almost more of the soft skills like are you just are you a fun person to play with like if you're playing the character who's a you know impulsive and greedy will you steal the crown jewels and you have the chance even though you know it's gonna cause a lot of trouble because that's more fun right before whatever the group's definition of fun is but you know in it I think that that kind of carries a little bit to streaming to where that's a little more fun to watch and I think that's just kind of a little bit of a convergence that's happened that the Dungeons & Dragons of 15 years ago may not have been very fun at all the stream because it would have been a lot of counting squares and you know I've been figuring out your optimal power attack back and yeah I got this bonus from the bard and then the druid did this to me and now I've got this bonus I'm plus some yeah that's why we started streaming a critical role we've been playing a pathfinder for years cuz two point five and Pathfinder was what I knew it was comfortable in and then when for the addition to come out and kind of the feedback had come in from the community that it was a much more streamlined when it came to you know involving storytelling into the actual mechanics and the combat wasn't quite as had reliant on floating you know modifiers from so many sources that was an easy choice for us for that reason because whenever we were a home games and we had to decide all the different variable bonuses from different sources and a given point in time it got to the point where people started the player sort of checking out of the actual action and a man there the players imagine of the players that's super interesting yeah I wonder about that because I don't I don't feel like 5e is more about those soft skills or like a good role-playing than Pathfinder was like that's a that's a lateral change right the mechanics dropped away in terms of complexity but I don't think there's anything in 5e that rewards or encourages that like be fun to play with in a way that previous editions of D&D didn't it doesn't mechanically so like a lot of the mechanical shipper was wood was 100 percent to make the game more accessible I mean that's the entire story of if addiction was we know we need to we need to start the player acquisition engine it's how you think of it right we don't have we hadn't really had new people coming in into pre tional numbers since that I news padeen D yeah and so that's so it's just just locked which I'll take right hey I like I'll take lock you're right mike wants to give me a lucky choice I'll take it but the I think in some ways it's it's going to be interesting to the future BD because at the time when we designed the rules we did have a sense of the community we wanted to build we did have a sense of the tone we wanted to have but it was we never felt we had enough tactical control over the game and we never really felt to be understood the audience well enough to be that prescribed in okay here's really mapped out how we want you to act because we just didn't really have a clear sense of it well and okay well is that something you know kind of on the topic of player death or player character death gear before Adam how are we are we at a point kind of in the future of 5e where you'll have a footnote or a side role or something like that for like here's how you could deal with death if you're planning on streaming this is that's something that you can envision in the rules in the future yeah no I definitely could because I think now thanks to streaming and thanks to having much bigger you know a really big active community we can start talking about these more meta topics with a bit more confidence rather than just feeling like we just don't know what we're saying right we can be giving and especially when you're Gunder going so much change in the game we didn't want to start delving into that and more meta discussion and how to set rewards and stuff it kind of had this like D&D has existed for 40 years so we just kind of you know streamline the game to get more people to start playing then we'll worry about being more tactical about things but yeah a lot of the stuff Adam talked about like GE doesn't really go out of its way I mean the one thing I have noticed is just with backgrounds just by including these tables and including like hey write this on your key down on your character sheet it's almost like that that was just a reminder people needed and I think that has helped new players a lot be 1% yeah bit more like specific about their character beyond just saying like lawful neutral so that's brilliant designs because you guys made it so it's a chart right so that it's it you can just choose something but there's also that ocular like I'm just gonna cast the bones and see what is my characters and that inspires people and it is a huge I've done I've introduced like you know 30 players to the game in my at work and it makes them think about their character in a way they never would have before and they like it it's fun it gets them thinking about stuff they wouldn't thought of before you know that we have a character in the in the the past of court of swords folks might remember percentage of truant or batur day nines character he he made a character who died like in the first combat that kobold hit him with a scorching second round of combat he was like well I guess my guy died I got to make a new guy but instead of making the character on purpose he just said okay I'm just gonna roll randomly for everything like every possible thing I'll roll my race my class everything that's him yeah and the character was the character was really interesting because of it and he was suboptimal in a bunch of ways but his buy-in was different right Sean was a guest he knew he only had six sessions he needed to play this character so the character came out really poor that freedom to just randomly roll I think was present but I don't know that people would feel as comfortable in a game like D&D doing that de facto at the beginning if that was your your setup there are games obviously that are built on that you don't get to make any choices around character creation but I think there is a certain like you said there's a certain irregular excitement about being like why why is this character like this like I rolled totally incongruous stuff now it's my job to figure that out and I think GM's know that you have to do that all the time like why are there four halfling merchants on the 17th level of this dungeon I don't know but the table said they're here so now I got to justify it yeah yeah a large part of a dungeon master or game mastering your knowledge is justification it's you trying to find out what the rules present before you the choices the players make and the unexpected scenarios and you just have to kind of formulate how to weave these together and so that as long as you're comfortable in that space it's not anything if you aren't it's a good exercise to take some of those random elements every now and then and see how best you can adjust that and incorporate into the story and it may not be the most optimal thing and aiming for a funny story in the long run but I think that makes you a stronger GM the more you practice you know allowing those unexpected elements and enshrines weave it in so I was just gonna ask I'm curious about mics it's because you were talking about the random tables do you think going back to JB's original point about character death do you think like the table is the background table is the more detailed ones in like Susanna thar's do you think that takes away some of the pressure of character death like if your character die is a faster path to creating a new character that actually has some interesting background that you can play do you think that reduces some of that drag yeah III think it does and I think also one of the things that when you think in just in terms of game design is making death more interesting you know and how do you get DMS to embrace that where because the thing is in a game in most games you die the game ends right if I'm playing a roguelike I die I start over but in a group cooperative game it's a little strange to be like okay so you're knocked out right like what do you so I think tables like that and like one of the things I've been kind of thinking about was you know could you in our publish adventures you do so do something along those lines like here's tables you can roll on to make the character who's joining the campaign halfway through like especially with another published game right you can say which chapter are you in then add this die roll to your array right so yeah maybe it's a bit more you know tomb does that a little right there's there's a section where once you reach the final dungeon it's a kind of go no-go situation but if someone dies here are 10 excuses to put a new character in the part yeah yeah I think an appoint to kind of help because scared to death is a very not only is it part of the the underlying tension that helps the players understand their choices have you know consequences and that's you know this is a real challenge you're trying to go through even though you're not trying to kill your players characters necessarily all the time you need to have that real threat for a lot of games for a lot of groups to feel like it's it's a thrilling experience what I've had previous campaigns where players have died and what's helped me especially could say if it's not a really epic you know you it's cool if the player like isn't a huge boss fight against a major building and trying and feeling gets to finish them off and they like that was a good death but if it's like cold number three wearing jump on me and I almost died yeah so some moments like that if you play just by the rules you go to zero hit points you know def saving throws you're dead game over for your character I've enjoyed even where it wouldn't make sense in the moment allowing those players to play out a lengthy death whether like even if they would have been smashed maybe when the battle is over they go back to his body and you know as I perform like Bishop and aliens is still there on the ground conscious as he's bleeding out and you give him like a minute to say goodbye or tell them what his final wishes you know I could this is a secret I held and I could never completely do it for me go forward you know and kind of drive that memory I find it as long as you give players the opportunity to make the Deaf meaningful even in a situation where it might not be that lets them put it to bed a little stronger I'm not sure they got you know they got taken away from them unfairly yeah the death is such a weird sticky thing there's kind of a fine line right because fir'd when you're streaming a game you don't want the audience to start claiming plot armor right that's like the last thing you want because you want to make sure like you said the most important thing is death they want to have this fear of dying but the second that people start saying like oh man he's got plot oh man there's no way this guy's ever going to die ever just because of what just happened so and then on the other side you don't want to make it too too challenging where you have a death every other show because then that sucks for both the players and sometimes the audience is into that for a death or two but the second they have to or the third or fourth time they have to learn a new character it's kind of just like oh god here we go again you walk into and they have they're engaged with the old character right exact age with a character Mithen in a very very intense way and you kill them off and now what have you done to your audience yeah well you you kind of surprised me when you said that you don't like killing players at a table ice I expect you to be the guy he's like yeah you [ __ ] died get out of here get off my thing you're not a fan of death at the the table what you want to expand on that a little bit in terms of why perhaps mere Adam you is you he oh yeah I'm Adam you're cold oh if you called me Coble then I would be very confused yeah that's good this is this is all you buddy yeah we're gonna last name oh did I say that what did I say I said I'm not a fan of killing what you're not I think it was a joke from earlier I was not an actual joke I've learned is that jokes are funny okay laughs then no it wasn't a joke no I have no problem killing off characters in fact I am one of my best friends and now my dungeon master and my boss who probably was thinking about firing me I killed off his character in the middle of a recent game and it was awful I actually I guess I guess I guess no I I if it's if it's there's there's good death and there's bad death yeah if there's death where everybody the table understands that had to happen right that's that's what that character would do and often it's best when it's the players decision right as you rub the lamp the genie comes out and the demon says if you don't do this then I do that and the player says I do not bargain and in player knows in that moment that he's gonna die yeah and it feels like this is what should have happened this is right I remember my friend Jim Murphy were talking about player death character death type of character death in the old game I like Mike Mike's comments my friend Jim talked about how like they would often argue and I vaguely remember this argue about how many deaths was the right number of deaths for a given campaign for a given character ha by the time your fifth level how many times should your characters have died because otherwise it was too easy otherwise the game wasn't wasn't realistic and actually been taking notes I think a lot of player death is about expectation like if he was a dungeon master have told your players ahead of time listen you need to make two characters because life is cheap in this world then that vastly recolors their attitude toward the game and their character and they're still gonna hate it when their character dies but they've got this they're already got but that's that's right I like I remember uh Sam when when Scanlon I get the names and the characters confused now because it looks stupid comic yeah when when Scanlon almost died and actually I think he was dead and somebody brought him back and he as an aside he said but I was looking forward to my new guy I already had an idea right so that that that's real that happens and you know there I think if they were Mechanics for heroic death where the player was like oh crap things didn't go my way and now my I'm gonna die and that sucks and you have all that you know that grieving for this character but if there were a mechanic for well I'm a paladin or I'm an elf or this is my background and I'm and I get this way to die that is heroic and epic and if you know like the retributive strike you know from that old that's actually yeah really cool idea the idea of a character's gonna die but you get one like a bad fit one final yeah way to help your friend as as your exit that can ensure or help them Mike actually think anybody in this chat could do it and probably mostly people watching but if you give Mike thirty minutes he could come up with conversation like the thing the thing is is that we're all having to do this work because Dean D doesn't care like the system is like I don't know you die yeah well I mean because like Mike said death is very how the players deal with it is I think a very idiosyncratic thing I'm not necessarily sure I would want I mean we don't know we haven't seen it I'm not sure I would want a philosophy regarding things you have them you have the mechanics of D&D and you have the the setting by which I mean not just the literal place your game is set but like the tone and the feel of that and you almost have to use that as a filter for the mechanics to get to the play of the game and it'll it doesn't translate one to one the game will as it passes through that screen it'll change and you get to a place where you're like okay cool so death by default is this very neutral OneNote thing but because I want the game to feel particularly gritty then we'll do it this way or I wanted to feel more heroic then it ends up this way and I think it's okay like the saying didi doesn't care about it doesn't mean that it should it just means that we have to do that work as as game masters and as players I think also there's a I think we all understand this but we haven't talked about it there's a lot of ways for a team or a character player to fail that doesn't have anything to do with death and I think there's this built-in assumption that death is the price of failure right and and and it is a difficult thing to deal with at the table because of the engagement of the player if we're talking my screaming and the audience but they're pretty similar uh my characters dead now this is a problem to solve I killed but but it's not really problem solved when you're talking about we failed to save the princess you know we failed to restore the heir to the throne especially if these are characters I think we're human beings we're monkeys we like looking and thinking about other monkeys if it's a character in the game that you've engaged with and now something bad happens to that character the players will feel like they failed oh yeah totally also there is a game back to something Mike said before I apologize for going on but like back in the day there was save or die I had a character you know like the devout bag of devouring back in the day there was I put on this necklace that I thought was a necklace of fireball I made the mistake was that you put it on in the first place for exactly was that we didn't wait till the next day when we had identified and but my point is save or die which is now considered a terrible mechanic because it is there was a reason for it though and the reason was it was fun as hell for everyone else oh yeah for everyone else at the table it was it sucked for you and you hated it but everyone else has the shade in front where they're like let's see what happens so that notion of like the group having fun in aggregate even though you you're down here but everyone else is up ah that is a very communites I don't like that design but it's very interesting speaks I mean it speaks to Jamie's original point about how a player can be or a group can be miserable but if your goal is to make a good show you can sometimes end up fulfilling that goal and have the players they'll be like I am NOT having fun but the audience super engaged because I've had this happen where you know because we're doing this in this sort of seven seconds off from live environment where a player will be discussing a terrible idea a player will be like we should do this thing and the players are all talking about it and I will look at my camera and I would be like god help me chat like they're gonna do it and you know this is not my fault this is not on me and then they do the bad thing and they all die and I'm like that was me that was them they did this and chat can buy into that but I think it's it's that fleeting it's that fleeting high right where people like huh yeah Tbk that was oh it's fun of the moment it sucks five minutes afterwards yeah interesting that we're talking about you just said it there's the player are they having fun that can be yes or no yeah and then there's the group are they engaged to having fun and that can be yes while this is no that what I was talking about cific and then there's the audience now now for some of us I know that people in chat were like there shouldn't be an audience I get that and God forbid I ever get to a point my life where I'm making decisions about the audience over the players that's crazy but I definitely think there are mechanics in ways you can improve the game play of the game for the players that were also really improved for the viewers yeah and that's that's kind of where I've been thinking about death and when we have that discussion and think about the back of my head and I think when we talk about save or die we really see the transformation that's gone on death the game has gone from being something is very tactical what you did in the course of the session was really important and what you did from session on session was just simply linking that tactical game you might have long-term goals like building a stronghold hey you know like like when you're covering out right do you go ahead all the kick start at the back right kickstarter.com slash strong anyway [Laughter] the but I think what the big transformation in the 80s and onward was games becoming more strategic that and strategic in the sense of my character was is you know the wrongly accused murder of the king and I will one day prove my innocence but that's gonna be like after like 30 sessions because if it's after one session then you're like oh no I want people want that big payoff and death kind of hasn't changed right now a lot of other things with the game have shifted but the the idea of your character dying hasn't really changed much at all it's still very much a tactical element I think that's when you see people get very disappointed is when you have a very tactical death you sit you fail that saving drew the ogre crits you and then you couldn't roll up of a tent so now you're dead I whereas when you think of death and storytelling I ever watching Robotech back in the eighties remember oh my god Zack we're gonna say and percent ROI was there oh my god yeah no it wasn't a win-win I think it was it was ROI or Ben went when they make they're eating us their right to eat a steak it's like Oh scramble event go off to fight and it goes running and then the camera whatever the animation zooms in on the steak and you're like my moment when Troy Fokker died in Robotech and you're like what yeah that was my Game of Thrones mistake I think yeah I don't remember I remember he was one of Rick's buddies they're like yeah they were like the three musketeers and yeah that guy's not to interrupt the giant robot let's circle jerk giant robot soap opera maybe maybe the thing to think about is that we we don't have like success on one end of the scale and death on the other because I definitely feel like there have been times especially in streaming where a character dying feels like a narrative success it's like I died boiling Marg yeah my sister instead you have like misery and success right we're like failure is just your character suffers no it's like this has to deal with bad [ __ ] the steak is getting us there like I think like this is what do you think about it that was satisfying because it said now I as a viewer knew someone was going to die that was part of the narrative right it wasn't about success or failure it was just about this characters arc and I think that's where I think actually pulling death I mean you could still put death on the success/failure line but but I think defaulting to that is a mistake and I think if you could find ways to make death more strategic where you can have that moment so I'll just give you a very brute-force mechanic you could say in dd5 you you could say the rule is you are once you fail a number of death saves equal to half your con score whatever you die and that's across the entire career of your character and you can't change that number ever so now suddenly you have the been walking away from mistake moment right like I only have one more deaf L death safe to go and that's when the players know we're about to fight like the eight headed dragon of the you know bro you just ascended hardcore mode for dear bennett diablo hardcore mode but that gives you that moment right where you know my character has won more I'm walking up to die yeah I'm going off to die right and now it's strategic now both deaths and the storytelling are strategic okay so we behind them may be worked on aligning those two things right no III percent agree but I I think there's a way to make it more like when I was pitching the idea of your character having kind of a built-in retributive strike like right I'm dying this is it and but now I get to use this super cool ability I was imagining it as like a booby prize right it's like well sorry you died at least this memorable thing happens but of course as soon as a player sees I have this unique resource I can only use when I die what happens right right say no I will stand on the bridge and I will hold the way you guys go you run because I know I will get to use my cool awesome ability and now this isn't a booby prize anymore now this is a deeply narrative thing happening right it's your character's final stand and you were in charge of it and you you took control of it was a proactive Pro a anyway you get the idea that's well the trick with the trick or the situation like that I'm trying to forecast dramatic death though is that you know you have one death save left you leave that stake on the table you walk outside you step in the pit trap a spike goes through your head and you died here arch-nemesis on the other side the trap being like really really man I tell you I used to work I worked on I was lead writer on a game that deeply proud of called evolved and it was originally one monster it was one monster versus four heroes but the way was pitched to me was and the planet is tough enough that it can win the wildlife the wildlife is so and it turned out that if you were running through the jungle and you got ambushed by the wildlife and you died the monster player would see you in and no one was happy right because the pit trap killed the party right and they're like wait why not even the Dungeon Master's not at like I was looking forward to busting out calor old vial what we're gonna pit trap what right so that you got to think about that as a dungeon master are you okay with the idea that this this this thing this disco ball that you put in they might kill your play might kill this character yeah I want to bring it up Mercer and I'll go ahead and then I have a question for you well I mean okay great I was gonna say in the same degree too and we touched on a little bit last discussion but at a certain point magic makes death difficult to stick by the rules and then it makes it a very binary experience by the way the rules are written to when once you get access to resurrection whether it be a player character or even just having areas in the world that's available I guess at the point where death is a minor convenience which is great for a lot of people that you know they don't want heavy death in their game and and want to be just to slow you down type and it feels like progress yeah yeah but but also from a streaming standpoint when the audiences are looking for the type of drama and the players are wanting to adhere to that the possibility it can become a challenge and so even even with a critical role when we started streaming it we had already gotten to a level where that was a possibility and there have been countless complaints about claims and plot armor that it's not hard enough and like I get it that's fine I'm doing my best to make a good story and there's a very real possibility there is no protection of the players we actually implemented a system for a resurrection to try and still build a possibility of failure upon this success you know this guilt travel thing you guys do but even that wasn't enough of the audience so you have to keep in mind to a certain degree to that as long as the players are engaged with the death and there is the possibility within the group's belief system that may still convey itself but I think there need though there should be discussion about ways to make higher-level D&D you know still have a sting a lasting sting after death which is why would this thing that you were talking earlier with like you know a finite level of death saves you can take before you go is a really cool possibility or variations to that but for but also degrees of failure beyond death I think is a big way to know that and that's kind of what we've done with our campaign and and is to make sure that whenever a failure occurs or even if a character comes back from the dead the narrative experience is so visceral that it changes the way they look at the world and how they interact with things so there are lasting consequences to their story based on that even though they still lived you know there is an effect that it's had on their experience but for players that don't that haven't had a lot of experience with the game or you know look to the rules to show them how to implement that I can see it being a very very hard thing and a lot of questions I see come from the community or like how do I at the higher make death meaningful when it's so easy to avoid yeah I think it would be trivially easy for somebody somebody like you in your game to say okay resurrection you're your own ninth level cleric now or whatever and you can resurrect people but there's a price your character comes back different right and there's to be a chart you have to roll on I remember back in the day you lost up there used to used to lose a point of constitution every time every game direction and even that which is so so what it's so just a number on a character sheet what does it mean it's not a zero narrative notion well not zero but you know what I mean like it was still this thing that had been marked off and you were like right there was this notion of this ticking clock as you lost unrepairable Constitution but there's also the notion that if you resurrection is there but the price could be I'm a different person now or the price could be my god requires me to go on a quest right that's the price and that can be a deeply narrative thing yeah I mean that's probably anything there there are new things in place for the new campaign to make things a little more intense with can't wait like I came with you to play testing for me have a nice deal I want I want this from the Dungeon Master's guide I want this from like printed material in the game to be like you don't have to watch 17 different twitch DMS to learn that you can make your own variations of this stuff like I would love to see more aggressive advice about like like mold lady Andy did this where it was like here is a basic framework for if you want to make up your own rules everything has a 1 in 6 chance of succeeding right spiral out from there I think that there's just so much anecdotal GM extends that that I feel like disservice is the the people who are just like I went into a store I picked up the game and now I'm playing it I want the books to say that I wanted to say like here are some different ways you can do it here are some frameworks for building your own rules I mean something you said my gun you're I was saying I was watching that that talk you're doing with Bart Carroll something you said was that your idea of what a game designer is is very very low right like there's the bar for entry to game design is very low and I want I want to see more of that in the mechanics I want the game to create new game designers more readily because I feel like it's weird that we keep having to give people permission to like make up their own [ __ ] for D and E which seems insane to me yeah you know it's one of those things where you know looking back into fifth we we weren't we're always worried about getting to medal like I said earlier because we didn't know there is a weird sweet spot right it's not like the first thing you want to learn because generally if one of the worst things you can tell if someone who's learning something is okay so you do this now you can do whatever you want right because they don't know the universe yet but we are looking at you know like what would that look like it with the audience of do you need growing so large you know it's it's significant large significant ly larger than it's been since at least like the late eighties is there now more room for like the the trade paperback book just on how to be a good deal or here's just you know a guide to the mechanics it's the annotated thing I have my I have a show on Tuesdays at 1:00 Pacific you know a plug but the where I've been designing subclasses right showing people okay here is I'm gonna make a subclass for the warlock so I'm gonna walk you through the Warlock class here's how the pieces fit together you know here's how a subclass okay now that I have the core class here's where the subclass fits in now go through and build it out and that's very specifically so we can start capturing some of that advice both for the community and then for us as we think is this something that that should be a product should this be in an expansion at some point you know we just did santa fires like what's the sequel to zenith ours is there one what does it look right elminster guide to making your own ass role-playing game rules it might be a hard to stream that can tell mr. doesn't care about your Terms of Service Matic the question I had for you you talked about high-level plan having access to resurrection what not now that you guys have started a new campaign and you're dealing with the the low levels where numbers are more swinging let's say we're player death is maybe more common because you only have you know 15 20 hp or whatever is that something you kind of hinted at it and I'm not gonna ask you to divulge the entire thing that might happen or may not happen on the show but is that something that went in to kind of starting paying tuned like well we might actually have a player die this time around we need to be ready for yes yeah and that well in the last campaign we had a lot of conversations about it and thankfully lucky rolls I mean even talons character in the last game when he had died had pretty much decided that he wasn't gonna come back even if they tried to resurrect him he's like my story's done he's fulfilled his goal he's he wouldn't come back and the player surprised him with some their developments that drew him back in but for this game when we were making the characters I was very clear I'm like guys you're squishy and you're Republic might lose a few people you know if before the first years done in this campaign so be prepared for that some stories might not finish you know and and we'll we'll see where it goes from there I don't want it to detract from the story but at the same time I don't want to do a disservice to the game and the tension that is involved both for our players in the audience the players want that the players aren't like don't kill my character like I mean it would suck but at the same time it's thrilling and at least give me a good death if it does happen which is kinda what we were talking about earlier so so yeah it's been a very open discussion and just like any table with your players we before you start a game you need to set the ground rules need to discuss what they can expect out of the story you're trying to tell how hard is it gonna be you know what are the focuses is it roleplay versus mechanics is it strategy versus storytelling you know is it a blend of the two and part of that was being very clear across the table players and myself that death is a very real possibility and if it happens you know it's gonna be sad but you use it to your advantage to make the end of that good story pass on what you can to the players that survived and then start thinking up what would be an interesting and unique new personality you know hi you know I can completely agree you know high death rate games it but who's the players to develop their backstory as they play right right like don't sit down I mean obviously you can if you want to but don't sit down the write a three-page backstory yet allow yourself to discover what your players backstory is so that by the time you're a fifth level or maybe third level and it's way more likely that you're gonna live to see the end of the campaign at that point you've got a more elaborate backstory and that is it's okay to start playing by rolling stats picking race and class and just going for and not spending not spending half an hour right on your background if that's your the juice for you go ahead but you don't have to do that I don't know where I don't know where we we i I want to blame white wolf because I love blaming a wolffish I'm with you I don't know I don't know how we got to a place where there was this expectation that a level 1 character meant anything to the world like well first I was born in this village like shut up I don't care about your village don't cover your father's sword you were a level 1 fighter come back and talk to me about your backstory when you get to level 5 it's a it's a big part of the appeal though I think especially with EEE these days like I have a theory that one of the things that drives D&D is is we've seen games in we talked about eSports earlier games are becoming more and more competitive and I think they're coming becoming more and more skill-based but III think for a long time people turn to games for that feeling of like hey I'm important I matter and I can play overwatch in now no I do not matter maybe not in the grand scheme of things but in the course of that singular game that you're playing you definitely matter with yeah I can I can totally drag you my team done right but with the but but I think there is a sense now what role playing games are filling is they are very much non-competitive like it's very much nine right I have to be like I was describing to someone this idea that when I play overwatch I can play tracer I love playing tracer it's really fun but you know I'm not that great at it but still thought I thought we were friends single conversation about overwatch though Matt reminding us that he's in the game oh so so when I pick tracer what I'm saying is I want to be this like super daring you know test pilot can travel through time and I want to weave through the enemy team and usually what happens is I blunder into getting headshot I go flying off the map or whatever but in D&D and a role-playing game I can just say okay my character runs 20 feet and jumps through the air and shoots at the enemy guide then then I activate my ability to travel back in time and then you roll the die and if you miss you miss because the die said you missed and if you hit you hit because the die sent you hit and you feel like great but it's not an indictment on you as a person or your skill it's just okay like that worked or it didn't and you know the game is kind of designed to like well it's harder to succeed against you know the tougher foe or things like that but you really have it almost automatic wish fulfillment like the game is not saying okay and ordered like we very much want you to feel like I want to play an awesome Archer okay great pick fighter who's the class it's good at fighting or Ranger the class that's good at shooting bows then pick the things that make you better being an archer and voila right it's not hidden it's like just right there the expectation is voila but even with a +7 you can roll one two three all day long and your idea of yourself as badass backflipping Legolas style bowmen can be totally undermined by the chaos plateau right where you're just like I'm a great Ranger no you are not learning the game right away I think that's the first time player says I'm gonna be the badass and then they walk into the first fight and roll like you said the one two three and you realize you're just an idiot and then that becomes the character a lot of time yeah you can't fire blow to hit anything to begin with kind of greats that backstory to begin with right and what you rose it's not your fault it's just the dice right like you're kind of okay I accept the dice sometimes they break my way against me and that's just but it doesn't say anything bad about me it is i mean dice are there to take all the blame for when things go wrong I think that's that speaks to what what the king of Kickstarter was saying that I'm not gonna stop about about how like your backstory is defined through the first few levels of play right you can start with a character that you do not care about and don't build a bunch of backstory for and by the time your level 3 or level 5 you're like I have an understanding of this character because of the things that happen to them right like I just stopped using my short boat because I couldn't hit with it and then I got a crit the first time you use a crossbow I'm a crossbow man now that nothing no mechanical thing has changed but because of that crit you can you can use the dice to take your character in another direction yeah yeah I want to kind of transition to the both Matt and then we'll transition in the next topic go ahead I was gonna say that also depends on the kind of player I find in my experience there are some players who with some sort of a hook of their own personal creation they have a hard time finding interest or at least finding some sort of active agency in this story no matter who's running the game and what they're finding I've had many friends of DM and had a player at the table that they just add into the session when all right that's not for me because there wasn't something holding him in there that they felt you know they had invested in so I I agree I think it's in for a lot of players efficient more experienced players it's a really really fun way to kind of see where it takes you but for a lot of people out there who are new to the game and are coming in because of watching streaming because they're invested in the story and the characters when they want to start playing they might be more the lines of well I want to make a character with the story preset then my excitement at going to the table every same we have a session is to see how much more of my adventure I can unveil how much more I can make get closer to this goal I had decided my I might have before we started playing right I think that's that's perfectly reasonable thing to want and to run a game for and in fact I remember in the play test Mike will correct me if I'm wrong you guys described levels at least one and two as being the apprentice levels right this is this is like you're you were literally just a peasant a second ago and so if you want that fourth edition yes if you want that fourth edition experience of your starting as a hero start at their level there's nothing I mean apart from the fact that it's not immediately obvious how to do it there's nothing stopping you from starting at third or fifth or in fact my campaign that we're gonna stream the chain of mini rows the players start at fifth level and they're gonna they're encouraged to develop their own backstories but you're also gonna get to watch them roll dice and generate their character from scratch and that gives them starting at higher level gives them the opportunity to come up with a cool badass backstory and be able to support it with their character sheet yeah you guys are kind of transitioned in the next topic already without my help the the levels of PCs and kind of the pacing of encounters that I think one thing that at least when it comes to streaming definitely come to streaming just having that number somewhere on the screen can easily dictate DM says hey you see a goblin in front of you the players know and the audience knows their power level is X here's a goblin they can easily take this goblin out but five seconds later oh there's a red dragon flying over you [ __ ] run but they gotta get out of here there's no way they can fight this right so with that said the audience react the same way as the players and they want to see that red dragon over goblin at the basic level but you can't get to that red dragon before you kill a thousand goblins so there's this weird like tug that comes to what is the best level when it comes to like streaming a campaign is there a best level is there an optimum level I kind of want to pose that to Mike to start off with you know what is that that best level range for D&D what's optimum so what we know from looking at the odds from the research we've done into the audience is that people generally start at first level and they played to somewhere from 5 to 7 then the campaign ends but typically when the campaign ends within like a week or two they have started a new campaign at first level they'll reach about seventh level after about six months then that campaign will end and when we first got the neighbor like oh my god everyone's quitting we're hemorrhaging clarifiers it's like no people just keep starting over and over again the big question is and we don't know I don't know the answer right now I'll be here to see what everyone else says in the panel is that people would happily play to level 20 if they could just find a dungeon master who's stuck around long enough to get them there that whether it's there especially the audience got a lot younger we see a lot more especially high school and college age players they their schedules change like they just can't commit to something that's gonna be that long I also think that realistically if someone's to tell you hey you should play D&D like oh cool that sounds fun yeah and if you commit to playing it Saturday I mean there was the fourth edition Tomb of Horrors which I actually quite liked and and would still like to run where you could if you wanted to in six to nine months take characters from like fifth level to eighteenth because it literally was like here's the tomb at this level and then you skip you skip you could say here's chapter one of our campaign it goes from third to seventh level and then we're gonna take a break and then we're gonna restart and advance the characters to twelve level and say so what did you guys Empire Strikes Back write what happened between Star Wars Empire Strikes Back you guys tell me right well then in a very short period of time we've gone from - yeah that kind of stuff fits really well with with streaming too because we expect this episodic TV style seasonally cut format of gameplay so you can be like season one was everybody from level 1 to 3 and season 6 is everybody from level 18 to 20 and you can kind of skip the middle bits because as long as you actively choose to do recaps or stop and say like alright this is the beginning of season 6 let's talk about what happened you can you can do that I tend to think of I tend to think of D&D like a bit like listening to an album in that the first three tracks of the album are gonna get the most play it doesn't matter if they're the best doesn't matter if it's the most fun to be levels one two and three that's just the thing people will will do the most and if you want to get to you know when the levee breaks you have to get through four sticks and go in California right like you you you have to get through that unless you skip to it but the question I guess becomes is it worth making people get all the way there is it worth doing all that play or do you think you can have a decent game experience jumping in at level 12 if you've never played D&D before yeah I think if you've never played twelfth is gonna be insane right it's gonna be so much stuff you'd attract we've done I won't say and it's rough putting people in at level three and they're just like yeah I do what I can do what okay yeah yeah we had a lot of guests throughout the last season critical role who had never played the indie before but with the campaign was at level 12 level 15 or 16 and they came on and so it was like trying to help make a character based on their concept that was simple enough and point out like well these are your bread-and-butter abilities just focus on these type of thing and for the most part it was a little confusing it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be but it is a lot to throw at you and especially if you're if you're gonna be playing this ongoing you know your level advancement assumes that you're learning your techniques and their synergies over a period of time to jump six to ten levels right it's it's preppy learning a whole new character and that form a streaming standpoint that can really bogged down and slow down combat even our players who are all actors and by no means the most optimal strategic players in the world you know have played all the way up to level 20 and even they were having a hard time remembering all the things they could do and should be multi classics and you're trying to figure out which might more of a rogue this round I'm more of a paladin what am i doing you know ain't no he's a little unwieldy no one's chat Mercer so no one can be chat we can all aspire to be yeah you mentioned kind of the pacing of encounters and I think that ties in to the levels in terms of what's optimum you ran a campaign like you said from what what did when critical role started streaming up what was the starting level for you guys doom it was around seven or eight I think okay first start so you've done seven two all the way to 1920 in terms of like the pacing of that is it and streaming it is it difficult to always have a fight almost be like a set piece rather than just like hey you're walking on the road here's some goblins or here's an ox monster this is gonna be an interesting discussion yeah Kovalev had a few times I I grew up playing I'm playing Final Fantasy so for me random encounters I thought was part of the role-playing game experience as I played through the years I found that occasionally doing random encounters you know are things that weren't tied to the narrative necessarily could be fun for players I found that the player engagement was much stronger when the when the battle had story implications or was driving the narrative forward and so for our game as you begin to stream it if you look back at the early episodes they were going it was a classic dungeon crawler in the Underdark they would encounter like a group of ogres and things that a lot easier to do at the lower levels higher level creatures and the level abilities that are around there tend to take more time and so you begin to decide as a dungeon master is it more worth it to have the same number of battles before you get to a boss encounter or do you want to just focus on those you know handful of small set-piece battles that feel more epic for the players and in from a streaming standpoint more interesting for the audience as well yeah don't even don't even get me started on the adventuring day I did a poll I did a poll on Twitter and that was kind of a I mean I'm sure Mike remembers this or I just asked my followers how many encounters do you typically get through in an adventuring day and in the tweet I said not a session the between two rests and like 60% of them the answer was one [ __ ] one it's always nothing to do with online play that has nothing to do with an audience that is that is people in general Ike I think 1,700 people respond wasn't like 20 people so what seemed to me a statistically significant number of people responded saying and and by the way no one was getting through like six or seven it was like in the book these is eight I think eight is that aid encountered six to eight that yeah yeah right well encounters in that group degree also what encompassed you know skilled chat like challenges of skill based encounters we're trying to break yeah things that were outside of combat encounters broken down into kind of this amorphous thing but that's also the issue is when you're reading the book for the first time and it says eight encounters a day you assume it means well battle encounters because that advice is in the how to take monsters and building yeah that's that's maybe why people think that yeah yeah but yeah that's definitely like there there has to be some way to address not the action economy but like basically the healing and recovery economy when every battle the players all can go supernova and you know I think we all I have ideas for how to address it I don't know if they're gonna work we'll see yeah it's really interesting because we see people most players don't really get beyond seventh level in some ways you know I could imagine us trying to really radically redesign how high low how high levels work and using that to flow back to how how conceptualize the the account the adventuring day and what that means at one point in fourth edition development we kind of had this idea there's this big argument there's a huge Rao over Encounters versus the day and should everything reset at the end of every fight and I never was a fan of like okay at the end of the fight everything resets because that to me felt like it means every fight is the same volume right there's no change in the dynamic it's always all or nothing like the fight had to either threatened to wipe out the party or it wasn't and there was no middle ground and you had to really work as a Dungeon Master to make the the fights filled that yeah where we ended up with Court of Swords where was a deadly encounter long rest deadly encounter long rest and it was just that for the whole first 50 episodes yeah yeah and so on and what we tried to it so in fourth edition we it kind of it's this idea I sort of half-baked it never really got him implemented but there was this idea of like thinking how do you expand the encounter to be bigger so that if you were like you're in a dungeon level it the encounter is the entire level of the dungeon and is there a way you can give people a framework where the some danger presented by that entire dungeon level like can work out to essentially be kind of like this giant battle so that if the party draws aggro from everything in the level like that can kind of work if they're smart and pick off one thing at a time like that's the smarter way to play like and try to give DMS more flexibility but it never 4/4 reaches very weirds one of those things I'm play tested very well but trying to translate it into a system that other people could run I mean that that's right surgery seems good to me like that's how you beat against the slavers right you just run in a grow all the slavers in the dungeon get them back to the entrance and then just murder them there and then you're done and then you win Gen Con somebody who has played competitive D&D at tournaments and has won that point when you consider that many encounters per adventuring day it's a lot of responsibility on the dungeon master trying me each of those small encounters interesting enough with the players feel like it's still a worthwhile experience otherwise you're just throwing more hit point bags at them just because the book told you to and to make it seem like they're you're expending their resources in a meaningful way and I mean it's already a lot of pressure on the dungeon master to prepare these games for their friends and their players anyway so if there is a way that we can continue going forward to consider minimizing the efforts or at least the pressure on the dungeon master prepare so many unique interesting encounters and they said focus on the narrative bits and they the set-piece battles and have ways that can still expand player resources and still make them feel like it's a it's a challenge to get to these big battles that would be a huge boon I think to everyone playing the game because thing is when you look when I think back to doom playing doom back in the 90s like you know that sort of style of first-person shooter where I have my health and there are a finite number of health packs on this level and if I screw up and use all the health packs but still emit 1% health and still have half the levels monsters running around I screwed up I have to reload yeah I'm done right food yeah so how can you translate that to a tabletop game in a way that and I think it's doable to matter like putting some time into it but I think that might be a path forward where where you're thinking of it is more of a flexible tool rather than thinking of it as like this could be one giant fight or this could be an entire dungeons of balls worth of monsters or you couldn't break this up into like whatever you're traveling from point A to point B and here are the four things you have to deal with right here's the ambush and here's the weird Oracle who might attack you if you you anger her or things like that and so and I actually think at the end of the day that might actually be a system that's a lot easier for especially beginning Dungeon Master's to understand because you're kind of telling them here's your roster like you know fill up your tank with danger and then deploy that danger across your map or whatever it is you've got and now you're good to go yeah there are games that mechanically do that right like I'm thinking of the very short-lived Marvel heroic role-playing game where the game would build up doom cool and you can spend the doom pool to be like normally this is this is an encounter with like 10 Hydra agents but I'm gonna spend two points of my doom pool and it's 10 Hydra agents and I don't know some sentinels because whatever so you had a resource you had a resource as a GM to be able to spend in at the time you needed so if you were like ok this is gonna be an easy encounter it's no big deal we'll like let them go through it I'm gonna keep I'm gonna hold on to my doom pool but as things get higher and you ramp up the thing you're spending your points to buy those things and it wasn't to giving the GM permission to do that stuff it was giving the GM a fuel tank to know how much they had left exactly yeah I was talking about guys man I think that you know one thing I don't know what we were talking about is what is the purpose of having multiple encounters in an adventuring day you know we've talked about and I really like the idea and I think it's kind of natural I think we've seen Matt do it on critical role the notion that a level of a dungeon could be one battle right and and and what he'll do is he'll say this is kind of the the entrance of this beginning middle and end and then that's it that's the level of the dungeon and I like that stuff I think you can simplify it even more and make it more dramatic and I think the players would go for it but why do we have an assumption that there should be multiple encounters in adventuring day and is there a way to make the game conform to our expectation rather than changing our expectations to conform to the game yeah and one of the big barriers we have with fifths specifically to trying to adopt a different paradigm I use that and I'd vent to like this we're gonna synergize our paradigm yeah and not and you meant it like not in the major way either but the child right now we have we have short rest and long rest mechanics so that actually is like a giant like you would we'd have to be aware of that when we're so if we're changing how to build things that is like yeah the warlock right yeah exactly well it's tough back in a short rest there was a game and I'm gonna try this by the way I've worked on this I'm gonna try it for my next campaign so I think people will get to see it succeed or fail or somewhere in between more likely where there was a game which I just literally happened to have sitting next to me that I actually quite liked the Warhammer Fantasy roleplay from Fantasy Flight maybe too many notes here Mozart but it was still like they had this cool thing of the party sheet and my idea of how the party sheet would work was different than their implementation but I like the notion that here are the rounds of combat right and so there's you get this sense that there's a bound on how long a battle can last thank God all right something's gonna happen toward the end that's gonna make it so one game Windsor or the other team loses but also I like that notion that you could have the party sheets say like listen if this is the second encounter in the day then on turn three everybody gets this thing right yeah I know like action points system from fourth edition on the 13 count of the day on the fourth encounter and you would literally have these things marked on the thing like hey hey if week if we press on then that means on the on you know on turn two in the next battle we get to do this cool thing and people would be like yeah and then you would have you have this less less of a sense of well we've been fighting for 18 seconds now we need to rest for 24 hours yeah it's not a good stamina ratio if you I'll see tomorrow in 4th edition I literally watched what the what was said in the players hamburger the DMS guide happened at the table where the players were like guys if we press on we get an action point and I just feel like if I think there are more interesting ways I think there are more flavorful ways to take that same mechanic and the point so each each battle the players like hey should we press on because if we do we get cool thing like that shredder because of what we've had to do for our game a lot of times is I just had to think of consequences for them not pushing oh yeah every once again puts more pressure Dungeon Master you have to have a carrot and stick exactly so if there's a way that implement something like that some sort of benefit to get to the players wanting to continue for that would be tremendous anyway you see you see these kinds of mechanisms represent in a bunch of different ways in varying degrees of success or like sometimes there are systems that are like okay we're gonna count up and every round you get a plus-one everybody gets a plus-one to their attack and yeah yeah and that just feels that kind of thing just feels like okay like by the time you're around six you're killing everything in one hit it's just because we're all bored of this and we're gonna move on it doesn't escalate the fiction it just sorta makes it go away quickly but there certainly needs to be a balance somewhere between the fictional stuff the like if you don't finish this fight in six rounds then you know the the train runs over the goblin princess super pulp that's India yeah that's a classic polish which D&D is built the skeleton of D&D is pulp fantasy it's yeah oh yeah that kind of stuff so yeah perfectly an perfectly perfect Ludo narrative harmony yeah and that was some of the stuff in 1.40 we're talking with this idea like you know how can you structure the encounters they're more interesting as more dramatic we had a lot of ideas built in like these never got implemented but we had concepts like you know the more you cast a spell the better better you get at it during the course of a day right so if I start Ken if I'm a fire mage and I'm channeling fire then I start getting this halo effect that starts building up and so now I from miking access I can't access my higher level stuff until I use my lower level stuff like I know you're not the person who acts - that idea was the coast no no no egos that's a great idea we just didn't have now that was robbed pain so I had a lot of that stuff and I've ever worked with him on it and he had a lot of really funky ideas to recharge that's we call them the recharge mechanics yeah but it just we ran out of runway I mean that's kind of the story of for eating a lot of ways is running out of runway as you're trying to get the plane up in the air so but but it's still something I think about sometimes like you know what the warlock would it be cool to say okay if you read as you reap souls for your master then your masters please so that's when you start yes it would be cool 5yz extensible enough to be able to to survive that kind of I mean we're looking look at the DMS guild right like people are making things that show that they have a clear understanding of how 5e works it's a framework you can build things onto but if you're not aware of the DMS guild if you're not at that level there is still like this kind of vast empty space we're like well why doesn't the game already do this and for me that the thing is getting people from the here's the core books and here's the advance like you're making your own [ __ ] and selling it on the Internet it's that middle space that I want to see the bridge yeah yeah yeah and you know by the way this is literally I'm thinking about this for my players in my next game while we're talking you don't have to solve the game you only have to solve your players so if mike says something like hey wouldn't it be cool if the fire mages stuff gets blah blah blah you don't have to sit there and come up with that's cool how would that work for every class and every specialty just do it for your characters right right ad hoc it as you go right yeah and and the players that will help you they will have they will help you they will love that idea you don't have to solve the whole you don't to solve the players handbook you only have to solve the characters of the table yeah like for Travis's character the new campaign is a warlock and based on these kind of a set piece battle you know smaller encounter numbers we've seen in the previous campaign that was a worry I had and we had this conversation Covell of my place where you know oh I don't want him to feel shafted we had a short rest mechanic not being as effective if this is how many encounters are running on an adventuring day so like I'm toying with a few ideas in the campaign to have like a trade-off where the ability where you can you know use an action to sacrifice hit dice equal to his level to get a spell slot back and ways to kind of you know balance it a little bit just a tailored to dice character I love yeah I like I'll be seeing more cool ways to sacrifice it dies yeah so I'm twenty mechanics there but mostly how it plays out but I think like you said tailoring to the player is an easy way to begin that Trek yeah we're not having to worry about an across-the-board release to a community and hope everybody's happy with it or not you know shooting on you ready for your design yeah just the person at the table yeah and you know that and if they're happy then usually the group will be that comes at the end of the campaign when they sell the rule book right right the fact that people can monetize their campaign right now means we we are in some kind of paradise I mean we've come with hats off to Wizards of coast for doing the kind of valve esque very steam like Dungeon Master's guild I'm super happy that they do these come poll we've come full circle right cuz that's how Dean D was Oh Dean right like like Gary and Dave made the game and then everybody's like thank you Gary thank you Dave here's my better version of your stupid game I call it crunch and it's a dollar for my zine and I'll send it to you from my basement and there was no there was no industry it was just people making a people for Andy yeah yeah and it worked be a vengeance yeah do you think anyway the idea to kind of expand on that a little bit the idea of if you're going to stream a show taking risk like Matt was just describing in terms of adding things or both Matt's were describing adding things to the characters that's only specific to your campaign that might not work for the larger audience but it works for the show do you think that's something that more streams should take into account to make them unique and stand out to other campaigns where it's not just like here's another campaign at level three we're gonna go into this dungeon and fight some colds it's it's here's a wizard that like Colville was saying that you know has fire coming around his head the more he casts fire spells etc said are like should should they try to be unique in that sense I design and design in public is terrifying right look if you if you're like alright let's say say I'm like I have a player and they're like I kind of like I like some of these classes but they I don't like all of them and I would like to play something that's kind of like this but there isn't one of those in the in the game and you was did you like okay cool well I'm gonna do this thing and we're gonna make this class for you we're gonna play it you have to endure every single episode people in the audience being like this class is unbalanced you're an idiot you don't know how to design you don't understand fifth edition why did you do this just play a ranger just play a warlock just play a fight or whatever there you're gonna get that feedback whether you ask for it or not it's like it's like Steam greenlight right this is the like it's not done so every day is a play test and people some people really like watching play test some people love tuning into a thing before it's done without being able to see like what is this class gonna be like when it's finished but you have to accept that mostly you will keep [ __ ] it up people will notice and hate it and it takes work to do that play testing in secret is much safer than playing in front of a thousand people I'm gonna say something I might by the time I'm done with this paragraph I may have talked myself out of it but I think I think that there is something virtuous about running a game in front of people on stream and busting out your own experimental house rules because you're showing everyone this is how it works bro this is it is all about it's all about trying and failing okay so about it's baseball it's not basketball it's about if you if you get a hit one out of every three times a bat you're one of the greatest players that's ever lived right that's its get up and give it a shot I part of me thinks that it is virtuous to try that and if that means listen if those people are complaining at all the whole time they're engaged they're complaining and they're that's that's their level of engagement is and I have people every video I upload somebody goes I really hate the way you you talk so fast and I'm like I'm pretty I just respond I go I'm pretty happy with the way the video in 99% of feedback I never sent of feedback is I would have done it differently phrased as [ __ ] you die correct but that's those people that are kind of shouting out into the into the cave and all you hear is their echo is coming back that those people that's their level of engagement and it's up to you as the person streaming I guess this is we're getting to like streaming advice which by the way I am NOT the expert on I'm only stream like 20 or 30 hours it's it's up to you to figure out how I gonna survive as a human being with you no bleeding on the keyboard in front of people and then being criticized it's up to you to figure out where you draw the line in engaging with your audience what yeah what's it I think I think it's also the audience to you right like I know from my experience this isn't streaming but with panels it shows like Gen Con wherever that there is definitely like a if we were of a panel and tell you the next product we get a billion people to show up if we do a panel and it's like we're gonna give you advice on how to be a good DM we get a bunch of people showing up when you do something it's more like here's like the tech the technical side of game design you get a smaller audience now it's an engaged audience right but it is smaller right I think there are a lot of people so it really depends if the audience is showing up for like I want to watch a cool story and the mechanics start to get in the way like where it is like it is about the class that's not functioning or that's too good yeah there is I have found that the people who care about mechanics really care but it is a subset it's maybe like Twitter side of the people you know I thought about the number of people you might be alienating with your noodley nonsense right because they showed up for the characters in the drama over the course of this discussion I've realized that it might be in the best interest if you are going to stream to just do the most basic thing because more people are gonna be able to relate that because they're playing the most basic thing themselves yeah I mean that's that's that that does sound like good advice to me but I know that for me I can't I can't raise it I'm not gonna curtail my own game designer proclivities sure and I'm gonna be busting stuff out and we're gonna see it fail wise from from a perspective of like marketing your stream as a as a product to be consumed the differentiation between you and what's in the players handbook can be a draw for the audience right like if you if you can say my campaign setting is really different and these are the ways in which it's different or I've changed some classes or we've thrown out alignment we're using this other thing or I'm doing a different XP system there is a subset of the audience who will tune in to be like oh this is really interesting how maybe I can do this maybe this is a different thing that I could implement and keep this it does require that you you have an idea of what that's going to be and are willing to yeah that's true through it as you build it a non-trivial amount of every stream ever has been people arguing about the rules and looking things up right so that's that's that's that's part and parcel of of D&D there's no way around it it can be minimized but if you're gonna be if you're gonna be sitting around argue about the rules anyway isn't it more interesting to be talking about your rules that you made up than it is the ones that everybody already kind of knows yeah well I think I think it's also tootin that not worrying I mean obviously if you if you were if you're relying on the audience size of your stream for your income then this is a different discussion or just how you want to look at it but I know sometimes it is easy just look at well how can I maximize the number of people watching and build from there like in the tabletop role-playing game space that is something that has always been weird to me coming into the industry in the late 90s there was I don't know how many times I've heard people say things like well I was going to design a science-fiction game but people told me that those don't sell so I didn't kind it's like but like you're just like you're like a saw Fringe why you doing this just for fun right like yeah like why do you care right it was a mistake for you to think that anything was gonna sell so do what you want you're saying like a 500 copies versus a thousand like you know and now maybe but it's just one of those things that has always been interesting to me like you know I think there is a culture and role playing games that is really worried about like did you how big was the event at Gen Con like how big was your booth like how many people showed up and it I think it gets this weird it's not commercialism it's almost more like but the prestige of it and you know it's something that I think has hurt the development of role-playing games because we do have to kind understand that like you're gonna get a lot of people to buy a game and just to consume it versus want to understand why it's designed the way it is sure and that it's okay that we don't it doesn't always have to be about maximizing that that number that's yeah that's what's that's not so great about this sort of small pressed game design space is that it at this point doing a game that you only sell a hundred copies of and then you leave it up behind and move on to your next thing isn't going to bankrupt you right like you can run a small Kickstarter you can do the thing you can be like here's my weird game of this one weird thing that this game does it's an experiment some people like it you move on you do another thing the it's not the like you have to work on it for 10 years buy 10,000 copies of it from a printer by the booth of Gen Con sell 100 copies and then just like cry into your beer for the rest of your life we're not in that space anymore like exploited spray and experimentation across the board is so much easier now yeah yeah it's one thing I think that has really held role-playing games back for a long time I think is changing but for ages it was well you know you think of if you wanted to write a novel you just wrote it right and if you wanted to publish a role if you want to make a role-playing game it's like well you've got to write it you've got to get the gen con' booth you've got a print if you have to get the art like the barriers to entry were we're kind of crazy you're right and it's and I think there's still perceptions of those but I thinking that is something that's especially the new audience coming in I think that's really changing I want to go back to something he said when we were talking about rules because I might not ever get a chance to ask this question again how much do you see Merle's it Wizards people asking questions or arguing with rules because of what happened on shows that were streamed is that like an everyday occurrence where something happens like well so-and-so did this on their stream and they're obviously wrong you verify no we actually don't see much of that like I know personally myself I have anyone asked me about hey this happened in the stream know what might be happening and we are a little bit aware of this I might just get asked a question like and we Crawford I definitely know this because they will definitely do like ask mom and ask dad kind of like hey you know so we'll we'll have people like often if they're doing it if they're trying to prove that they're right they don't want us to know it's part of an argument but it is usually the most common cases they will ask Crawford a question I mean yes and then ask the other person and then go well Jeremy said this there are four core rulebooks for DNA now right there's the players handbook there's the monster manual there's the Dungeon Master's guide and there's Jeremy Crawford's Twitter account and that's just that's where all the rules come from yep how much for good or ill expand a little bit how much internally are you guys seeing what happens on other streams or I guess the basis question is do you guys watch streams to see what should be done about the game for future updates or anything like that oh yeah no because we at me we've got our own we run right now and that might be a slate expanding it definitely does because this goes back to when we made v we were really aiming it at new players and the play test was all about hey existing players are we gonna piss you off and luckily with the answer was the opposite yeah this is great but and I think we kind of time to touched on this earlier we are now really starting to understand the culture around the game and I think in a theoretical 6th edition or the next book that looks kind of like you know the rules expansion you would see more stuff that is almost you know in that meta mechanic here's how to make your game function better here's how to think of things in a way that might be clearer and easier and make the game smoother for you as opposed to just like here Mechanics for our ships you know or like here's 20 new prestige whatever pursue special subclasses things like yeah because I think like that that was actually the point which I knew the audience had really changed with when we tried to play test Presley's classes and people overwhelmingly hated them and it was fascinating right coming in from third you like no way right people love these things and overwhelming like and we got so many comments people were just like why are you adding this to the game it makes no sense like I choose my class I choose my race then at some point I choose my subclass then I'm done like why would I then make another class choice yeah it's weird and first of all you figure out what prestige class you're gonna be at a teen level then every time you get a level you're not making any decisions at all because you made them all at first level I mean well first and it's so it was interesting to see that the culture of the game that's why I knew like we had definitely changed things like there was a sea change like because just we saw so little support for the concept and again just a lot of baffled again now people have been with the game since third we're like hey this is great why are you gonna implement it and I think it was like only like 30-something percent positive now keep in mind for us like 50 percent positive is like oh that's that's not good right like we'd have a lot of people most players aren't like hyper analyzing their rules look that sounds cool they just check yes I like it but I mean we we we calibrate them you know for like a hard but the but yeah seeing that but the percentage that low was just I think it's the single worst rated thing we've ever play tested to be a subset of fans and I've seen this that that feel like fifth edition is a step backwards that complexity is good more complexity is better and that any attempt to incorporate new players by reduction of complexity is like a mistake that you're betraying the core foundations of what D D is so by the time we get to like twelfth edition it's gonna be traveler and no one will be able to flip it anymore what can we just jump straight to that that's an interesting point I wonder I wonder if like it's funny because D and D 5 is already it's a pretty complex game like if you don't assume everything about D and Eve you're just like I like playing minecraft it's like this is super crazy complex I wonder if there's not a way to kind of or even reason to introduce a concept of prestige classes back into the game somehow because I definitely love that idea that um you know there's lots of eldritch Knights out there but I'm maybe the only boy this is the thing that I think is interesting about the the DMS guild and the idea generally of having like an SR D or opening your game up to group development is that the first thing that any community will do when you open your game up to being developed is they will ruin it in every way you actively chose not to ruin it when you made you in the first place yeah all those things that you're like this is gonna be a terrible idea let's cut it that'll be the first thing someone in the community will make right but that that's why we do that right so that the core development of the game can continue you can continue to creative directed in the way you want and if people really want perceived classes someone can make the PDF introduces them and they can make X amount of money where X is the number of people that want to buy that but the game itself can retain a like a purity of vision in the sense of like this is still the D&D that that is the core set of the rules I have a question for Matt do you ever when you're working with your players on their characters and you're listening to all the kind of stuff they want to do and you're thinking about how to do it do you ever consciously decide you know what I'm gonna try to find a way to do this just with the players handbook because even though I'm at could come up with some cool thing I don't want to deal with the people watching or do you just say no screw that I'm gonna like 100 let's go this is great no no III generally just one cuz primarily we're still playing the game for ourselves and then everyone's a challenge you know the players enjoyment I think is what will engage an audience more than anything as long as we're happy as players ultimately doesn't matter if you couldn't cocked some crazy what a prestige classes are you know for Liam's guard for Caleb if Liam thinks this is awesome then first of all who cares what the audience things at that point but I will tell me I don't they a whole bunch of them will like it right because Liam is engaged with it and he's excited by it yeah well like for instance the blood hunter I never set out to design anything I'm not a game designer by trade at any means but I we ran a one-shot for Vin Diesel for this one / promo for his witch hunter movie and like can you make him his witch hunter character it's like I guess and I threw something together haphazardly for him and then it was this overwhelming community request of like can you release the rules for whatever he played I'm like you aren't any class the community wants to see easels class I don't have one so I guess I'll cobble something together but I don't want to call it common comments I get in my videos is when I talk about something I do at my table people are like that sounds cool how do you do that yeah I'm like I don't I just told you how I did it that was it that was the whole thing there was no there's not a secret tome where I've got that's you saw the whole thing just you know there's not you you believe in yourself you can do it just make it up as you go you can see like when I started the class it was awful it was I was still learning I was still learning the balance in the end the the design of the game and like every iteration was me releasing it publicly being lambasted and set on fire and going okay I see what I did wrong thank you for the intense feedback but the feedback nevertheless and you know it's just I've learned a lot as I progress and that's how all any of us do you start and you create something that sounds like it's fun and interesting and and unique to your game and then you try it out and it will succeed in some ways it'll fail in others and you've updated and learn from that you know and that's it's a scary thing to throw things out there like you said earlier you know play test thing live like that can be a very scary thing but if it's something you want to do and you're passionate about then I think that's more important than being conscious about the audience because that's what the audience the audience is there because they want to see people engaged there when I see you as a Dungeon Master having this cool idea and get excited and then if the players are excited by it then you want that that's that's victory I'm gonna read this comment from twitch ad it says way to throw Vin Diesel under the bus mat in a battle between Vin Diesel and bus I know who I'm putting my money on so to jump over we're kinda all over the place because there's so much to talk about but I do want to hit on the point of you know experience in how it shapes play and Matt I think you're very and Adam we switched quarter swords to be narrative style but I want to talk on in the aspect of streaming do you both agree that narrative style is the best way or the way that you're playing right now on your streams respectively for D&D in in my in my experience there's there's in in regards to like do you play the game as much like it is written ignoring the fact that you have an audience to cater to there's basically two ways to split it or there's the people who want the game as it is and there's people who want the characters and the game is secondary and if you tried to do a show that was up your primary business source it was a primary source of your income you try to do a show that was just we're playing by the rules we don't care what chat likes or doesn't like we're gonna play as if they weren't here you would not be able to succeed like there are people who are like that but the audience size is not enough to be successful I think that most people tune in to watch the characters do things and to get attached to the characters and the rules are there to add drama and add chaos and move the narrative in different directions but mostly people are there because they like the the characters first and foremost yeah I mean that quart of swords was that experiment for us to be like we're just doing we're just doing the thing and we're only going to play by the rules and it's gonna be hard mode D&D and characters die all the time and we saw like the the feedback was there were some people who are like yes this is great I love it keep playing the indie and hardcore mode but more than two-thirds of the audience were like I'm getting fatigued like I'm getting tired I need to attach to the characters and you can't you can't keep taking them away from me at random like this or I'm gonna stop watching I want Mercer to answer this but we're going to Colville afterwards because his facial expressions are too good not to give an answer works for us now we're talking like mechanics of experience and character advancement yeah yeah just like in terms of narrative style versus combat right I I am it depends on the table really I find experience was very important for a lot of my gaming years when you had players at the table that felt that experience points were a quantitative way of showing that they were doing good it was course they have succeeded yes yeah it's a scoreboard and and also to make sure that there wasn't an unfair unbalance if a player couldn't be there at the table there was a kind of a there was as much of a congealed unit especially when a game started unless your group of friends and you're all like excited to be there and help each other out it wasn't a huge deal but if you had people from different walks of life and different groups coming together to be kind of a shitty thing we'd be like hey how come we're at the same level he's been gone for three weeks it's [ __ ] you know that would come up a lot I find the whole fair it's not fair game was in the air stuff exactly I find that that that is less of an issue the older you get and the more the kind of the community matures a bit as a whole and for me I started our last campaign was experience-based and I have I have I still had this huge excel chart that it's just a nightmarish anomaly over five years of our campaign ripe an individual character experience and like you know who got better bits for character moments and I was keeping track of every campaign and it was just so much bookkeeping for a for a party and a group of friends that I realized didn't care and so with the new campaign I was like can we just do away with the experience points and make it a narrative based level advancement anyway that's an option yes yes okay let's do that and I mean we're trying it out now for the first time and I'm already loving it so I think I think it's a great way to do it but you have to ensure that the table is excited for it and won't consider that a point of contention it's it's really important to remember to the that there's a secondary for you know you and I form an eye talking about streaming games there's a secondary player incentive right like if you're playing at your table you have like the group is having fun and you're getting experience points as like explicit and implicit kind of rewards but there's also the like is the audience digging what we're doing and that in a lot of ways can override like do we care about experience because if if I'm in a campaign and I'm like no I love experience points because they let me know I'm winning at D&D and I'm winning harder and faster than everyone else I'm playing with but if I'm streaming that game that's secondary to am I making my character in a way that people like to watch right am I getting people to view are they tuning in are they telling me like your characters awesome or they making fan are they doing the thing because that's a bigger priority for a stream than like winning D&E so there is there is that additional thing that most people won't get that won't happen in most campaigns mr. king a Kickstarter you're doing a show pretty soon because the king of Kickstarter are you gonna do things that Kickstarter was for us yeah getting studio space so we could stream our next game exactly are you gonna go narrative we gotta go combat you can try to mix it were you well I definitely think we're gonna use milestone XP if that's what you're talking about right yeah I'm old enough yeah I'm old enough that I remember when not only did you get XP for clean monsters you also got XP for gold yeah and when I posted that on Twitter or my subreddit people's many people literally didn't understand what I meant they thought like you spent you spent your gold shop and you just got a thousand XP I mean split with the party and you up and you got the gold pieces there was no so I and that I'm a big believer and I think this may be a philosophical difference between me and a lot of other modern Dungeon Master's is I'm a big believer in if you have six players there's a good chance you have six different motivations why are the why are those people there it's very like running a company all your employees are there for different reasons no two employees are created equal it's up to you is the folk the person behind the screen to understand why is this person here why is this person here my player Lars likes getting XP he's the guy at the end of this like we killed these monsters how much are they worth it's not my place to tell him that is that is a primitive way to think you should be more enlightened you should be caring only about advancing the story this gets back to the whole adventuring day thing I come from an era where you measured your progress I think we talked about this last dream and how many rooms you made it through right but I don't think that way anymore I still have some of that in me I still now think more in terms of of what did we achieve we found something out right we we stopped something from happening all right we may be advanced the narrative somewhat I also so I think that player players it should be okay if the the choose for you is we threw the ring in a Mount Doom we saved the world a plus or I found a lot of gold and just we fought a dragon and got a whole bunch of gold a plus those are both totally valid as far as I'm concerned I also remember playing I played champions I ran a Champions game every week for three years and you only ever got like one experience point in a given session because that's how their XP work and you spent it and after a little while I just stopped giving XP and no one noticed and that's the il-6 that's the el6 style of play right you hit six level in D&D is a very third edition kind of old-school way of playing you hit six level and that's it that's that's Dan lock-in you're locked in at that point and people like that a lot of people like that so there are a lot of options I do plan on using milestone XP and I'll tell you why because I don't I don't got time I did my time in the third edition time I did my time with spreadsheets where I'm like okay this character is it's just crazy if you've never played third edition Craig is third level and Dave is fourth level that means these Craig got more xp for these goals even though they're both in the same but he was lower level than Dave so that means he was fighting tougher tougher goals so he got you had to do all this math and Ferg I don't know man like five or eight years or however long that game lasted I did that every week didn't even think about it it was awful it was literally like we had to bust out the hole it was bad to crowdsource it the players had to all help and we all had our calculators out and stuff like that but we took it for granted we didn't even consider it and I am like I'm too old for that now all of that is about buy-in at the beginning of the campaign because if you don't have that conversation to go with your metaphor from before the you end up with a group where Frodo wants milestone xp for throwing the ring into Mount Doom Sam wants xp for expressing his characters beliefs about Frodo and Boromir wants to know how much XP Sauron is worth but you can have you can have that conversation at the beginning to be like these are the things that you will be rewarded for in play is everybody okay with that and if if Boromir is like no I want xp for every goddamn mark I kill either Boromir needs to get on board or you can be like cool Boromir you get shot to death thanks for playing that's Faramir you're on board yeah Tolkien talks about that session in the making so the yeah I think that there's fewer things that we can do as Dungeon Master's to make our lives happier I make our players happier than set expectations at the beginning and if you tell your players what you're up to ahead of time hey I got this crazy idea they will get excited that you respected them enough to bring them into the process and they will play along with your crazy ideas even if it's not the thing that they were hoping for initially yeah mic hearing all this and kind of I would make maybe it's too much in saying this but with the rise of kind of milestone XP thanks to streaming is it something that you guys will weigh heavily in the next book or next update etc where you put it right next to kind of combat XP or will combat XP kind of always be the the main focus for the rule book as it work it is a really interesting question and I would not be surprised if like in a theoretical 6th edition or even in some update that the sort of quest XP you know like hey if you click if you rescue this guy like you can imagine from the starter set there's the adventure where begins you're you're heading to to town and this guy gets kidnapped get to a rescue em if the bender just said it might even say this I can't remember haven't looked at it in a while like okay if the players rescue the guy and escape the caves they are now second level like just that straightforward but you know it's funny hearing all this I'm kind of like having said contrarian note rising give me like my next campaign would I want to run I had this entire thing not figured out I want to run a campaign where it's like okay every week you guys get like two to four hours to play and every week the dungeon levels up so if you guys don't get enough stuff done to level up your characters you're just hosed you're gonna fall of it every game everyone yeah yeah I just do that right every game every game I run is the clock is always ticking and if the players don't proactively try to stop the bad guys that means those bad guys are leveling up and getting better yeah so I love I love that as a table focused thing like I think people love darkest dungeon they love torchbearer yeah there are games that are like be good or die right and you it goes back while we're talking before about player skill like you get better at clearing the dungeon faster getting further on any given session you know pushing one or two more rooms before you go back to town but speaking from experience I don't know that that for us like that doesn't work for a stream yeah yeah because the let's do it again next week the audience starts to suffer yeah the audience starts to suffer when they fail because it I think that people want that to be the consequence they want it to be brutal they want it to be like if you die you die and everything is gritty and horrible but they forget they forget is it like cool alright well you're gonna be first level six or seven times while you learn this no like oh this room again more kobolds it's like okay but that's the structure of play so it's yeah I think it can be really really fun for sure the idea of like fronts or clocks advancing as you play but but if you're trying to make it an art form to be consumed by non players you you have to be very careful about how to pace that yeah I will say that we're in reference to the earlier stuff about the difference between the player who wants XP for monsters and the player who wants to throw the ring in the Mount Doom I think you can make Boromir happy if at the end of that session you say okay you guys killed all the goblins so you get this extra quest XP right and that way he feels like oh great actually does does he really need to keep track of every individual goblin I bet not I bet he would be happy with that little like you did you you didn't let any goblins get away here yeah the solution the solution we found to that problem in court of swords was turning milestones over to the players so the players come up with goals for their character they say I want to kill all the goblins doesn't want to steal the ring from Frodo and I want to go back to my home a hero right and the GM assigns like I will assign a value to those be like all right so killing all the goblins probably a medium goal still ring from Frodo is gonna be hard and ever returning home at all is gonna be deadly but if you pull it off you get a bunch of experience instead of the the GM a screwing or obfuscating those goals and being like oh you did a goal check you just turn it over to the players and the players will tell you what they want to do so that in the next in the next session you can yeah in the next session I can build I can say like if JPS character wants to learn about a certain NPC I know that's a flag that JP is waving saying please include this NPC more so that I can interact with them that's interesting because I my I put put a big doctor in front of my players I think its bits online somewhere and said hey these are the campaigns I'm interested in running next what do you guys want to play and they picked the black company game they picked the mercenary company game and I told them explicitly the hook in order to enjoy this you're gonna have to want you have to buy into the idea that you care about fulfilling the contract in those days the black company was in service - right and that notion that we do what we say we will do no matter what our team literally signs a contract to do that well there is your milestone stuff okay guys this is you're gonna if you complete this you're gonna get this feat you're gonna get this that near thing you're gonna get these mechanical and narrative rewards and tie it all into the characters and the team and the decisions they make of players because then when they look at a given contract they're gonna be like there are good rewards here but we're all gonna die all right right and that's a great narrative great player choice dramatic player agency all that good stuff yeah I'm sure the final topic and Walt spend too much time on this but the idea of you know skills in a game fluidity element that is to expand on that better players are just gonna play faster and it's more fun to watch because they're not fumbling on their rules and I think we've experienced this on court of swords Matt you're kind of going through this right now with everyone playing new characters for the first time and seeing how those skills work is it does it but who've someone who's going to stream their game to know their character inside and out or is it better to learn alongside with the audience so that the audience also knows what's available like where do you guys sit on that I I personally feel it depends on the type of audience you're trying to draw in because I mean most of my players the last campaign was their first time playing role-playing game ever and they we messed up rules all the time you know as much as you know keepeth got [ __ ] for you know not keeping track of all the druid spells and all druid forms at all times grog who is a barbarian forgot his extra rage damage often you know like it sometimes happens when you're caught up in the moment you forget things and some people would complain and be frustrated and angry that there are suboptimal players but we've got a larger response people saying it made me feel better to know that even on this level you can make mistakes and it's okay or I've done that too and it helped and though and acknowledging that we were forgetting things are that we were making mistakes help them remember those rules for their own game better so I don't know it can it can depend if you really want to draw a really hardcore audience that loves watching optimal tactical everyone's great player gameplay that could be a very important focus for you for our particular stream in our game we're more narrative focused we're more we don't wanna spend too much time reading through a rulebook remember exactly how something works and if it's taking a while we'll just make a snap decision based on what makes sense in the moment and move forward right so I think it really depends on the type of audience you're trying to draw in what type of viewer you're trying to appease and what kind of thing is fun for your players you know if your players really enjoy being super tactical then definitely cater to that but if they're more interested in character dynamics and being silly and getting in bar fights and lighting things on fire then maybe it's not something you need to focus on too much right koval you were shaking your head as I said the question which where do you fall on that I mean I'm I'm on the record as saying it is and I believe this very strongly and of course because I believe it very strongly I immediately start thinking of exceptions the it is the players job to know their [ __ ] sure yeah there is no virtue and ignorance however people are people and there is there is definitely a virtue in presenting the game as being a thing that human beings do and human beings screw up all the time and in fact I don't even really I said this about Matt I was on the record I went on the critical role subreddit and I was like listen y'all because people were giving Matt I don't even remember what it was about but I was like I watched that whole thing happened live and I don't think anything that did was a mistake because not forgetting a rule is not a missed the only mistake is if Matt thinks oh I knew how that works I screwed it up that's a mistake and only Matt knows what forgetting a rule is just a thing that happens misinterpreting something is a it's it's the game is too complex Friday this is item I was one of the designers on the dude and collectible card game it was impossible to hold that entire game in your head at once period no one could do it right so you were always gonna have to be looking up the rules and misinterpreting things that was a human thing to do so the notion that maybe maybe it's maybe it's okay which is just a hypothetical I realized that the notion that maybe it's a good thing for players to be kind of tabula rasa and figure things out as they go because then the audience is learning with them I think it's the players job to know their [ __ ] and they are it's it's it's just respect for the other players it's your turn what are you gonna do I'm gonna cast the spell okay do you know what that spell does no what right that's right that's that's now that is disrespecting the other people the table but the same token happens all the time isn't really anything you can do about it other than just be mindful that's all mindfulness and having empathy with the players and realizing nobody's perfect and and thank God I think there it should be stated that the only people that can be somewhat upset might be a harsh word but upset that the player doesn't remember their stuff is the people at the table people watching it don't [ __ ] hound that person for not knowing that's the worst thing in the world it's really bad yeah if you want if you want something that doesn't have moments like that go watch all of Netflix sure yeah but you if what you want is you want to see people playing D&D then that means what you want is you want to see people for getting rules and misinterpreting things yeah because that is it is built into the nature of this is a really really I remember when Wizards of the coast had incredibly ambitious plans for express expanding the category and there was gonna be that and in fact I think Mike will correct me the most successful world playing game in history is the Pokemon jr. adventure game they sold like 6 million units like some right and they had broken down they have broken down they have hired a psychologist child psychologist to understand at what age do kids understand the different levels of role-playing games because we want to make a game for six-year-olds well ok six-year-olds don't understand character permanence or they do understand character per minutes but they don't understand the polyhedral will make a game for them but guess what not the Pokemon jr. adventure game it's up at the other end of the chart it is the most complex game for the oldest gamers if that's what you want to watch then you're watching a whole bunch of people sitting around failing to read the last sentence of the spell it explained everything and would have saved us from arguing for the last happening yeah I mean I think there's a difference between like I absolutely agree that if you come to the table in the first session and you don't know how to play your character it's everyone's responsibility to kind of like help you get there right and if 10 episodes later you're still forgetting the same rules like fix fix your [ __ ] yeah it's funny once but like get it under control you'll get to a point where no matter how much skill all the players have D&D exists in the contextual intersection of rules and that's where it gets complicated because you'll stop having people feedback about you forgot the rule or you you did it wrong and more like you did it in a contextual way that I wouldn't have or I interpret these things intersecting and that's when people start screaming Crawford right because they're like we need we need rules as intended not rules as written anymore and I think you'll never get out of that ever like that no no group that was passed at that place in fact I referred I have a third term that I use and that's the rules as played the thing that happens at the table and to me that's really the only thing that matters is the thing that's happening at the table and happily I've cultivated a team of players that feel the same way so we talk about what we think is reasonable we don't talk about what we think Jeremy Crawford intended and when we all agree on what what makes sense and if they perceive me as being primarily worried about what makes sense based on the accumulation the sociological accumulation of decisions we've been making all the way right and that shared that shared communal understanding of what we all tend to agree on makes sense and is fair then then all the players are happy and that's what matters is the rules as play not necessarily the rules as written or even as intended I've gotten to a point where I don't care what the rules is intended were because if you didn't write a rule that I can interpret here's the thing this is dream matter completely agree rules as intended rules as written if you as a dungeon master screw up guess what you you can't go get Jeremy Crawford Mike Merle's and say could you come to my table and explain how it's really your fault no it's on you it's on you so you better own it you better own that stuff and you better say out of the gate it's my game not Mike Moses game right yeah because he's not there to defend the decisions that were made in design or that you made you are and so you might as well just say listen is my game we're gonna work it out yeah yeah I will say also carrying into the to the streaming element to there is a very real anxiety that comes from knowing that every decision you make in the game is going to be picked apart by an audience oh yeah that's why for that version and and it's and it's it's real for the players on all scales and I've talked with many people in many different role playing game streams too you can make a mistake once and then get a day lusion people letting you know you made a mistake that then gets in your head is the next time you play you're so worried about not making that mistake drink another mistake yeah that's two reasons the audience is coming on you and it's just this kind of this mounting thing that even as you tried to ignore it it's still present and you know we're trying to work through as we go forward to because it's it's led does a lot of like negative feedback in some elements and some players have been down on themselves about it but it's just unfortunately part of the nature of putting something in publics it's is you have to go that's part of it when they're criticizing your friends that's the thing that kills you know I love it you're not giving me [ __ ] you it kills you to do when they are criticizing your friends I'll tell you this I feel as though this is a ridiculous thing to say but I feel as though there is a technological solution to this I think if there was a low latency streaming service if I could just turn to chat and go hey how does this work oh yeah right we do that sometimes right yeah if that were possible instead of having to wait 14 seconds basically right second yeah I would love the idea to crowdsource a lot of this stuff because the the the crowd is wise yeah well watching know the rules if I could just literally say how does this work and just wait the living index great you can't do that you have to sit there and wait and that's in terminal from a stream from a stream your perspective and from a stream where we have chat up and available because it's all like we don't have a studio we're doing it on our on our computers chat our chat knows that if they if we've messed up a rule or they have an alternate interpretation of a rule they can give us a page number because without a page number I'm not even gonna look at it you can give us a page number but they have to know that whatever they are trying to help us fix will not be applied now it's not for today you're like just case you never want to screw it up again here's the actual rule but for today we're done it's it's in the it's in stone everyone's experience with this will be different but my personal experience in wargaming is that coming to wargaming from role playing but I was raised on role playing and then gotten to wargaming in the 90s I discovered that what we did at the table was unusual we argued all the time about everything and the wargaming all the people I was playing with was like well you think it works this way I think we're just like let's roll a die and see and that'll be what decides it and we'll look it up after the game because you know we're at a game store time is precious and there all these pressures here at this tournament here at this game convention I was like this is crazy these guys these guys have this stuff work that didn't mean people didn't argue about stuff they did but that notion of like figure it out after this thing is this this session let's just roll a die and see who believes what and move on if there's not a judge nearby I was like wow that's great and so that became a big part of my DMing style was all like look I'm gonna make this ruling now but just be aware that I'm gonna go look it up afterwards and it may change and/or you know I'm an error in favor of the player now because I don't know the answer and I don't have time to look it up but I will figure it out afterwards just be aware that your guess is it may change okay so it's so hard when the its you have to make a call that's not in favor of the player or the GM but in favor of like what seems to be the most narrative ly interesting thing in the moment right like there are moments where it's like okay well you you've made this move and you rolled and you failed and now your character is dead yeah there is some debate about that because the stakes are so high and then having to roll that back can be very deflating right where you kind of want to lean into like okay the most interesting thing to have happen here is you died so we're gonna stick with that and there's there is a stakes question there I seem to recall mr. Mercer in the final battle with Vecna someone did something and you went down a road and then they found out that's not how it worked and you were like I'm sorry man you should have ever thought your stuff worked I don't do you remember that am I am I remember this specific moment that's happened a few times and they came to a point when the stakes are super high like for instance the first time they encountered a vecna there was there was a disintegrate spell that was supposed to disintegrate a character and I began describing like the moment of them like just turning to ash and dust this might be when I was whimpering yeah and they were like oh wait no this this actually would have circumvented it and so I went and that is the vision you had right before you have suddenly shot to reality and dodge just in time so that's very clever I was really angry once at a player because of that and I was like I sympathize with you so much right now because you know like actually this happens all the time the the tension that you're trying to build is a group of people telling a story versus the game's mechanics occasionally butting in I think it happens to everybody we had a situation in court of stories where I I described the the during the short rest when the creators had a nap and I was like you you wake from a dream of like your home city you know drowning and everyone dying in this cataclysmic thing another player chimed in was like also everybody gets sixteen hit points I was like yes okay like that's true also that happens but like we were having a moment here so you know and that's that's the group you you have to you have to build those things generally by the rule that there's a very small kind of amorphous time window to retcon any events that have just taken place yeah if they managed to catch me in a rules change you know within a very short period of time and I can narrative lis roll it back a bit and still like keep the story flowing then I may allow it if and again since you're talking about they all of a sudden remember something that would have changed it a minute and a half two minutes ago we've already moved on to two different other player turns didn't know it that one's your responsibility to recall that and we're moving forward with how it played out I'm sorry I think the phrase my friends and I use is friendly game this is a friendly game and the answer is well has anyone else gone and thing else happened in the game that there's a die roll or a player choice because if no if all this happen is narrative repercussions and we can rewind those but the branching tree of how did this how would this have happened the flowchart week that that we're not going to spend our time undoing people's actions and exactly yeah yeah the final thing I want to ask and this is purely for Mike I will ask the other three of you how you use it but the [ __ ] is information for the most possible but yeah those things where it's exact like we were trying to kind of like mess with how people play the game and it's why we even say the dmg like oh you don't have to use this we don't want it right but it is like the single most well here's the thing I think we put them in because we thought okay we have these tables for your background you know your your bond your trait your flaw and here's here's the thing you get for using those and I think what we've generally seen is people use them without needing the mechanical room board that yeah that they generally like oh cool I'm not my character is being hunted by bounty hunters and I've betrayed this person and okay that's cool like I just want to play that like that having that as any characters its own reward I don't then need inspiration to get me to keep actually doing that because in a way it's probably kind of runs counter to a lot of our design where we're like hey we want to really think of the audience this game is building we probably don't want an audience where people have to be like hey need to like portray a fun character you need to really keep getting the canonical rewards like I get like that why you'd want to do that but I think for D&D we didn't really need to do that so I think most groups just they read it they just forget to use it I don't think I've ever hadn't seen and and all the D&D I've played and slash watched I've never seen a player say hey can I get inspiration for that yeah yeah because the point stands yeah yeah I've had it happen but usually it's just to give me [ __ ] I mean I believe mechanically in the idea of inspiration I believe in the idea of rewarding the players for doing things that are in character the problem and I think I don't know if I speak for everybody but the problem I have is I have no idea what the hell's going on with your background man like I got six players I got C players and that's three different it's all bond and a flaw and that kind of stuff and what I've no time for that [ __ ] I mean I mean it makes me feel it often makes me feel like if I were a better Dungeon Master I would know those things but you can only beat yourself up over that something so much before you got them like move on but what I'm what I what I discovered in prepping from the next game was and this is probably unique to my game is that I don't this to sound like as a plug the next name I apologize the the players because they're members of a mercenary company they have ranks or job titles like there's a standard-bearer and they're gonna get and there's more of those than there are players and so there's gonna be some left over and the players are gonna choose and I'm gonna know which ones they choose and I designed mechanics for them and so if it's sort of like I'm complicit in their backstory so I'm gonna know you're the standard-bearer if you do something that is part of that kind of title and is in line with your character here's inspiration and it's not gonna be so much about me remembering these somewhat obscure decisions you made six months ago it's gonna be a big part of your character yeah I when we first started streaming the game II moved over to fifth edition from from Pathfinder inspiration was something we were trying to incorporate because it was we just learned the rules and it was in the rule book like cool and the first few episodes you watch the caves and you'll get inspiration but we also confused it with Bartok inspiration which was a bard so instead of being advantage we may not like it these sticks you had to roll and then it then it just come to the point I was like well I feel like the bard should be the one who's gonna be inspiration and I found that in to still reward those moments of character intrigue instead of just giving them inspiration we would I would adjust DC's on certain challenges that were in front of them and if they succeeded or they were being really cool about a moment I would lower the DC in my head for what they wanted to accomplish they really messed up I'd raised the DC and so yeah it was just it was a cool idea that narrative leaf or the way we were playing even when we tried to utilize it eventually just like a like a vestigial twin it just kind of fell off you know it didn't yeah didn't find necessity in our game and went away I think it's somebody common if you want to do a little gamey archeology on fifth you can tell the mechanics we weren't sure about by the number of other mechanics that lean on them so there's there are very few if any things that use hit dice because we weren't really sure at the end of the day people really want to use well and now I'd be something where we would delve more into inspirations another good example of there is nothing in the game that requires you to use it like you can just totally forget to use it and everything else functions fine I find the trouble with inspiration is that I just want to give it out all the time because as written I'm like you open your mouth good good [ __ ] job like is there a group like you you talk to your character's voice or you like you did you did a thing that is above just like being yourself pretending to be the character I like I wonder if there are groups where people need that like I don't know what do I do and you're like you'll get inspiration if you like talking a funny voice certainly kind of like never been a problem with not knowing when to give it out it's just being like I guess you have everybody have inspiration have it again no you already have it have another one like it III see the useful carrot for groups that have want to engage or are more mechanically focused and like more tactical exact you know combat censured players and you want to get them more invested in the story and their characters you know role-playing elements it is a carrot you can dangle to give them an option to do so and I see that that can be important with some groups yes they finally something but in a theoretical space yeah I mean I was just gonna say that as a person who likes to win at Dungeons and Dragons like I like to get XP I like to beat encounters I like to be challenged by the DM and do the thing every time every time I get into that situation I'm like cool well before I make this role how do I get inspiration right how can I charge up and then dive into that thing because if I go into an important role without inspiration I [ __ ] up and the way to get inspiration is to just do a little thing where I mean character and for me that's like it's tough because then it becomes looking at the GM like was that enough you want more you want me to do some more [ __ ] Shakespearean worship all right here we go I'm not trying to open the door Shakespearean worship yeah I'm not I'm not trying to open the door till you give me that inspiration I think it's tricky because definitely you don't want to I mean this is on a group a group basis but you don't want to imply that there is a virtue to speaking character or virtue to role play because of the players that aren't huge didn't that feel like wait why is that and I've seen that happen in my game although that wasn't probably when we were younger is that players who were rewarded by the DM for role playing there was definitely the players who just weren't interested in talking in character and doing that kind stuff but we're still having fun and still contributing they've they got resentful and I one of the things I felt like I learned as I did this was again players are there for different reasons and so in general I think that inspiration can work in its the it's rewarding people for doing something cool as opposed to punishing them for not doing it right which is always good design but yeah I think it be careful that you're not ending up like just always showering those one or two players with inspiration because they're playing the way you wished everybody played but yes you should but that's not that's not it should be okay two people play differently the fundamental problem with it is that it's it's supremely Fiat based it's like did you amuse the GM for a second cards against humanity' yeah yes thank you most so here you win yeah yeah so it's I mean it's it's very tough there are systems that I think allow for rewarding players playing their characters in a meaningful way I think there are definitely reward systems that plug in in a in a way but I've always felt like like you know like what Matt was saying that it feels vestigial it's like well you're all role playing all the time so everybody just has advantage all the time you may have Lenny joke here you go have some inspiration yeah yeah it's a dog treat RP here you go buddy yeah I just feels weird well last time I did this was was October and you guys were just getting ready to release Santa thar Mike and now we're here in February and you guys are getting ready to release another book is that first off what's the new book and then I want to ask is that the the normal schedule of releasing things because so the yeah the book is a morning kittens to mofos it's a book it's a combination it's a bit like bulldoze guide monsters and that it's a combination of a bestiary so lots of new creatures mainly creatures above CR 10 so really going for more powerful creatures so it's I think it's a half the creatures are above challenge ten and half are below and then the front half of the book goes into the lore of things like the blood war the war between the elves in the drow the sort of like cosmic conflicts of D&D and Morden cannons not know it's on them see mourning canes basic stick is he believes that every big conflict has to be held in careful balance so that no one powerful group overruns the the cosmos of dandy and so now as far as whether surprise regular schedule we're we're kind of commitment events yeah no it is actually it's a bit of a change usually this time of year we're doing an adventure but I think one of the things we want to do is we don't want to become completely chaotic but we also don't want to become too predictable so we do yeah we want to become we want to keep people on not you know it's a it's a fine line to walk but we want to be always surprising but not so surprising that it doesn't make sense so I wouldn't be surprised if you see that we mess around our schedule some more gamers especially because gamers are definitely pattern forming creatures they want to find the template and then apply it alright so we are very much not adhering some templates I am myself people at work tell me I'm very chaotic so I guess I just had that's just what and I'm just owning it that's just what I am so the so I would not try to think that just because we did something one year that that's the correct plan for the next year we are we're always evolving so so we'll see what we do next year it should be interesting so I have smart reacting to what people are doing yeah that's a lot of it - yeah yeah I'm gonna pry there if you had your way tomorrow you can make a new book appear out of thin air what's in it I got a prize out as your lawyer no I know exactly what I want cuz I've been I've been messing around this myself I would just really I don't remember the fourth edition book dungeon delve oh god I would love to do that book 4/5 it basically like well I mean keep in mind there's nothing in that book that a third party couldn't do and put it on the damn skill exactly so there so a but but that would be oh yeah I love that book that book is so useful I also like that you know the book of challenges from 3rd edition yeah similar thing yeah yeah but if you're not if you if you haven't seen those books basically a dungeon delve had 20 short adventures in it they're all just quick little dungeons you could run in an evening and what was great about it was and I did there's a ton of time during the the fourth edition era we would just a little you know weird there's five of us here let's play some D and E so just get on the character builder make v little characters and the dam would pull out the fifth level Dell then we would just play there was one for each level that was the thing is yeah we're level you rat or whatever you want to play out tonight 12th level that's fine there's a twelfth whole dungeon delve yeah it was great yeah so yeah you heard of here first of the next expansion for everyone here what do you guys want Wizards to make for the next book what would you guys want to expend be it a new it's a monster manual be it items be it player advancement be it how to stream D&D whatever you want I want to be I just want to be surprised look I just I don't I don't want to be able to predict like that that's the thing for me like I've been playing D&D for 25 years now and I have seen lots of D and E supplements come and go I've made a dungeon crawl role-playing game I would way rather that the professionals at Wizards of the coast released a book and I was like huh I would not have expected that instead of like a thing that I'm like yeah good I'm glad that that's because anything that I want badly enough to expect someone else to design I should stop being lazy and designer myself so instead I would I would like to be Steve Jobs didn't be like you didn't know you want this you want this now and be like oh you know what you're right I do want that to make an iPhone Mike get on that yes I er Joanie Ives it'll be fine he's cheating he's not doing anything right now Mercer Colville you guys got an answer oh man I mean just for personal preference I would love to see some other settings open up classic settings revisited I love Forgotten Realms don't get me wrong another huge fan of what you guys have done with it but I mean I adore Planescape I want to see more cut you know more plain interaction overlapping I want to see signal I want to see in any way even when Perkins brought it in to the recent game I'm like oh yes more of that please you know sent that made me excited so more more other settings dark Sun things that the show players that not every D&D world has to be Forgotten Realms because they're a lot people are coming to the game now and are watching all the streams that you guys are doing on there for the most part a lot of it is just Forgotten Realms and that's really cool and I notice I try to keep it chords a good way to introduce them to that but I think it also be a cool time to start showing people that there are many different ways that you can build a world around this system that have very vastly different thematic elements and high magic low magic you know I'd like to see some more than its it's the it's the cool thing I agree completely like I love all of those kind of like grid settings but I'm having a super strange experience running tomb where like I grew up on the very pulpy like RA Salvatore a Drizzt like I know I've gone back and tried to read it now and not enjoyed it as much as I did when I was 9 but playing - okay playing to annihilation to me like it's our December I'm so excited like being able to tap back into that that like preteen excitement about a setting that feels so like like visceral and real to me has been very strange because I'm a super cynical dude I'm just like mmm Forgotten Realms that's for dorks but I'm loving I'm loving it so much and it's it's super cool to think that other people will have that experience as their settings might be like revived I was happy to see fourth edition was doing dark Sun I know other people were I loved I played on my friend Jordan ran the dark Sun game and I got to play a Defiler warlock and it was one of my favorite characters of all time I love dark Sun yeah Kovu dark so soon I mean they can't say strongholds and fall know that I did the Adam Coble thing I'm making the book that I wish yeah that's the beauty of the idea okay so I've got to have a stock answer that I use when people have asked me this and I don't wanna cheat and give people something they've heard before so I'm gonna give two answers one is the stock answer is I would like to see wizard the coast Mike clever your cover your ears I think they've done a bad job with leveraging the power of their adventures although it may just be that I don't know the adventure is well enough I have bought all of them and read all them but I haven't run any of them yet so it could be wrong but I would like to see for instance the big city campaign here its water deep the source book for water deep and it's also the campaign that shows you how D&D can be an exclusively urban game right okay great that's that adventure that's 2018-2019 is the heck scroll game oh dude tomb is the tomb is that you have to lay it's zoom is so good and it it brings back all of that like hex by hex what is it raining today that matters like navigating rations understand the principle though right is that like each each adventure should be showing people that D&D and to a tomb really doesn't do that that DD can be very different than the things we've seen before so that's one answer but the other answer is I really really like to dragonomicon right and that was a great that was a great example of like anybody could have made this book there was nothing in the dragonomicon that a third party company could've done but nobody would have done it as well as was as the coast it doesn't have to be the dragonomicon but something like that where you pick a pick this hallmark of D&D dragons and you just do a whole book on them and get new player options and new dungeon master options and it seems really boutique right it seems ultra specific but the game it's got dungeon dragons in the name of the game right is something that I think a lot of people would like to see doesn't like I said doesn't have to be dragons but that the quality of design and writing and production that book I was a big fan of so yeah something like that alright got 2018-2019 planned for you let us know when you get to 2020 nice you got it alright that's gonna do it for the show we went a little bit over time so I appreciate everyone allowing us to do that here on the panel let's do some shout outs though to wrap everything up Adam model why don't we start with you and then the others can you can lead by example here yeah sounds good yeah so I'm Adam Koval you can find me on twitch twitch TV slash Adam Coble or on Twitter that's gonna go says JP mentioned the top of the show I am the co-creator of award-winning tabletop role-playing game dungeon world and you can find me running role-playing games right here on ma JP and over at twitch.tv slash roll20 app where I'm currently running through tomb of annihilation and I didn't know I was gonna love it I thought I was gonna hate it but it's really really fun so if you want to see a hex crawl and and like like the kind of starter was saying definitely check that out all my schedule stuff can be found over on on Twitter so that's me what we're gonna ask Covell be I don't you know I'm I I'm not good at that I'm not I'm not important yeah be rabid kickstarter.com the Kickstarter thing is I don't the Kickstarter is doing fine this is okay it doesn't need it doesn't need to be it's it's we're gonna do all the things we said we're gonna set out to do you know how about how about go to comiXology and check out the critical role comic because that is something I am intensely proud of it's something that is some of my favorite writing that I've ever done and it's something that I've collaborated with mr. Mercer on so the it's and it's just a blast we got two issues to go and I people accused me of Scanlon being my favorite character but I gave grog with the most epic moment in the whole comic so stay tuned nice nice some teasers I like it mr. Mercer some shoutouts yeah you can find me Thursdays at 7 p.m. Pacific on geek and sundry's twitch did dungeon mastering for our show critical role check out the comics that are amazing I'm Koval is been writing it's been a lot of fun to work on that I think that's that's but I don't I'm bad at this too what what game this week are you voice acting in what no question if you're if you've been playing monster hunter world you can hear me then as the field team leader and the hunt I'm so you'll be really annoyed with me Mike morals do some shoutouts please alright so yeah you can find me I'm on Twitter and Mike Murrells just dolls both words squish together and I'm also I have the Mike morels happy fun hour 1 p.m. Pacific at a twitch.tv slash D nd the game I gave you my own little show so I spend an hour a week building a new subclass for different classes in D&D and so that's we're starting maybe a little edge I get the monster to magic item in spells but a lot of folks on my summer and have watched that and they speak very highly of it so I encourage people check that yeah it's also yeah I will say go watch it it's great what time is it on one more time just so everyone hears it is Tuesdays 1 p.m. Pacific time ok that's for Eastern I think yep never math on stream that's rule number one that's gonna do it though for this round table thinks I want so much for watching thank you guys for joining us here on this Sunday afternoon / evening and we will see you guys potentially next time we're out yeah

Channel: itmeJP

Views: 188,663

Rating: 4.9365215 out of 5

Keywords: matthew mercer, mercer, critical role, matthew colville, colville, mike mearls, mearls, skinnyghost, adam koebel, 5th edition, 5E, D&D, Dungeons & Dragons, roundtable, discussion

Id: pFbCxuvknWM

Length: 142min 1sec (8521 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Shifted7]

I love hearing Mearls’ insights on 5th edition. The “archeology” (as he called it) of it is so fascinating. Big yes from me on the idea of an annotated rulebook with “meta” notes from the designers.

Really interesting discussion about hit dice as well: like Colville I see a lot of space for expanding what players can do with hit dice. It makes a ton of sense that Mearls called hit dice out as something WotC was not as confident about and avoided tying to other mechanics. I hope that now they’ve seen that they work and people get it, they will expand into those other mechanics (Downtime? Travel? Exhaustion?)

And the idea of having players set their own goals for gaining experience is super cool. I wanted to like milestone xp, but whenever I play with it in a game it always feels arbitrary, which I now realize is because the players have so little control of it. Giving some of that control back without having to bust out the spreadsheet is great.

Really good episode. LET MIKE TALK!

[u/AeoSC]

I think this roundtable went loads better than the last one. Looks like they learned some from the pilot. Hope there are more, maybe with different faces.

[u/linuxphoney]

the conversation about character death is really excellent. Some great ideas thrown around here.

[u/Kipex]

Glad to see JP take the host role. This time the whole thing felt more natural and lots of great discussion all around.

Cool ideas surrounding the daily encounters and how to possibly go about encouraging players to advance further during a day - halo of fire and whatnot daily progression. The lack of uses for hit dice was also a good thought-provoking point. Plenty of possible ideas to try in your own games.

Hope to see another one after Tome of Foes is out and settled in, even if it's not directly on that topic.

[u/sarge1016]

Does anyone else feel like Adam cuts people off a bit too much? Not trying to hate on him specifically or anything, this is definitely a cool thing they are doing, but I find myself getting a bit annoyed when Mike Mearls is in the middle of explaining something and then he gets interrupted. I just wish people on these types of talkshow things would be more cognizant when others are speaking and let them finish their thoughts.

[u/TomFotz]

Good stuff! I missed it last night. Turns out I was busy watching Matt's uploaded stream on Birthright, which I our group might try and wiggle into our Microscope, world-building session zero(s).

I was a bit disappointed (mainly impatient) that I couldn't instantly watch the twitch clip without a subscription to itmeJP. In that regard, thank you Matt for keeping all your content free and not behind a paywall! Makes it very easy to support the many projects underway.

Been looking forward to this round-table!

[u/[deleted]]

I’m here for the Triple Ms.

Adam is kind of like a sorbet pallet-cleanser at a fancy restaurant. Yeah, it’s super out their and unique, but it’s really just there to make the awesome main course look even better.