Weekly Dungeon Delve Episode 0

The main ideas from this conversation are: - The hosts are preparing to record an episode of their podcast, Weekly Dungeon Delve. - They discuss the format and introduce themselves. - They talk about their experiences playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) and being dungeon masters (DMs). - They explain what D&D is and describe the gameplay mechanics. - They highlight the importance of following the rules and consulting the DM for actions. - They discuss the storytelling and improvisational aspects of D&D. - They mention the fun moments and anecdotes that can arise during gameplay. - They briefly touch on the different editions of D&D and the role of the DM. All right, so now it's reporting. So, is it one or two of these for me? I think two. I'm not 100% certain. I mean, mine's good now, I think. Yeah, I think I'm two, but this is good for me. This will work. Pull up the Google Doc and then we can get rock and roll. Do you have an intro in mind or anything? Anything particularly particular you'd like to... Nah, didn't quite think that far ahead. Okay. Just, you know, good old welcome, welcome. Then I'm...why is that? This is where it holds it up. It keeps it balanced from falling over. Well, yeah, I just didn't know why it was so textured. Anyway, I'm ready to go if you are. Welcome to the Weekly Dungeon Delve. This is Theo. Are you next to me? I'm going to be interviewing him. Do we have something? Hey, we can do whatever you need to do. I saw a cool editing trick where if you decide to cut like this, you want to make a sharp sound so you know where to look. Yeah, you told me about that a while back. I kind of forgot. Nah, it's all good. Let me get a drink real quick. Moisten the mouth. Moist. Oh no, that's recorded. So you can use that now. That's crazy. I hate that. Oh my gosh. I have blackmail now. That's sick. Welcome to the Weekly Dungeon Delve. My name is Jack and right next to me is the lovely Theodore Short. It's Shorty. That's recording. Oh my God. Anyways, welcome to the Weekly Dungeon Delve. My name is Jack. This is Theo. How are you doing today, Theo? I'm good. How are you? I'm swell. It's kind of been a long day. I'm kind of a little bit sick actually, but I'm starting to get a little bit better. I didn't realize. Anyways, so for this episode, episode zero if you will, a little D&D reference. Yeah, a little section zero. We're just going to do some introductions both about you and about D&D in general. Sure, yeah. So I'm going to start with you tell me a little bit about yourself. Who are you? Well, I'm a born and raised Cincinnatian. I am from Coleraine. Shout out Coleraine. I'm a LaSalle grad. I'm a dual major here at Mount St. Joe. I study social studies, secondary education, and computer science. After graduation, I plan to be a social studies teacher and pursue, right now I'm thinking about a master's in prop making at CCM so I can work in Cincinnati's very diverse theater scene, which would be really cool. A little bit about my extracurriculars here on campus. I'm a resident assistant. I'm president of Residence Hall Council, so we put on monthly bingos. I'm on financial committee for SGA. I do theater. I was involved with choir. I work with campus police and ISS. I do IT at the nursing home. I'm involved a little bit everywhere. And then I run, well, we try to make them weekly, but not so weekly D&D sessions as well as our other DMs. Yeah, yeah. That's a struggle, isn't it? Yeah, scheduling is always the hardest part. How long have you been playing D&D? I've been playing D&D for about four years now. I started right before COVID broke out. Like probably November of my sophomore year of high school. And I started I did theater in high school. I always like to say I'm band kid adjacent. Because the way I got into it was just a bunch of my friends from LaSalle. We were big nerds. We'd hang out in the computer science teacher's classroom. He did graphic, but we'd hang out with him. And they started playing one day after school. And I was like, that looks like a ton of fun. And they kind of introduced me. It's really interesting. When we started, I had never played before. And then I decided to become a dungeon master on a whim. And so my first time ever running the game as a dungeon master, I had four other dungeon masters playing. And then one veteran player. He'd played for like five years at that point as a sophomore. So it was kind of terrifying. Because there are these people, I wouldn't say like professionals, or like what's the word I'm looking for? I don't know. They're advanced in their field. Veterans, more experienced. They're incredibly experienced. But it was a tough crowd. But they told me I did well. So now I am here four years later as the token forever DM. You talked about before being a lifelong DM for a while. And how you were stuck in that. I know for a fact now you've kind of broken out of that. Because you're not the only dungeon master we use. Well I have that rule. If I'm gonna run a game, I'm happy to do it. But someone else has to pick up and we'll do every other week. So right now that's Angel. First it was John with the Riz campaign. Riz. Yeah, the last character. Dude, best character ever. Oh my god. How would you describe D&D, Dungeons & Dragons for someone who's never heard of the game before? The best way I've found to describe D&D to someone who has never heard is I like to make it akin to a story or video game. Which if you're unfamiliar with story and video games like Red Dead Redemption, Breath of the Wild, stuff like that, I highly recommend you get acquainted. Great stuff. But the best way I can explain it to you is when you're playing a game, you sit down in front of your TV, you turn your Xbox or your computer on, whatever it may be. You have your controller and you navigate this world presented to you by your screen. You go through and are prompted with different things from the game, whether it's quick time events or storylines or NPCs, non-player characters, that come up and talk to you and prompt you for an adventure. Everything's done through that computer, through that software. The best way I can describe it is you're playing a game like Fallout or Skyrim or Red Dead Redemption 2, but instead of on a computer, you're just playing it with paper and dice. So instead of having an Xbox and a TV screen guide you through this world, it all takes place in the theater of the mind. So your DM, your dungeon master, game master, GM, whatever term you want to use, the person running the game is telling a narrative. They are giving you not only what you see, smell, hear, taste, experience, feel, but they're also playing all of the characters that aren't you. The cool thing about it is you get to make a character that is completely whatever you want and then essentially act through it. It's a lot of improv in our games. And you get to experience this world as someone who you choose to be as prompted by your dungeon master. So why don't you start telling me about some of the major parts of D&D? Well, to start, D&D is a TTRPG system, and TTRPG stands for Tabletop Roleplaying Game. This system is effectively the agreed-upon rules that help guide and scaffold how you play. So, for example, in D&D, you're going to roll a 20-sided dice for most actions. To set up a scene, let's say you're playing a thief, and you want to pickpocket the keys from the guard to go unlock the jail cell your friend is trapped in. If I'm that thief, I'm going to ask my dungeon master, hey, I want to steal his keys. And the dungeon master is going to go, okay, make a sleight of hand check or a stealth check. So you're going to roll your 20-sided dice, and you're going to get a number, and then you're going to add the appropriate modifiers to those numbers. With that, those modifiers are based on the statistics you've given yourself, those kind of, how strong you are, how quick you are, how fast, you know, whatever that may be. You're going to do that at character creation, but the dungeon master is going to prompt you and say, hey, okay, make a stealth check, make a sleight of hand check, whatever it may be, given the situation. You're going to roll your dice and see what happens. The dungeon master will tell you whether you've succeeded, whether you've failed, and what the consequences of success or failure are. One of the things I've always heard people say when they ascribe D&D to a new person is that it's a game where you can pretty much do anything you want, in theory. In theory, it's the key word, yeah, 100%. Or you can play a character that can do anything you want them to do, in theory. But a lot of new players I've found take that and ignore the in theory part. I've found a germ. No, 100%. They think they can just say they did something and then they all done it. Then they can't consult their DM to see what they may have found or what they have done or whatever. Yeah, no, 100%. And that comes with just not knowing the rules very well. And that's always an uphill battle, especially with new players, is trying to get them to understand what they can and can't do realistically. I think that's also, but that opens the door for so many fun moments. Like, I have a journal for context. We had a new player who was searching a room and he went upstairs and he'd searched for a while while the rest of the group was battling some guards. And he comes downstairs and the Dungeon Master looks at him and he goes, so what did you do? And he goes, well, I found a journal and I found blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's the funniest thing ever because you don't just get to find things. You roll an investigation check and then the Dungeon Master tells you what you find based on how well you roll. So just the nonchalance with which he said it was just like, I found a journal. It was the pure confidence in which he said, I almost gave him the journal. If I was the DM, I would have. It was a great moment. But then, so we've covered what a system is, right? The agreed upon rule set. And in this situation, it's D&D fifth edition, which is just the fifth edition of the rules. But then we can talk about the tabletop RPG side, right? It's really to put it in layman's terms, it's a board game where you play a character that isn't you. That kind of goes in with that idea of Red Dead Redemption or those role playing video games that are great storytelling modules and great ways to have an interactive experience. We just do that without technology. I think that pretty much covers the actual methods by which you run D&D. Once again, let's go back to what are the three major parts of D&D itself as in like elements that you cannot have. Right, yeah, I totally didn't answer your question. The way I break D&D up is it's got those three parts, right? So you have the player characters or PCs, the storytelling, and then the mechanics. The player characters, the players get to make whatever character they'd like to adventure through the world that you've either made or are running from a pre-made module. So the characters have three major parts, your race, your class, and your background. Race is are you playing an elf or dwarf? Are you a half-orc? Are you a human? Your class is kind of like your vocation, right? The classes, there's I think 12 or 13 of them off the top of my head. I don't remember exactly. But you could play a knight and play a fighter. You could play a rogue or a thief. You could play a sorcerer or a wizard or a warlock or a paladin, you know, each having their own kind of specifications within and different abilities that they grant. And then you have your background, which is what you were before you became an adventurer. Because D&D kind of takes place Or even what led to you becoming an adventurer. Oh yeah, well, so that's the really cool part about these player characters is as the player you are in complete control over what your backstory is. Obviously you have to work with your dungeon master to make sure it fits into the world, but you have complete creative freedom to be whoever you want, right? If you love the underdog story and you want to play someone like Steve Rogers turning into Captain America, you could totally do that as a paladin. If you want to recreate the hobbit, you could be Thorne Oakenshield as a fighter or a paladin of the ground. You could be Bilbo Baggins. Go and be a rogue. A roguish halfling, which is a hobbit. It's directly based off of a hobbit. There's so many things you can do and so many options. I've seen tons of characters in my short tenure playing this game. Such as Riz. Such as Riz. Riz, for context, he's actually a great example of the three major parts. Thank you for bringing that up. Because I'll run it through. His race is a lizard folk person. So he's kind of like a mix between a lizard and a man. So pretty cut and dry. His class was a wild magic barbarian. Barbarians draw their power from their rage. They're able to bring themselves into a frenzy in battle that makes them ferocious. Ferocious creatures to fight. And then his background was folk hero. Background and backstory are not the same thing though. Actually, I lied. His background was outlander. An outlander is like someone who lived in the woods. Which makes perfect sense for Riz. I was about to say something. I was like, Riz was your character. I haven't played Riz in a long time. Shame. Shame. What a shame. But Riz, his backstory was he was a lizard. And then a wild magic surge happened in the forest. Because of a convergence with the Feywild. And for context, the Feywild is like an alternate dimension. A little more magical. For lack of a better term. But there was a convergence with the Feywild and a bursting of wild magic throughout the forest. And it shapeshifted him from a lizard into a lizard man. Hence why he's a wild magic barbarian. Wild magic being the subclass to his main class. So he was a lizard and now he's a man. And because of that wild magic surge, he has some of that magic within him. So when he rages, it expels out of him. Should we briefly cover subclasses real quick since you brought that up? We could do that. So you have your main class. In this example, it's barbarian. And then you have a subclass, which grants different abilities for spell casting classes. Like a wizard, you get different spells you get access to and different abilities that come down with it. It's just kind of a way to further your customization. If I want to play a rogue, for example, rogues normally don't get magic. But if I wanted to play a rogue with magic, I could pick the arcane trickster subclass and get a handful of stuff. Which uses the rogue with the wizard. And then you get into the discussion of multi-classing where you pick two or more different classes to gain the benefits from their lower levels. Normally you have requirements for it. Like you have to have certain stats or whatever. Correct. There's prerequisites for that. To prevent players from just doing whatever the hell they wanted. Exactly. But the three major parts back to the player characters. Again, race, class, background. The second major part is I'm selfish here because I am a dungeon master and this is my favorite part. Storytelling. I love telling stories. I did theater through high school. I do theater here at the Mount. Like I said earlier, I'm planning on getting a master's in theater. Prop making. Storytelling is why I love D&D. I do all homebrew. Which means instead of buying a pre-made or pre-written story, I write my own from scratch. So I do a lot of creative writing. It's really hard because I am so invested. And kind of squirrely, but so invested. I love it so much I could ramble on for hours. I ripped something from the dungeon master's guide. Which if you don't know, the dungeon master guide or DMG, it provides, and this is a quote from the Wizards RPG team, the company that produces D&D. They said, the dungeon master's guide provides the inspiration and the guidance you need to spark your imagination and create worlds of adventure for your players to explore and enjoy. Inside, you'll find world building tools, tips, and tricks for creating memorable dungeons and adventures, optional game rules, hundreds of classic D&D magic items, and so much more. So that book, that's kind of that guide, has this section in to explain what a DM is. And I'm going to read this to you because I can't articulate it any better. It's perfect. It says, a dungeon master gets to wear many hats. As the architect of a campaign, the DM creates adventures by placing monsters, traps, and treasures for the other player's characters, the adventurers, to discover. As a storyteller, the DM helps the other players visualize what's happening around them, improvising when the adventurers do something or go somewhere unexpected. Side note, happens constantly. I think it's General Susan, the guy who wrote Art of War, he says plans are useless, but planning is essential. I might be misquoting him, but it's fine. As an improviser, when the adventurers do something or go somewhere unexpected, as an actor, the DM plays the rules of the monsters and supporting characters, breathing life into them. And as a referee, the DM interprets the rules and decides when to abide by them and when to change them. Inventing, writing, storytelling, improvising, acting, refereeing. Every DM handles these roles differently, and you'll probably enjoy some more than others. It helps to remember that Dungeons & Dragons is a hobby, and being the DM should be fun. Focus on the aspects you enjoy and downplay the rest. For example, if you don't like creating your own adventures, you can use published ones or pre-made modules. You can also lean on the other players to help with rules, mastery, and world building. I think that just puts it so eloquently. I'm there as, like my analogy from earlier, I am the computer when you play your video game. That's like a sub-part of the storytelling element is also you have to be really good at improv, both as the DM and the player. Like you said, you have to be prepared to do the unexpected things at times. Like when we were playing that one campaign in Coalfield, you encountered a situation where my character got sucked into hell unexpectedly, and suddenly we had to figure out, what am I doing in hell? What's going to happen next? Yeah, I had to create an entire city just off the rip. No resources, no nothing. Where the beautiful name Hell York came from, because I'm really bad under pressure with names. But the first two parts of D&D being the player characters, the PCs, and the storytelling, we then get into the mechanics. What I mentioned earlier with our 20-sided dice, right? You're trying to pickpocket the keys from the guard so you're going to make a sleight of hand check. That's pretty much kind of how the game runs. It's just a bunch of hey, can I do this? Okay, this is what I got. You would ask your DM, I would like to commit this crime. I would like to dive after this guy who fell into the pit and try to save him. You also got to deal with, when you're making the character, you have the stats you set for the character as well. Exactly, which gives you your strength. They're usually either randomized, or you choose from a set amount of points allocated into each stat. Yeah, which can make or break a character. You, as the player, would ask your DM, hey, can I make a stealth check? Or can I do this, that, or the other thing? And your DM's going to say, yes, you can do it. Roll a 20-sided dice to see what your outcome is. That 20-sided dice is effectively the world in which you are playing in, deciding like, think about it as karma, if you want, but the world you're playing in, deciding whether or not you can do that action. The DM does not punish you for bad rolls. The DM simply reacts in the way the world would. Does that make sense? Yeah. So like, in our stealing keys example, if I'm stealing the keys and I roll a 2 with a plus 3 modifier for a total of 5, I'm going to slip on a rock, right? Your character is going to fumble those keys. If you're grabbing off the guard's waist, you're going to grab the side of their waist. You're going to grab their coin pouch on accident instead and give it a hard jerk so they turn around and think you're immediately a criminal. No questions asked, right? I'm not here to punish you when you roll bad. I'm just going to react. I, the DM, as the world, am going to react accordingly. And then there's also rolling a natural 1 or a nat 20. Yes. Yeah, that's a huge thing. Nat 1's being a critical failure. Thank you. I always struggle with that terminology. Being a critical failure and a nat 20 being a critical success. And really, outside of combat, because there are different rules for in combat and outside of combat to, again, kind of give structure to the world. But outside of combat, technically, per the rulebook, there is no critical success, critical failure. That's not how I play it, though. I think that's not how most people play it. That's not, no. If you get a nat 20, I can't automatically let you succeed for something. But you're going to have a good outcome, right? If I'm trying to do something impossible, I'm not going to succeed with a nat 20. Like if you try to spray water on the sun to put it out. Exactly. Or like, my immediate thought was throwing a javelin at the moon, because I had a character try to do that once. He was just pissed off at the moon, so he tried to kill it. And he can't. It's just that simple. There are some things you can't do because you're not powerful enough or you don't have the right tools. Or just a random character saying, I want to go fly right now. Yeah. With no resources to do that. If I have no wings and I jump off a building, you're probably going to get hurt. Right? So I can't make impossible things happen because you roll well, but you can kind of take it. I always try to make it a moment of adding more wonder into the world, right? If I'm throwing javelins at the moon, maybe the goddess of the moon is going to be upset about that. And on a natural 20, you get to have a communion with her. You get what I'm saying? Like, there's options for things like that that reward the player for that natural 20 without rewarding bad behavior. Does that make sense? Yeah. And the nat 1 just being usually something funny happens. Yeah. That really makes you feel ashamed for what you tried to do. No. I mean, yeah. Again, I'm not trying to punish players for bad rolls, but if I roll a nat 1 in the world, the world's going to have maybe not a punishment, but it's going to enact some sort of karmic virtue, right? It's going to happen. You fire an arrow at the enemy rolling that 1 to hit at the arrow. Somebody turns around in the air and somehow hits you. Yeah. I mean, you see, I think that's far, personally, but if I'm shooting an arrow at an enemy, I might hit my friend or at the very least cause disadvantage on my friend's attack because I almost hit them with an arrow. You get what I'm saying? Yeah. Or at the very least, I accidentally break an oil lantern and now half of my teammates are on fire because I broke it. You get what I'm saying? There's options for stuff like that. Let's just talk about the d20s as well. There's other dice to use. Oh, yeah. Most standard D&D sets of dice have 7 polyhedral dice, including your 6-sided dice, which is what you normally use at poker or not poker, but casinos. And then you have a 4-sided dice, which is shaped like a pyramid that you use for smaller weapons and not so strong spells. Then you have an 8-sided dice, a 2 10-sided dice, or a percentile dice. One has 1, 2, 3, 4, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. And then the other has 0, 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 on it. And then you can use those to roll a d100. So get a chance out of 100 using your dice. And then you have a d12 and a d20. I've also seen like d30s and stuff, which are funky and weird, and I don't like them. There's also on occasion you will see mention of a d2, which is like just flipping a coin. Well, either flipping a coin or I actually found out reading an old source book, they suggest so in originally D&D did not use 20-sided dice. They used just a handful of d6s. I mean, why? They didn't have... 20-sided dice were not common before tabletop RPGs became a thing. But they would use a handful of d6s. So what you do is you roll a d6 and then divide by 2. So if you get an odd, you get a 1. If you get an even, you get a 2. Anyway. Same thing for a d3. Just do it that way. But then, like I mentioned earlier, there's the different rules for combat. So the mechanics also include, okay, my spell has a 120-foot range. That goblin is 125 feet away from me. I can't hit him. I have to move X amount of squares, which equal X amount of steps, to cast this spell, which I only have so much spell slots for. And spell slots, for context, are like mana. Their spells take a physical toll on you. A physical exertion. You're not going to be able to do everything all at once, all the time. Just like if I'm fighting all day or climbing a bridge that has fallen, you know, whatever it may be, I'm going to get tired. Spell slots are the account for that. But there are those rules in place to help balance the players to make sure Todd the Barbarian isn't getting completely screwed over by Alex the Wizard. Because Alex the Wizard has infinite fireballs. But then you also get into the conversation of what are your class and race and background features? So if you're a wizard, you're probably going to be wicked smart, but not that strong. If you're a barbarian, you're probably going to be wicked strong, but not that smart. Tell me about all the stats. Oh, there's this beautiful analogy that I absolutely love. And Jack knows this. He put the ball on the tee and handed me a bat here. I love this. This is called the tomato theory. And the tomato theory is that you can explain all of the D&D stats, the six core stats, using only tomatoes as your example. So dexterity is your ability to throw or dodge a tomato being thrown at you. Or catch it. That's a good point. Strength is your ability to crush a tomato. Constitution is your ability to eat a poisoned tomato and survive. Intelligence is knowing tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put a tomato into fruit salad. And then charisma is your ability to sell a tomato-based fruit salad. It's my favorite analogy. Because it makes sense for a lot of new players. And each of the different sub-skills using tomatoes will support it. Yeah. So each stat has an ability that correlates with it. So, for example, stealth or sleight of hand or acrobatics are dexterity. Nature checks and medicine checks, survival checks are wisdom. And that's like street smart. Things like history, religion, arcana are going to be intelligence checks. Athletics is strength. Pretty self-explanatory. Constitution has none because constitution is what affects your amount of health. But that's a later conversation. But yeah, so the mechanics kind of dictate that scaffolding, those rules that we choose to play by in order to have a well-balanced, structured time. ... ... The silence, I need to edit that. So you go back to class and race features. You started talking about spell slots. You mentioned exhaustion, too, which is an important mechanic. Not enough people actually talk about. No, yeah. So exhaustion is, we get so caught up in our little adventures, we forget that we're kind of human and need to sleep. Exhaustion is so, so, so important because if you don't sleep, you will start to get disadvantage on all attack rolls and ability checks. And the way disadvantage works is when you make a check, you roll your 20-sided dice. And if you have disadvantage, you roll your 20-sided dice two times and take the lower number. Just like if you have advantage, you roll it twice and you take the higher number and then you add your reporting modifiers. But exhaustion gives you, I forget what all the stages do off the top of my head, but the first one is disadvantage on skill checks. The second stage is disadvantage on all attacks. And your movement speed is halved, I think. And then it goes on to a point where you collapse. Your movement speed is permanently zero. And you effectively can't function. And then if you still choose to take on a level of exhaustion or you get one put on you by an evil spell, you die. It's just cut and dry. I don't see people use it very often. I think it's kind of one of the more forgotten about mechanics. Well, I think it's because it's just not fun. It just kind of sucks all around. It's not rewarding for players who stayed up overnight to stake out the evil cult or to put out a fire in a town, whatever the situation may be. Also, because so many races just remove the need for sleep altogether. Yeah, like elves don't need to sleep at all. They have a four hour... Yeah, they meditate for four hours and that's game. That's their long rest. It's kind of goofy. And so many people just don't need to sleep anymore. In the current state of the game, that exhaustion just doesn't exist anymore. Yeah, it's just, it's not super important. It's a cool mechanic, especially for like dungeon crawls where you don't see the sun and you have to actually gauge how much time you're doing and use your short rest and your long rest wisely. And for context, short and long rests are essentially like saving your game or going to sleep in your game. It's, you get your spell slots back, you get your hit points back, you can articulate yourself to a degree, you stave off exhaustion, stuff like that. And then a lot of classes have abilities that are replenished at a short or long rest, and then you can also change certain things about your character at a short or long rest. Like barbarians get their rage back. Correct, because you only get so many according to your level. Sorry, do you think a second to think? You're good. Spell slots, you mentioned those before. Exhaustion without being exhaustion. Exactly, right. I mean, I'll make a really easy analogy. You go to the gym, you're doing sets of weights, right, you're on bench press. You want to get a full workout for your pecs. So you're going to go till failure on every single set, right? So I start with, let's say, 125 on the bar. And I bang those out until I can't physically do it anymore. Take a break, rest, whatever. I'm still not going to hit 25 for 8 reps like I just did. So I'm going to go down a level. And I'm going to hit 100 for 8 reps. And then I'm extra tired after that one, so I'm going to go 75 for 6 reps. And you keep working your way down, right, until you get to just the bar and one rep, because you've trained till failure, essentially. With that kind of analogy in mind, that's that same idea for spell slots, right? If I'm casting these super powerful spells that alter the fabric of reality, I'm going to be tired. I'm not going to be able to do that again. It's just that simple. And the most powerful spell in D&D has special rules for it that make you extra exhausted. Yeah, well, because it is a physical exertion. You are using mental, emotional, and physical power to manifest these things into reality. And I'm not going to get into how magic works in D&D, because I've studied it. I still don't get it. That's a later conversation, anyway. It's wild. It's so crazy. It could be for hours. Oh my gosh, yeah, it'd be bad. Long story short, you're going to be tired after you're casting spells all day. You won't be able to cast anymore. Exactly, and that's why we have spell slots to account for. You have to start casting weaker and weaker spells each time. Exactly. And depending on your class, you get different amounts of spells and different whatever. So like Warlock, for example, you only get two spell slots, which isn't a lot, but they're super powerful. You're like a glass cannon. But Wizards get a ton of everything. Excuse me. A ton of everything. But they can't do a lot of the small stuff that Warlocks can on a whim. Hmm. Yeah, like they get, um, they just get the highest level spell slot for their level. They don't get, like, they don't keep the ones from the lowest level. If they cast a spell, whoever they chose is probably going to be very dead at the end of their cast. Or very sad. Or very sad. One of the two. I can't always say the same for Sorcerers, or for Wizards, or for Clerics. Because they're not always going to be using the most powerful spells. Exactly. Warlocks are really unique, because we like to say they're very front-heavy, right? So you get a ton, a ton, a ton of abilities early on, but not much later on, because you only get, like, two or three spell slots as a Warlock, but they're super powerful, but you can only do it twice. You know what I'm saying? You also have to watch what you do with them. Mm-hmm. For it, they get powerful Cantrips as well. Cantrips are reusable spells all the time. Exactly, right? Cantrips don't go for spell slots. You can do it whenever you want, however many times you want. They're usually not that powerful, though. Yeah, usually. Unless you're a Warlock. Unless you're a Warlock, and you buff them. Or buff them, sorry. Yeah. What are some other important class and race features to talk about? Um... I can give a brief description. Let me pull up the class list. Just remembered to edit this out. Yeah, so for classes, every class kind of has their own unique thing about them. So Barbarians, like we kind of talked about earlier, have a rage mechanic. They become bloodlust on the battlefield, and they're able to tear things up. And they're also kind of like the taste of the guy. Yeah, they have the most hit points, they are objectively the strongest, they do the most damage, so on and so forth. Then you have Bards, who are magic users, but they use magic through some sort of art form. And traditionally it's music, but I've seen people do a Bard that's a mime, and they're just so good at being a mime that they inspire and invoke magic from the world. Or they're painters. Or they're painters. Or writers. Or poets. Yeah, there's so many things. And they pull their magic from their art. Then there are Clerics, who the most, the easiest analog is a Priest, right? Clerics are those who devote themselves to a god, or devote themselves to a god, and then they are practicing that worship so strongly that they're able to invoke that god's favor and powers, essentially. And I feel like most people play Clerics as a healer, too. Yeah, Clerics are kind of the default healer, because they have the best healing spells. You can heal with a Bard and stuff, too. Or a Druid. Or a Druid. Druid is my favorite class. I love Druids. If you've ever seen Lord of the Rings, Radagast, that man is a Druid. I know they say he's a wizard. He's a Druid. Druids often have animal companions, and are kind of devoted to nature and protecting natural things. They're a physical counterpart, because they're a magic class. Their physical counterpart is a Ranger. Correct. Yeah, yeah. 100%. Druids are known for using natural magic and being kind of one with nature. Then there's your Fighter, which is exactly what you think. Think the Gladiator movies. That guy's a Fighter. He's just strong, he's fast, he's good with a sword. But not all Fighters are strong. You could play a Dex-based Fighter as an Archer. Not that many people do. I do, but it's special. Then you have a Monk, which the best analog I can give to you is a...think Bruce Lee. Martial artist. Jackie Chan. Jackie Chan, yeah. Any of those folks. Monk is not written very well. Gary Gygax, the creator of D&D, had some not-so-pleasant worldviews. That's the way I'll put it. When writing Monk, he based it off of a lot of Eastern cultures and traditions that he did not do any research on. It is unfortunately very much founded in ideas of chi. They use these things called key points, which are used to enhance your abilities. It's all founded in Eastern Taoist and Buddhist culture. It's kind of weird that it's a religious thing. Clerics are religious, but within the gods of the world you're playing in. Monk is just kind of... It's a weird rip on Eastern culture. I don't love it, but It can be a powerful class. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't take away from the class. It's got some weird roots, so it's hard to explain. The best way to explain it is a master of the martial arts. They get into some chi stuff and stuff like that, which is whatever. Then there's Paladin, who takes an oath and they believe so strongly in that oath it gives them powers. A good analog, Captain America. That's a Paladin. You want to call him... It depends on which arc you read. You can make an argument for Oath of Redemption when you work for Hydra, stuff like that. He believes so strongly in American values that he is able to pursue a career off that. Obviously Captain America got the super soldier serum, yada yada, but he's a good analog. Ranger is kind of the more physical combatant counterpart to Druid. Think Robin Hood. Think... Traditionally they're archers, they have animal companions, stuff like that. They're survivalists. More directly, The Ranger's Apprentice would be a good analog as well. Yeah, 100%. Literally uses Ranger in the name of theory. I never read that one. It's a pretty good series. You should definitely check it out. Then Rogue. A rogue is a thief. A lot of people say Bilbo Baggins is a rogue. I totally did earlier. Technically, by definition of the class, he's not. But, it's the best analog. A rogue is often a spy, or an assassin, or a thief, stuff like that. Or the Mastermind subclass, where they're basically the Godfather. Yeah, they're the orchestrator. I would make a really good argument that Han Solo would be a rogue. 100%. 100%. Charisma based, of course, but nonetheless. A sorcerer is... So now we're getting to the three main spellcasting classes, being Sorcerer, Warlock, and Wizard. Obviously, in different literature and situations, those words are interchangeable, but that is not the case in D&D. A sorcerer is very specifically someone who has inherent magic from either their bloodline or a freak accident. So, Superman, technically, would be a sorcerer, because he's Kryptonian. The Flash would be a sorcerer, because he got in an accident with some mega particles and a lightning strike. Harry Potter. He came from a magic bloodline. Harry Potter, as much as we love to say he's a wizard, is totally a sorcerer, because the foundation of his powers is from a bloodline. Yeah. They're just supposed to be taught magic. They get their inherent magic from... Well, so anyone who has magic is going to learn magic similar to that of a Harry Potter wizard, because you have to train and learn about your god, if you're a cleric, or your oath, if you're a paladin, so far and so forth. You're just going to have to, in order to level up. I guess you get clerics or druids who just get their magic inherently from whatever gives them powers, such as clerics being from their god, or druids being from... But even then, to level up, you have to serve and learn more. Yeah. Or, depending on how you roleplay, for druids, at least, it might be like, I can suddenly do this! Like that lovely line from Vox Machina, where their druid goes on a rant about suddenly being able to transport between trees. Oh, yeah, yeah. 100%. Dungeons & Daddies does something really similar when they go... So, quick, really brief explanation. Dungeons & Daddies is a D&D podcast where four suburban dads from middle America get sucked into a D&D world and they take on classes, according to their personalities. And the druid guy, he's just like this kind of earthy... They call themselves like a granola dad. It's like Birkenstocks, and he's always eating flax seeds and crap like that. He becomes a druid and has nature's magic, and the first time he casts a spell, he goes, I don't know what I'm doing! And he makes vines appear and wraps up the enemies. It's a really funny, cool moment. And what I mentioned was Critical Role. They're a different D&D podcast. Yeah. From Sorcerer, we move on to Warlock, and Warlocks are really fascinating because they get their power from a bond. So, they make a deal, oftentimes. Like a deal with the devil. Yeah. So, like Johnny from the song, Devil Went Down to Georgia, would be a warlock. He gets a golden fiddle from the devil, and let's say he can cast a spell with that. He's now in a really unique relationship with a devil in order to be a warlock. And it doesn't just have to be you who's made the deal. I've heard really cool stories of warlocks who their parents were in a bond, so they sold their firstborn child to a devil, and then the player character plays that child. They're searching for their original parents, but they're being raised by and working for this devil that they are now an indentured servant of. So, it's really cool. And warlocks offer really cool storytelling options as well, because if you want your powers, you have to hold your side of the deal up. Like in Dimension 20, another D&D podcast, there are warlocks of a dead pirate king. And to get your powers, you effectively buy spell slots with gold. Because he's a pirate. He hoards treasure. It's a really cool idea. But that's warlocks. And then wizards are not what you'd think, but wizards are anybody. Anybody can be a wizard if they choose to, but you go to school to learn magic. Wizards use a spellbook, usually, where they have incantations and specific ingredients that they have to mix together. There's a thing from Fullmetal Alchemist where they talk about how alchemists will hide their alchemy recipes in cookbooks, for example. And wizards do much the same thing in D&D, where they will encode their books so only they can read them. Because why would I let these powerful, could potentially be world-ending spells fall into the hands of a thief? Yeah, or a 12-year-old. Someone who stole my book in the night. You get what I'm saying? But they study the weave, which is the source of all magic in D&D. And they study how magic works and kind of the theory behind it. There's a setting called Strixhaven that has really, really cool explanations for this in different ways people study magic. There's a school of art and fashion and people who express themselves via magic. There's a school of those who find nature really enticing. And natural magic. You get a lot of bars and druids from those, respectively. But then there's a really, really cool school, my favorite, that studies magic in a mathematical sense. They study magic as a mathematical theorem. So when they cast spells, it's very geometric. It's founded in numbers and logic and how the world is kind of affected by it. It's really, really fascinating. But that's wizards. And then there's artificers who are, they get their magic from gadgets. Iron Man. That's an artificer. It's that simple. And then Critical Role has their Blood Hunter class. Which is kind of bad. It's like Geralt of Rivia from the Witcher series. They're monster hunters. 100%. Now that we've covered the mechanics, we move on to the next question, which is, what kind of people is D&D made for? D&D is for anyone who wants to play. The Dungeon Master's Guide, which we mentioned earlier, details six types of players. I don't remember them all off the top of my head, but one's the tactician. He plays for combat and combat alone. He wants to kill monsters, slay goblins, and save the princess. That's what he plays the game for. He wants to manipulate the rules to his favor. He wants to min-max his character. And he wants to be the most efficient killing machine. Not a bad way to play D&D. D&D has combat rules for those reasons. Not why I play D&D. Like I said, I'm the storyteller. I like role-playing. I like doing the goofy voices. I like telling stories. But we play with some players who are the tactician. They like to make plans. There was one session, we spent 45 minutes. Oh my gosh, YouTube caused me issues. You know who's the biggest though? Ethan. When we played in the Fulcrum campaign, for context, there was this caravan that was driving down a road. We spent 45 minutes concocting a plan on how we were going to stop the caravan, kill all the guards, and steal all the stuff. Did it work? It did up until our cleric got kidnapped. It actually was kind of a really bad situation. It ended up very poorly. It worked for what we wanted, but we were punished greatly. But D&D is for whoever. You have role-players like us. I'm a former actor, and we play with a lot of former actors. They love making these characters and then doing the voices and getting in the mindset of these characters. I play characters that are wickedly not who I am. It's a really cool way to explore myself and express myself. Then there are people who simply like the pretty colors, and they want to make characters and draw pictures of the settings. Angel does a lot of that. She loves drawing our player characters. There are some people who just want to sit in the back and watch. There are some people who sit in on all of our sessions who've never touched the dice. Beeler is that way. She has watched so many of our sessions because she likes hearing the story. But to answer the question, D&D is for whoever wants to be involved. It can take any form, any shape, any anything. It's really, really a cool medium. How do you prepare a session differently for new players as opposed to old players? From the DM side, it's a lot of work. To prevent more of those internal moments. Yes, exactly. I prep my story just like I would for old or veteran players. I do a lot of outlines. I do a lot of pictures. For me, I use OneNote as my go-to. It helps me organize very well. I'll write things out in chronological order, and then if you guys are solving a mystery, I'll make a column for just facts about that mystery. So when you ask questions, I can give you the factual information. I also include I'll make side notes of maps and monsters you may be fighting and the stat blocks for those monsters so I know how to run the combat encounter. For new characters, it can be really, really overwhelming and really scary to start. Character sheets, the way they're organized, if you get a minute, look up, just type in character sheet 5E into your computer, and you will be so overwhelmed, you won't even know what to do with it. There's so many boxes, so many spaces, so much writing, it's crazy. It's so scary. So what I do is I will hold my players' hands through how they make their character. I'll make the character for them, honestly. I have them describe what they want to be and how they want to be it, and then I make the character. I do all the work. This is for TB. Just when we made a character for TB. Exactly, like when we made a character for TB. It's usually done during session zero, which is like introducing the players to whatever the world, the setting. Yeah, the setting, the background, who's playing what, how are we organizing. A huge part of session zero is that often overlooked are consent forms. And we're not good about it, frankly. But I know you all personally, so it's a little easier. But if you're playing with people you don't really know, consent forms are super important, right? If I am writing a story, obviously there has to be some sort of bad thing that happens in order for a story to happen, right? But what that bad thing is could change depending on who is playing, right? If someone has had, just for example, a domestic violence situation, I don't want to run a story that mirrors an experience they've had, because that's shitty. It's that simple. This is supposed to be a way we escape and have a fantastical world and adventure and kill goblins with our friends. Or there are going to be serious topics. You also want to make sure you don't want to violate someone by talking about something they're not prepared to talk about. Exactly. And it's not just like if you have a traumatic history and you want to be conscious of that as a DM. It's also, you know, maybe after a long week, you just want to sit in an imaginary bar with your friends. You don't want to have to solve a murder-suicide. You get what I'm saying? There's times and places for those things and you have to make sure your table is not only the time and place for that, but also prepared to be in that time and at that place. Does that make sense? But session zeros are also a great way to introduce the world and find out who's playing what and walk people through those characters. But anyway, I make a lot of those characters and I will make a separate I'll give them their character sheet, which is very scary, but then I will print out and handwrite a Word document explaining what everything is, where it comes from, and how it's used. And I highlight it, I color code it. I do that for their spells and stuff as well to help them organize what they can cast when and how they do it, so on and so forth. And I make that personalized to the person. It's a ton of work. It's a ton of work, but I'm happy to do it because it makes all the difference when they're able to be autonomous. It's also like D&D is a game you can do whatever you want. You can do absolutely anything at any time. In theory. But players get that freedom and then they go, I don't know what to do. I have too many options. We had that a lot with Rachel when she played with us because she often would just be like, I remember one comment specifically. She said, I fire a flaming arrow into the tent. And then John was like, okay, what else do you do? And she's like, I end my turn. What else do I do? And that comes with confidence and time. I try to make that easy for my new players because it's really daunting. To be given absolute freedom is terrifying. I know there's some people who just excel with that too. They're extremely good strategists like Tim. Oh my gosh, Tim is a legend when it comes to this stuff. Tim one time was fighting a guy in the air. He was a fairy. He could fly. He was fighting a guy who turned himself into a hawk. So Tim grabs this guy who's a hawk right now by the wings, flips him so that the guy as they're falling through the air, the hawk is underneath him. And then he turns into a bear and just flattens this kid out. Oh my gosh, it was awesome. During the Ruth campaign, your character and mine had just recently reused the goddess of the sun and the god of the moon. And so we shut off the sun and brought the moon into the sky randomly to scare some bandits and make them our cult. Yep, pretty much. Hey, and I didn't like using the term cult. We were a religion of freed people. Oh, you're so right. We definitely started a cult. And then we definitely executed a few of them. They deserved that. He said he liked being a thief, not because he was able to support his family, but because he liked stealing from poor people and making them poor. Word for word, bar for bar, he deserved to die based on my character's thoughts, feelings, and opinions. That's not Theo, that's Riz. Anyway. It's very much the same, but it's also very different. You just gotta handhold and meet people where they are. That's all new players are. Well, we've pretty much reached the end of the questions I prepared. Are there any questions you think I should have asked you today? I totally had one, but I forgot. This is an awkward silence. It is an awkward silence, but I have an answer for you. I would have loved it if you would ask me about the process of writing, because session prep is one thing. Writing is a totally different thing. We'll talk about that. Well, we are short for time, so I think that can be a topic for our first official episode. What's the difference between creative writing and writing for D&D? I don't know. But thank you so much for listening, and we will hopefully see you, or I guess you will hear us next week. Maybe. We'll see. This has been like four weeks in the ranking. Hopefully there's no more conflicts. I hope not. But you know, that's also college life. Well, thank you, and have a good rest of your day. Catch you later. That's going to be painful to go through. And I know, I know, I'm going to listen to this, and I'm going to go, um, um, um, because I caught myself saying um way too many times.