Latest / Sessions Canceled / Tabletop Shout Out: CAIN, Part. 2: Ep. 159

Transcript

Tabletop Shout Out: CAIN, Part. 2: Ep. 159 · Sessions Canceled

• 0:08
  Hey. Everybody.
• 0:13
  So we you know, we really tried starting session this week.
• 0:16
  We tried you know, we ever the stars aligned, everybody was
• 0:18
  together, GM was ready and then we just couldn't stop
• 0:23
  tangenting. We just, we just kept talking
• 0:26
  and, and then before we knew it, like 3 hours passed and the GM,
• 0:31
  I to be honest, we saw him dangling and we just decided
• 0:34
  maybe it wasn't the right, maybe it was the right model call to
• 0:36
  just call for the night. The session's cancelled and
• 0:40
  we're looking for new GM tried so hard to derail you on that
• 0:44
  one. I dude, the Mark Sanchez.
• 0:46
  I literally. I literally I want you to know
• 0:51
  I. Almost said something and I
• 0:53
  just, I had to like look away from the mic like no, you're
• 0:55
  better. Is it the urge?
• 0:58
  Yeah, yeah. The other one that came to mind
• 1:00
  was Mark Luffalo That that I think Sanchez was harder for me
• 1:05
  to. I think Ruffalo would you know
• 1:06
  who Mark Sanchez is. I I don't know, it's a.
• 1:11
  Quarterback for the New York Jets.
• 1:13
  Oh, no, I absolutely do not know who that is.
• 1:16
  Yeah, I played like, I want to say like 2016 to like 2018 or
• 1:23
  2019, something like that. Yeah, no, no idea.
• 1:28
  It's fair enough. That's fair enough.
• 1:34
  Oh God. Anyway, welcome back to the
• 1:39
  sessions cancelled podcast. It's BSA.
• 1:41
  I'll be able to Josh. Yes, Sir.
• 1:44
  And today we're doing kind of a Part 2 of Kane.
• 1:49
  We're going to do a little bit of finishing up with the book
• 1:51
  stuff. Sorry, Kane, Kane and I just
• 1:56
  need to I just need to pause my timeline was so off Bro was bro
• 2:00
  was the first round draft pick in the 2009 draft brother
• 2:05
  brother, I'm old cooked Yikes he's.
• 2:09
  Cooked. Oh.
• 2:12
  Crazy. I'm sorry this is not a sports
• 2:15
  spot I guess but God damn yeah if it was I'd be so fucked.
• 2:19
  I, I don't watch any sports other than boxing and I haven't
• 2:23
  watched boxing. The only one I I play, I pay a
• 2:25
  little bit of attention to. Fair enough.
• 2:28
  Yeah. Anyway, yes.
• 2:30
  Kane, Kane, Kane. Yeah.
• 2:33
  So we're going to be talking a little bit more about Kane,
• 2:35
  specifically about the sins and some of the fun stuff that they
• 2:38
  can get into. And then we're going to do spend
• 2:40
  the rest of the episodes just kind of talking about the
• 2:42
  practical experience I've had at running it because I have run it
• 2:45
  twice now, two one shots back-to-back and I ran the same
• 2:49
  investigation both times. So we can see you can talk about
• 2:52
  some of the fun like differences that we got out of it.
• 2:56
  Yeah. Thinks it'd be a good time.
• 2:59
  Before we get into that though, do us a favour and follow us on
• 3:04
  any podcast platform of choice. Appreciate that we're on 9096
• 3:10
  Subs on YouTube. Come on.
• 3:12
  Four more baby. Four more.
• 3:13
  So close, so close to 100. Give us that hundo just for the
• 3:16
  funsies. That would be very nice.
• 3:19
  I'm not going to promise anything if we hit 100, but
• 3:21
  like, it'd be nice. I mean, if we do, I can do
• 3:25
  another. Like another we can do.
• 3:27
  We can invite Matt and Anton and we can do another shit takes
• 3:31
  episode. I haven't done one of those in a
• 3:32
  while. That's not a terrible idea, I'm
• 3:37
  sure. I'm sure plenty of shit takes
• 3:38
  have risen up through the cracks since last time.
• 3:42
  Honestly, we should do a Daggerheart.
• 3:44
  Shit takes. I don't know if I have enough to
• 3:52
  contribute to that. No, no, it's fine.
• 3:53
  We'll find them on the Internet. Fair enough.
• 3:57
  Fair enough. Yeah.
• 3:58
  Dicker Hart has been in the in the news cycle something fierce
• 4:01
  recently. I'm dude in the tabletop news
• 4:04
  cycle. Obviously not, you know, not
• 4:08
  like, not like V shojo showing up on the Wall Street Journal.
• 4:12
  Oh, my God, dude. I all right, I just, I just, I
• 4:18
  just need to say this in confidence.
• 4:20
  And by in confidence, I mean recorded live on the Internet
• 4:23
  for anyone to hear. Yup, Yup.
• 4:26
  But like all this V Sojo news, I'm really just sitting here in
• 4:31
  my chair like I was right the whole fucking time or what we're
• 4:36
  telling everyone to tell them they should just go Indy.
• 4:38
  Yes, I've said the whole time I was like, V shojo is a bad idea.
• 4:42
  These these fucking V tuber companies are a bad idea.
• 4:45
  It's the exact same horseshit that they do with the idols of
• 4:48
  Japan. They just abuse their fucking
• 4:50
  performers at I've been on this the whole time and I've just
• 4:54
  I've really had to bite my tongue on this situation because
• 4:57
  we have a lot of friends who are invested in the V tuber scene.
• 4:59
  So I'm trying to not be rude about it, but like, I was right.
• 5:05
  That's all I'm saying. I mean, it's mainly just Ray and
• 5:08
  Matt. Yeah.
• 5:11
  Well, I mean, we have a couple, not just them.
• 5:13
  We have a couple, OK, friends. They're the, they're the two,
• 5:15
  they're the hashtag 2 like, and it's like there, but it's really
• 5:20
  Cardinals in there. Like we have friends who are
• 5:22
  invested in the seed, you know what I mean?
• 5:23
  Like, fair enough. So I, I'm trying to be
• 5:26
  diplomatic about it, but it is one of those things where I'm
• 5:29
  looking at and I'm like. You should have.
• 5:31
  Listened to me a little bit maybe.
• 5:34
  This is, you know. Say it anyway.
• 5:40
  The fact that also I was actually sorry.
• 5:43
  Side note, I do need to make this statement.
• 5:44
  I was 100% right about Gura, 100% correct.
• 5:48
  She did exactly what I said. Exactly.
• 5:52
  Just point it out there. Can't let that one go, sorry.
• 5:57
  To be fair, you the only people who were like kind of on the
• 6:01
  fence about that. Well, the only person I know who
• 6:03
  was on kind of the fence about that was Ray.
• 6:05
  And she did literally almost to AT what I said.
• 6:11
  I was like, she's going to quit. She's going to be back in a
• 6:13
  month with a similar vibe and it's going to be like nothing
• 6:16
  ever happened. She did exactly that, exactly
• 6:19
  that. I just, I just, I just had to I
• 6:25
  I, I, I just had to say, I don't know.
• 6:28
  For someone who doesn't give a shit about V tubers, you get so
• 6:31
  animated. I know I do because I have a
• 6:34
  really, I have very complicated feelings about the V tubers
• 6:37
  situation. I have very complicated feelings
• 6:39
  about it. I I know, I know you do.
• 6:41
  This is not AV tuber. Pocket, We're not going down
• 6:43
  this rabbit hole. I'm sorry.
• 6:46
  I'm sorry about the derailment. No, it's fine.
• 6:49
  I mean it still goes off the fact that that V Shojo made
• 6:51
  headline news They did yes they did yeah crazy dude laundering
• 7:01
  half a mil from charity money is wild Was it that much yeah.
• 7:06
  Oh my God 500,000 I didn't hear I didn't hear about that part
• 7:10
  yes Sir, Jesus fucking Oh my God.
• 7:16
  How do you think they don't even you're the worst crazy part is
• 7:19
  that so one of them case on what like was talking to the the
• 7:23
  Japan's CEO and was like, where'd the money go?
• 7:27
  Yeah, and he was like it. It may have gone to operational
• 7:30
  costs. Bitch.
• 7:32
  May, may, maybe may have. How does half a mil go missing?
• 7:38
  Fucker. What?
• 7:40
  That is almost exactly what Gerard the completionist said.
• 7:45
  May have been brah. Yeah, that's pretty close to
• 7:49
  what he said. Not exactly, but pretty close.
• 7:54
  Yeah. Sheesh.
• 7:58
  Sheesh. Yeah, not a good look.
• 8:03
  A massive elves dog. No, definitely not.
• 8:09
  Just can't. All right.
• 8:09
  Get us back on track. Get us back on track.
• 8:11
  Yeah. All right.
• 8:11
  You can do this. You can do this.
• 8:13
  I know, don't worry. OK, so I don't know what it is.
• 8:16
  There are some days when we record where I can't get my
• 8:19
  fucking thoughts together to save my life.
• 8:21
  And last episode of when, when we were talking about Kane
• 8:23
  proper, I like, felt so scatterbrained.
• 8:26
  It felt useless. And I'm sure that episode is
• 8:28
  fucking terrible. It's almost 3 hours long.
• 8:31
  I don't feel like that's it. I I feel like I I do want to say
• 8:35
  I think a lot of that was just because we were both really
• 8:38
  excited about the game, so we kept jumping around a lot.
• 8:41
  I really think that's what it came down to.
• 8:42
  Yeah, fair, because there's a lot of really interesting ideas
• 8:48
  that the game puts forward and it's hard not to like jump to
• 8:51
  the most exciting thing first, you know?
• 8:53
  Yeah, I mean, like, they're we definitely.
• 8:57
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 8:58
  It yeah. Anyway, it did spur some
• 9:03
  thoughts for me, though, about looking at other games.
• 9:10
  Oh, it gave me some ideas. I don't want to get into it
• 9:13
  right now, but it gave me some ideas.
• 9:14
  OK, well, as we talked about before last episode, we're going
• 9:20
  to cover just a little bit last bit of the book that we didn't
• 9:23
  get to touch on, which would be the sins themselves.
• 9:25
  And then we're going to go into a bit more of a practical talk
• 9:27
  and how I ran it and my thoughts on that.
• 9:29
  I don't have a ton of thoughts on running it because I did only
• 9:33
  run 2 sessions of a very one shot forward game, right?
• 9:36
  There's a lot of mechanics that I didn't get to interact with a
• 9:39
  ton, but I mean, yeah, but this game is pretty good for one
• 9:44
  shots. So like it is.
• 9:45
  Yeah, it's it. But it's like, you know, we
• 9:47
  still we didn't get to do the downtime.
• 9:49
  We didn't really get to play with expanding your living
• 9:52
  quarters and we only got to go with Sin pipe.
• 9:54
  We didn't fight the like tiny sins.
• 9:57
  You still you still dealt with a lot of the core functionality of
• 10:02
  the game. Fair enough.
• 10:06
  Yeah, well, without further, we're going to kind of kick it
• 10:08
  into the sins. We talked about it last.
• 10:12
  I keep almost saying last session we we maybe we should
• 10:14
  start calling out our sense sessions because it kind of
• 10:16
  feels like we should. I'm pretty sure we said we were
• 10:18
  going to do that from the start and then we didn't do that.
• 10:21
  So like, yeah, last session we were talking about the sins and
• 10:25
  sins are not that we need to do this, but they are the enemy of
• 10:31
  Cain. They are the thing that you are
• 10:34
  investigating. They are the creatures you are
• 10:36
  fighting. They're the big monster.
• 10:37
  They're the big monster, right? And they are according to sort
• 10:42
  of manifestations of a a person's latent psychic ability
• 10:47
  when deeply suffused with trauma, which is a lot of fun.
• 10:53
  And essentially what happens in the lore is when a sin
• 10:56
  manifests, they do so at a certain category, as according
• 10:59
  to the category scale we talked about last time of zero to
• 11:02
  seven, always above 0 though. And it pretty much is it.
• 11:06
  It just causes a controlled natural disaster.
• 11:11
  So with like the ogre, you know, storms and dense fog might go a
• 11:15
  Bruin. Buildings start crumbling with
• 11:18
  things like the centipede, it's just a zombie outbreak.
• 11:21
  The hound causes people to get murderous.
• 11:24
  The idol just makes cults, you know, all that fun jazz and you
• 11:28
  might be a lighter under you're you're throwing names off.
• 11:31
  What what's up with the sins? What's what's their what's their
• 11:34
  deal? And well, good question.
• 11:38
  There are six of them and we named quite a few, right?
• 11:42
  There's the ogre, which is the first one of the book, the idol
• 11:45
  hound, centipede, toad, and finally the Lord.
• 11:49
  And each one represents a different type of trauma, a
• 11:53
  different sort of inciting event that causes a person to manifest
• 12:01
  in a quick like down the run. Ogres primarily manifest through
• 12:06
  intense despair. So, you know, people in deep
• 12:12
  bouts of depression, maybe having lost a loved one or put
• 12:16
  themselves in a situation where they feel like there's no way
• 12:18
  out. We've seen in the book that it
• 12:21
  describes manifestations due to a person losing their job after
• 12:26
  years of workplace abuse, one where a person went through
• 12:31
  ridiculous hazing and crunch culture for months at their job
• 12:36
  and manifested in the company building.
• 12:38
  And I'll, well, we don't actually know what the casualty
• 12:42
  rate for that one is because it was redacted, which is very fun.
• 12:49
  And then finally, let's see, what was that one again?
• 12:53
  Oh, yeah. The murder of three high
• 12:54
  schoolers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 12:56
  Oh, it's fun. I think generally to give to
• 13:02
  give just context for what Isaiah is talking about, each of
• 13:07
  the sin sections in the book gives like samples of Canon
• 13:15
  previous missions that occurred, and it gives you little
• 13:18
  breakdowns of like basically famous notorious sins that were
• 13:23
  killed or fought or whatever by previous.
• 13:27
  What do they call them in this game?
• 13:28
  Previous exorcist. Yeah, sorry.
• 13:32
  I wanted to say hunters. I was like, that's not what they
• 13:33
  call them. No, I, I, I've yeah, I feel
• 13:36
  that. I almost wrote Hunter in my
• 13:37
  notes a couple times. Yeah.
• 13:40
  So like, one example it gives us like, oh, there's the Minotaur.
• 13:42
  It was like possessed subjects 076 postmortem type 3076 worked
• 13:48
  at a major financial firm redacted and had been suffering
• 13:52
  from workplace hazing culture and harassment for five years
• 13:54
  and seven months. Upon manifestation, the company
• 13:57
  building was converted into redacted, trapping 153 humans
• 14:01
  inside. Hunters were able to execute and
• 14:04
  exfiltrate with only a redacted percentage casualty rate.
• 14:08
  So it gives you like little sample.
• 14:12
  It's it's just it's just world building stuff, but it's to give
• 14:15
  you the vibe of each of the types of the sins.
• 14:17
  Well, so that's the fun thing, right?
• 14:19
  It is world building stuff, but it does actually inform how the
• 14:23
  investigation should be run, which is kind of neat.
• 14:26
  It informs your prep. Yeah, for sure.
• 14:28
  Yeah. I mean, I think the thing
• 14:33
  honestly, the sins in this game or the specifically the chapter
• 14:39
  of where it, it gives you the six types of sins, to me is the
• 14:44
  most interesting part of this game and is the thing that made
• 14:47
  me want to run this game more than anything else.
• 14:50
  Because if you're coming from, you know, DND or Pathfinder or
• 14:55
  Shadowrun or the OR that kind of ilk, you might assume that the
• 15:00
  sin section of the book is just, you know, stat blocks, right?
• 15:05
  Yeah. No, the sins, the each sin gets
• 15:11
  its own section and each of those sin sections is it's
• 15:17
  basically an entire adventure layout.
• 15:20
  It gives you so it, it starts with the sample like Canon sins
• 15:27
  that have been fought before. Then it gives you some trauma
• 15:30
  questions to design. You know, your specific version
• 15:33
  of an ogre or your specific version of an idol or a hound or
• 15:36
  whatever. Then it gives you what their
• 15:40
  palace is like. So the palace being the the home
• 15:44
  base of the sin that you have to fight them in at the end of the
• 15:47
  mission, then it gives you their pressure clock, which is the,
• 15:53
  you know it. It's the clock that ticks over
• 15:56
  slowly as the mission goes on until the sort of final
• 16:01
  catastrophe point. Then it gives you their traces,
• 16:05
  which is their like minion type. Then it gives you their
• 16:08
  execution section, which is how you fight them in their palace.
• 16:13
  It gives you their severe attacks.
• 16:15
  It gives you their afflictions, so like status debuffs and
• 16:19
  they're like super attack that they can do.
• 16:21
  Then it gives you their domains. Like, sorry.
• 16:27
  I'm sure you were gonna get into the sorry.
• 16:29
  Perhaps I'm jumping in a little too much.
• 16:31
  A a bit. Yeah.
• 16:32
  The point I'm making. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
• 16:34
  The point I'm making is that the sins are really, really
• 16:37
  detailed. It's not just a stat block from
• 16:40
  monster. It's a whole mission
• 16:42
  incorporated into this type of creature.
• 16:46
  And what makes it really cool is that it gives you basically
• 16:54
  everything you need as AGM to make an interesting adventure
• 16:57
  with almost no work. Like you could just do what the
• 17:01
  book tells you verbatim and you will have a banging mission.
• 17:06
  Like basically out the gate. It's really well done.
• 17:10
  Like the sin section made me the most excited in this game by
• 17:13
  far. Sorry, I didn't mean to jump his
• 17:17
  head so much, but it's yeah, I mean, like I, I was, I, I
• 17:19
  literally was going to say I think the ogre is the perfect
• 17:23
  let's you're killing me. I literally about to say I think
• 17:26
  the ogre is the ideal first hunt because I think it's the easiest
• 17:31
  to run, it's the most straightforward and it gives you
• 17:33
  really good fluff on each of the topics.
• 17:35
  And I was going to explain what each of those fucking things
• 17:37
  were. It's basically, I mean, you, you
• 17:41
  can, you can go into it a little deeper, but basically what I'm
• 17:44
  saying is it's that idea where a lot of people go to play DND and
• 17:51
  they're like, oh, I want to run a dragon and I want to make the
• 17:54
  whole adventure around this dragon, right?
• 17:59
  DND doesn't give you that much information, or that much.
• 18:05
  It doesn't give you a lot of hooks about how to run a fully
• 18:10
  dragon based adventure. It gives you little tidbits here
• 18:13
  and there, but you really got of extrapolate yourself from a very
• 18:19
  small amount of information. This game is like you want to
• 18:22
  run an ogre mission, or an idol mission, or a hound mission.
• 18:27
  Here's every single step you need.
• 18:31
  And then once you've run this game a whole bunch, like let's
• 18:33
  say you run Kane like, I don't know, three years in a row, like
• 18:37
  you've run nothing but Kane. So you've run through every
• 18:40
  possible combination of the existing stuff that's in the
• 18:43
  game. You will now know the game well
• 18:45
  enough that you can expand upon it.
• 18:48
  So the game gives you a really good starting set of
• 18:52
  information. And then once you've played the
• 18:54
  game a lot, you can expand upon it really easily because it gave
• 19:00
  you the game, gives you really good training wheels, is what
• 19:04
  I'm saying. Like to run it.
• 19:07
  It gives you. Excellent training wheels for
• 19:09
  you to learn, and then once you've learned, you can go far
• 19:13
  beyond the game and totally master it on a in a whole new
• 19:16
  way. Yes, it's just this kind of
• 19:20
  stuff. The reason this got me animated
• 19:22
  is because this kind of shit is what I look at in the game and
• 19:27
  gets me excited. Like I want to run this game.
• 19:31
  Like when I read Cain I was interested when I was reading
• 19:34
  through all the Exorcist stuff and the player stuff.
• 19:37
  But when I got to The Sims I was like OK now I want to run this
• 19:41
  game. And for me personally, because I
• 19:44
  tend to be AGM far more often than I am a player and I
• 19:47
  generally prefer to GM most of the time, I actually I am.
• 19:52
  I am the the smaller minority of people when it comes to to RPGs
• 19:56
  where I prefer to be the GM. I'm always looking for games
• 20:00
  that give me AGM section that give me lots of meaty girthy
• 20:04
  shit to like, yes, I have, I could do something here, you
• 20:08
  know, like that's why the start, that's why the all the without
• 20:10
  numbers game, right? Stars and and worlds and
• 20:14
  everything get me so animated because those games are like
• 20:18
  meaty girthy GM shit, you know what I mean?
• 20:24
  Sorry, I I did. I did not mean to jump ahead so
• 20:27
  much, but I had. I had to.
• 20:31
  Yeah. I had to say Hilton.
• 20:32
  It's fine. It got me hyped.
• 20:34
  It got me hyped. Yeah.
• 20:37
  I did sort of go out of order by sort of describing what was
• 20:39
  going on in the archive, the archives, before I talked about
• 20:42
  it. Fair enough.
• 20:43
  But yeah. So yes.
• 20:46
  Or was I? Yes.
• 20:47
  The ogre manifests through people who are struck him with
• 20:51
  deep despair, feelings of grief, self hatred, inadequacy, misery,
• 20:55
  all that fun stuff. There are trauma questions,
• 20:58
  which we talked about in an earlier section.
• 21:00
  It's the the main leads that you have to follow on your
• 21:03
  investigation. The things that you should be
• 21:05
  looking for to help you put everything else together or
• 21:07
  within context are who or what pushed you into this hole, who
• 21:13
  or what is keeping you from going over the edge, and what
• 21:16
  are you most ashamed of. I love these questions
• 21:19
  specifically because not only is it, oh, we have to find this
• 21:23
  person, you know, they might be in danger.
• 21:26
  There's a little bit of of insinuation, almost like
• 21:30
  accusatorily. So what are you most ashamed of
• 21:33
  it? You know, it's like, what did
• 21:35
  you do to 'cause this, which I like a lot.
• 21:37
  And the reason why I like it is when my players were looking at
• 21:42
  them as they were going through the investigation, it really put
• 21:46
  them on edge to know whether or not the host is a villain or
• 21:49
  not. So they would find anybody who
• 21:53
  they thought was a host. And, you know, a player would
• 21:57
  always try to do good cop. A player would always try to do
• 21:59
  bad cop. And the other was typically
• 22:03
  walking around the room trying to, like, be the middleman.
• 22:08
  Yeah. And that's fun.
• 22:09
  That creates drama in a really, really interesting way.
• 22:13
  Yeah. I mean, for me, the reason I
• 22:16
  really love the trauma questions is because I look at those and I
• 22:20
  go, these are amazing. They're great improv prompts,
• 22:28
  They're great writing prompts for me to springboard off into
• 22:34
  just a fucking plethora of ideas, you know what I mean?
• 22:38
  Right? And I think games that games
• 22:45
  that really make me want to run them are games that leave a lot
• 22:48
  of really good open questions. And these trauma questions are
• 22:53
  just inherently that. So yeah, it's it just, it gets
• 22:59
  you thinking. As soon as you read them, your
• 23:01
  brain starts firing off ideas, you know, like almost
• 23:05
  subconsciously, right. And I, I think the, the reason
• 23:08
  why I think the Ogre is better than the Hound, even though I
• 23:11
  would argue that the, the Hound is more straightforward, is
• 23:15
  because I think a lot of the work that it does in, in not
• 23:20
  just the manifestation, but their domains specifically in
• 23:23
  the way the palace has talked about, really lend to the ogre
• 23:27
  being effective. Just all of it.
• 23:30
  Like the, the, the, the pressure, right?
• 23:32
  Each sin comes with a unique pressure.
• 23:34
  It's the thing that you are actively trying to combat
• 23:37
  against. It's not a physical doomsday
• 23:39
  Clock. It's the Doomsday Clock.
• 23:41
  It's a miasma. It's a black choking fog that
• 23:46
  corrodes and corrupts everything it touches.
• 23:49
  If it's there long enough. And it even starts to affect you
• 23:51
  as the exorcist, you know, your your hair starts to fall out,
• 23:55
  you start to age visibly, your teeth fall out, your nosebleeds.
• 23:59
  You can do so much amazing work with that.
• 24:04
  And none. Of it necessarily even has to
• 24:06
  have any like mechanical effects, right it just has to be
• 24:11
  really poignant beats that you hit that make the players think
• 24:15
  that they're about to incur a level of harm, you know what I
• 24:18
  mean? Yes, yeah, I think, you know, I
• 24:24
  talked about it. I'm going to keep doing this.
• 24:26
  I talked about it again in the last episode, right?
• 24:28
  This game has a really interesting relationship with
• 24:33
  perceived difficulty as opposed to like actual practical
• 24:37
  difficulty. It really makes.
• 24:40
  You think like your back is up against the wall and you've got
• 24:43
  no chance but if. You keep pushing.
• 24:46
  Through you'll do it. Yeah.
• 24:50
  I mean it it does have a little bit of a meat grinder effect,
• 24:54
  but. It gives you.
• 25:00
  I may have said this last episode, I don't remember, but
• 25:03
  it gives you enough. It gives you enough tools to
• 25:08
  weight the meat grinder in your favor that the meat grinder
• 25:13
  effect feels less shitty. I am of the.
• 25:20
  Opinion. And perhaps some people.
• 25:24
  Would disagree, but I am of the opinion that the meat grinder
• 25:28
  in. Games and I.
• 25:29
  Don't know this mean tabletop. I think this applies to video
• 25:31
  games and board games and any any kind of game.
• 25:34
  The meat grinder effect. Only pisses.
• 25:38
  You off if you feel like you had no chance to tip the scales
• 25:44
  towards yourself, right? If there's nothing you could
• 25:47
  have done to weight the scales at all, then you're.
• 25:51
  You get. Pissed off because it feels like
• 25:53
  well I just had no chance. I was guaranteed fuck.
• 25:56
  But if there are tools you can utilize to fuck with that
• 26:00
  percentage, to fuck with that that seesaw of of difficulty,
• 26:06
  then you don't feel as mad even if the like.
• 26:10
  Even if the seesaw. Is weighted against you by
• 26:13
  default. If you can affect which side,
• 26:17
  like if you could affect the percentage of which it tilts,
• 26:20
  you still won't feel as bad about it, you know what I mean?
• 26:23
  Because you still feel like you have that element of agency,
• 26:26
  right? No 100% the meat grinders only
• 26:29
  feel shitty when you don't like in, even in a game where you
• 26:33
  know you're going to die. You feel less shitty.
• 26:37
  About the meat grinder, if you at least get to go out doing
• 26:40
  something cool, right? Yeah, we've talked.
• 26:43
  Literally the Dark Souls effect, it's, it's Dark Souls right?
• 26:47
  Because the meat grinder of Dark Souls, you are unlikely to walk
• 26:53
  into a boss room, fight the boss, and win, right?
• 26:55
  Every once in a while it happens, but for the most part
• 26:58
  you're gonna walk into a boss, fight the boss, and get your ass
• 27:02
  beat because you don't know what the boss can do.
• 27:04
  But you are learning every time you slam your head against the
• 27:09
  boss so the the scale the the seesaw is always tipping.
• 27:15
  Every time you do another run the scale, the seesaw scale tips
• 27:19
  ever so slightly in your direction.
• 27:23
  And in a. Tabletop game, you don't have
• 27:26
  that infinite respawning element that something like Dark Souls
• 27:30
  has, but you can tip the dice and the percentages and the
• 27:35
  effects of your abilities, you can tip those in your direction.
• 27:39
  So as long as there's something there that you can work towards,
• 27:43
  you're not as mad. Like, it only feels shitty when
• 27:48
  you walk into the room and the boss punches you in the Dick and
• 27:52
  you take 100 damage and there was no way for you to do
• 27:54
  anything about it no matter what.
• 27:57
  Yeah, You know, it's, it's I I guess agency is really the word
• 28:01
  I'm looking for. If you have agency in the
• 28:03
  events. Yeah.
• 28:04
  Agency. Your ability to put up a fight.
• 28:06
  And like, you know, true, true to the point of the Dark Souls
• 28:09
  thing, when you die in Dark Souls 'cause you pulled off a
• 28:12
  sick move, but you just didn't have the timing down right,
• 28:15
  You're like, oh shit, can I do that again?
• 28:17
  You know, like, yeah, it gets you excited to do it.
• 28:19
  It's that knowledge. And I'm jumping ahead a little
• 28:22
  bit my notes. But it is.
• 28:23
  There's no other better way to put this is this game.
• 28:27
  Captures. That idea to a team.
• 28:30
  Yeah, yeah. And it it.
• 28:31
  It comes in the form just like no better way than the severe
• 28:36
  attack. Every.
• 28:39
  Single sin has what's called a severe attack.
• 28:41
  It's their their finishing move, their super attack, whatever you
• 28:44
  want to do and level. 3. Yeah, it it's, Yeah, I put this
• 28:49
  at the very end of my notes. It should have been higher.
• 28:53
  It's. Basically a.
• 28:54
  Once per investigation finishing move that sins can do to inflict
• 28:58
  like crazy damage on an exorcist and I mean.
• 29:02
  Basically. It could potentially insta kill
• 29:04
  somebody and it's. Really supposed.
• 29:07
  To make you feel that visceral, visceral, fuck me visceral and
• 29:11
  really memorable moment in each investigation.
• 29:15
  Because that's the point where your player, either you know,
• 29:18
  they'll die outright because you're out of injuries.
• 29:21
  You'll have to make a defy fate role to become an imago.
• 29:25
  Or if none of those happen, you get a cool new sin mark to
• 29:29
  remember the occasion by. And I think that's that's, you
• 29:33
  know. The game doesn't say.
• 29:37
  This but I. Think that.
• 29:40
  There should be a hard rule for this where the the severe attack
• 29:43
  should be the final thing a sin does, because technically you
• 29:47
  could just have the sin show up and nail a player with a severe
• 29:51
  attack if they, you know, off the pressure gauge.
• 29:54
  But that's not going to feel fun that that's going to feel like
• 29:56
  the bad kind of meat grinder where it just it's shows up, you
• 30:00
  got dipped on and then it just fucked off.
• 30:02
  You're like, all right, well, now I'm down an injury and I
• 30:04
  can't use my psychic powers as much.
• 30:06
  What was that? What was the point of that?
• 30:08
  It's a. Little it's.
• 30:10
  Kind of similar to in Daggerhart the game the adversaries, you
• 30:18
  have the ability to spend the what's.
• 30:22
  It called the fear tokens. Right, the adversaries accrue
• 30:26
  fear tokens and the. Game says.
• 30:30
  If a player character imposes a debuff on the adversaries, they
• 30:36
  can use fear tokens as an action to clear the debuff.
• 30:41
  Which technically means technically means.
• 30:47
  I don't know, stumbled over that word.
• 30:49
  Don't worry about it. I'm there with you.
• 30:51
  Yeah. Technically.
• 30:52
  Means. Rules is written in Daggerhart A
• 30:55
  adversary like if you stun an adversary they can immediately
• 31:00
  clear that debuff like right after you do it.
• 31:04
  But the game says. This is something you.
• 31:08
  As the GM could do, but we encourage you not to do that.
• 31:14
  Because it. Feels shitty to play that way,
• 31:19
  and this is kind of the same thing.
• 31:22
  You can open up with the severe attack on turn 1 if you want to,
• 31:27
  but it feels shitty to do that and.
• 31:30
  Some people. Might say, well, I as the GMI
• 31:35
  should always do the most optimal thing, But a game like
• 31:38
  Kane or Daggerheart or Dungeon World or even Fabulous to some
• 31:44
  extent, don't expect you to do the immediately optimal thing
• 31:50
  right out the gate because. The.
• 31:54
  Style of fiction that they are invoking doesn't do that
• 32:00
  particularly Kane especially right if you're thinking about
• 32:03
  Kane which is pulling from shown in battle anime primarily the.
• 32:09
  The Ookie spooky monster bad guy.
• 32:11
  Does not open with their most powerful attack right from the
• 32:14
  jump because from a narrative perspective that would fucking
• 32:19
  be lame. You know like if if you're
• 32:23
  watching Bleach and you know it's the battle between Aizen
• 32:28
  and the Ichigo and Aizen just whips out his ultimate fucking
• 32:33
  fuck you Bon Kai distort reality attack thing.
• 32:35
  I don't remember what it's called but you know what I'm
• 32:37
  talking about. He's like his like invert
• 32:40
  reality attack right from the jump.
• 32:43
  It's kind of lame. Like you, there's no build up of
• 32:45
  tension. He just immediately shuts down
• 32:47
  the main character, right? This game is asking you to
• 32:51
  operate in that headspace and. That's not to.
• 32:55
  Say and I think it's important things that it's not to say that
• 32:58
  you shouldn't ever break that rhythm, but what it.
• 33:02
  Does mean? Is that if you do break that
• 33:04
  rhythm, make it important, right?
• 33:06
  The reason why Super Deal and JJK is such a monster is because
• 33:11
  he does whip out his final attack first because he's like
• 33:14
  I'm not doing this bullshit and. That's what makes him.
• 33:17
  Like frightening, right? Because there is no let the be
• 33:20
  like the the protagonist have their fun.
• 33:24
  If you treat it like that. And save it for like a super
• 33:27
  powerful high end sin that's like sentient, like an idol
• 33:32
  that'll feel a lot more earned or like a Lord that'll feel a
• 33:35
  lot more earned. Yeah, it it's.
• 33:41
  It really it? It's.
• 33:44
  Narrative. Pacing, right At the end of the
• 33:46
  day, it's. It's the idea that at least in.
• 33:53
  The current. Iteration of how people play
• 33:56
  tabletop games. They want to.
• 33:59
  Mimic the narrative pacing of their favorite media, right?
• 34:06
  People play DND or Kane or Fabula and they're trying to
• 34:11
  mimic anime, they're trying to mimic video games, right?
• 34:15
  They want to mimic that narrative pacing because it
• 34:17
  feels satisfying to to embody that moment.
• 34:22
  So. You want to take.
• 34:26
  The rules of the game and try and keep them within that flow
• 34:30
  because that's what feels most satisfying, even if from a
• 34:33
  gameplay standpoint it's not the most quote UN quote effective.
• 34:39
  I like, I mean, I don't know. I, I sort of disagree.
• 34:42
  I was going to say I I sort of disagree with you should always
• 34:45
  play enemies the most optimally. I yeah, like part of part of
• 34:52
  your fun as AGM is to test the players, not beat them.
• 34:56
  And like, I'm not calling you. I've seen this, this opinion
• 34:59
  online a lot where it's like, oh, why wouldn't I just fly
• 35:02
  around as a dragon Indian and just wait for my the dragon is
• 35:06
  like weaponry rolls to pop and it's like, yeah, yeah, the
• 35:08
  dragon is the classic exam cause dog that's boring.
• 35:12
  Like, right. It's.
• 35:13
  Boring, yeah. It's not in boring for you,
• 35:15
  that's boring for the players and if you're running it that
• 35:17
  way, you just want to win. In which case, like why?
• 35:22
  Yeah. Because if you.
• 35:23
  If you look at any. Fantasy.
• 35:27
  Show or video game or book or whatever.
• 35:32
  It it's. Never that the dragon flies up
• 35:35
  in the air and swoops back and forth and shoots fire, right?
• 35:39
  And if it is that situation, what happens is what do the main
• 35:43
  characters do? They like, hide in a cave and
• 35:46
  make a strategy, or they, like, duck into cover and get to the
• 35:49
  ballista to try and shoot the dragon at right.
• 35:51
  There's always like a tension element.
• 35:53
  It's not just the dragon making strafing maneuvers.
• 35:57
  Yeah, 'cause it's boring. It it it doesn't.
• 36:01
  It doesn't. Inspire.
• 36:02
  It doesn't get that that. I don't know what the word I
• 36:06
  want. Here, but it doesn't invoke that
• 36:08
  that sense of like. Cool.
• 36:13
  You know, yeah, I know. I mean, it creates some Ludo
• 36:15
  narrative disco biscuits for sure a little bit, but but it
• 36:18
  but it, it's it's Ludo narrative dissonance for the sake of the
• 36:22
  narrative, you know, like for a purpose.
• 36:25
  It's it's funny because did you play Undertale?
• 36:31
  No. No, I wanted to.
• 36:34
  It got it. Everything got ruined for me
• 36:36
  because that's how the Internet works.
• 36:38
  I have complicated feelings about, but if you do the
• 36:42
  genocide run when you go to fight Sands, he has a line where
• 36:46
  he so like he throws a bunch of attacks at you and then he says
• 36:51
  I don't understand why bad guys don't just use their super
• 36:54
  attack right from the OR their most powerful attack right from
• 36:56
  the start, right? Like he makes a joke.
• 36:59
  About it. And that's Toby Fox
• 37:01
  acknowledging the trope, you know?
• 37:05
  But in reality, Sans is not using his most powerful attack
• 37:09
  right from the jump. It's just like a cheeky, like,
• 37:11
  satire of the trope. So it's it's a thing everyone's
• 37:14
  aware of. Like everyone knows this is a
• 37:16
  thing. So play into it 100%.
• 37:20
  Yeah. Right.
• 37:21
  Like, yeah. And I I think.
• 37:23
  So again, we're doing the notes a little bit out of order, but
• 37:27
  sorry, it almost feels like the no, you're good.
• 37:29
  It feels like the game understands this.
• 37:32
  And yeah, I think the game absolutely understands this.
• 37:36
  Yeah, because, you know, the stings don't have a stat block.
• 37:40
  Effectively they're just using the dungeon rolled or or PBCA
• 37:43
  methodology by using tags to inform abilities.
• 37:46
  And and by nature, a sin has to be reactive.
• 37:50
  Sins are do anything. Honestly, the the.
• 37:54
  Sin pages, like the sin pages in the book, they are.
• 37:59
  They're mission structures. They're not.
• 38:01
  They are. Yeah, stat blocks for a monster
• 38:03
  they are. They are full on missions.
• 38:07
  Under the. Guise of a quote UN quote
• 38:10
  monster stat block. But really, they are a a, a
• 38:13
  whole, a wholesale mission start to finish.
• 38:18
  It's it's honestly. It's it's a little clever
• 38:22
  because. You're almost.
• 38:25
  Kind of tricking the DND players into running like a mission
• 38:32
  based monster without maybe realizing they're doing it.
• 38:36
  You know what I mean? Like there's, there's some I
• 38:38
  have thoughts about the the like first time GM, all you've played
• 38:42
  is D and DI. Don't worry.
• 38:43
  I've thought about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 38:44
  There's some clever. I don't want to say manipulation
• 38:47
  per SE, but there's some clever. Writing methodology.
• 38:54
  Into getting you out of that D&D mindset.
• 38:59
  Yeah. And I you, I know you must be.
• 39:04
  This game is very sorry, talking too fast.
• 39:11
  This game is very. I guess analytical is probably a
• 39:15
  better word. This game is very analytical
• 39:17
  about game design, right? Yeah.
• 39:22
  And right, you know what I mean. Yeah, I do.
• 39:24
  Yeah. And dear listener, you might be
• 39:25
  asking, what do you mean when you say the Sins can't do
• 39:28
  anything? Well, that's kind of true.
• 39:33
  The Sins don't have attacks. It's kind of true they can't
• 39:36
  attack you. They can do the the their severe
• 39:39
  attack on you. That is something they can do no
• 39:42
  matter what. That's not a reaction thing.
• 39:43
  You can just say at any point, OK, after a player's finished
• 39:46
  their turn, the Sin is going to do their thing.
• 39:49
  But whenever you attack the Sin, they get to react to you.
• 39:55
  So it basically the way it works.
• 39:57
  Is is let's say you're fighting the sin, you're always going to
• 40:00
  roll with risk unless you set up or use teamwork or anything like
• 40:03
  that. And when you roll with risk you
• 40:05
  roll your wrist eye and and the game literally says execution
• 40:09
  attacks with what that means is if you roll for example 4 plus
• 40:15
  you take two stress and you can describe that it uses it either
• 40:20
  its teeth, claws, the fetid water around it, or the black
• 40:23
  spew that it pukes out. To hit them.
• 40:27
  And it gives you a number. Of how much stress a player
• 40:29
  takes based on that. At one they take 5, two to three
• 40:32
  they take 3/4, plus they take 2. Can.
• 40:36
  Can. I just say 2.
• 40:37
  I don't know if I said this previous in the previous
• 40:42
  episode. I.
• 40:46
  Fucking. Love the tension.
• 40:48
  Dye Oh yeah. It's so cool because I have a
• 40:53
  very, very specific feeling about it.
• 41:00
  The what Apocalypse World was doing right where it took the
• 41:05
  failure, Middling success, full success, right That paradigm.
• 41:11
  The tension die. Feels like a really interesting
• 41:15
  evolution of that concept because.
• 41:20
  It's not. About what did the.
• 41:23
  Player roll. It's like OK, the player rolled
• 41:27
  a success or not and then the GM rolls this this.
• 41:33
  Tension die. Which is a response to their
• 41:36
  role. Like it's a really interesting
• 41:38
  back and forth where effectively what's happening is.
• 41:44
  The player is. Making a check to see if they
• 41:46
  succeed, and the GM is making a check to see if they succeed.
• 41:51
  And there's degrees of success on both sides.
• 41:56
  Like it's, it's a really. Cool evolution of that middling
• 42:00
  success concept that Apocalypse World started.
• 42:04
  And I am positive, with no evidence to say it all, I'm
• 42:11
  positive that Tom Blune has read and probably run Apocalypse
• 42:16
  World in some capacity, because I can absolutely see in this
• 42:20
  game what his train of thought is.
• 42:24
  You know what I mean? Yeah, no, 100%.
• 42:28
  So yeah, I love. The tension die.
• 42:30
  I love that it 'cause it it takes, it takes the concept of
• 42:36
  degrees of success and it adds in that element of randomness
• 42:40
  that everybody likes and it adds in the the idea of success or
• 42:46
  failure on the player side. Like it takes both sides into
• 42:50
  account in a really fun way. Because ultimately the.
• 42:56
  Randomness. Right, you want randomness.
• 43:00
  On both sides of the table, and I think that's the thing that a
• 43:03
  lot of games miss out on, like AD and D or a Pathfinder.
• 43:09
  When you're running D and. D5E there's.
• 43:13
  Not that much. Randomness on the GM side of the
• 43:16
  table. You as the GM kind of know
• 43:18
  what's going to happen most of the time.
• 43:21
  And then there will be these little moments of randomness.
• 43:24
  They're like, oh shit, that's crazy.
• 43:26
  But for the most part, you know how it's going to happen because
• 43:28
  the game is very calculated in its design.
• 43:33
  The tension to. The tension die throws that out
• 43:37
  the window in a way, because you have this element of randomness
• 43:42
  that you, as the GM have to capitulate to.
• 43:46
  And you can't. You can't manipulate it.
• 43:51
  You can't control it. Rules is written, of course, you
• 43:53
  know you can if you just ignore it.
• 43:54
  But Rules is written. You have no way to manipulate
• 43:58
  it. If it rolls A1, it rolls A1.
• 44:01
  If it rolls a six, it rolls a six.
• 44:03
  You like you have to bow down to the tension die no matter what.
• 44:06
  Yeah, like. It's just, it's a.
• 44:09
  Great again. It goes back to that.
• 44:12
  Improv idea. It just, it forces you to improv
• 44:15
  things in a way that's well, it also it like like you're saying
• 44:18
  it does the IT has a mind of its own thing, right?
• 44:21
  Where it's like, Oh yes, you rolled A1 on the on a risk die
• 44:24
  or on a tension die or whatever. Now the tension is going up by 1
• 44:29
  like that. And that could push you to a
• 44:32
  higher pressure and that will force a pressure move and a
• 44:36
  tension move which will push the narrative forward.
• 44:39
  It like, yeah, it's, it's literally like if, if, if, if
• 44:42
  the GM is on one side of the table and the players on the
• 44:46
  other, the GM is is rolling the slot machine and everyone looks
• 44:49
  over to see what it rolls like. Yeah, yeah, it's a slot machine
• 44:54
  on both sides and it's an. It's it's a slot machine.
• 44:59
  But it's also a narratively interesting slot machine, right?
• 45:04
  Because you. Could say.
• 45:07
  Oh, well, in D&D there's a slot machine on both sides.
• 45:10
  But the slot machine on the GM side is really fucking boring,
• 45:14
  right? Like it's the attack hits or it
• 45:17
  doesn't for the most part. You know, like, it's not a very
• 45:21
  interesting slot machine on the GM side.
• 45:24
  In Kane, the slot machine on the GM side can swing things wildly
• 45:29
  out of control in a way that you were not expecting, and you got
• 45:35
  to deal with that again. Assuming you're.
• 45:40
  Doing what the game is asking you to do, right?
• 45:42
  That's always the caveat here. You can ignore the game if you
• 45:45
  want. Always.
• 45:46
  You can always ignore the game. But.
• 45:49
  If you're letting the. Game take you for the ride that
• 45:51
  it wants to take you you. Have to obey that.
• 45:54
  Slot machine, right? I I think another like the other
• 46:00
  sort of answer to the what sins can do and this sort of matters
• 46:04
  because it it ties into the the idea of you just got to sit and
• 46:09
  like shut up and see basically is the domains, right?
• 46:12
  Josh talked about them a little bit.
• 46:14
  Domains are the like. They are the rules.
• 46:18
  Of the Palace. They're the rules of the bounded
• 46:21
  field. If you think about it like they,
• 46:23
  they are the the the hazards that you must abide by and that
• 46:27
  you as the GM have to confront the players with that They
• 46:32
  therefore have to figure out they're the they're the regional
• 46:37
  effects. If you want to like DND it they
• 46:39
  are. And something interesting, they
• 46:41
  almost become layer actions during a fight.
• 46:45
  Yeah, Yeah, they're more important than regional effects.
• 46:47
  They take on a life of their own.
• 46:49
  But that's the closest equivalent I could say.
• 46:52
  Yeah, I know. Like, basically what I'm saying
• 46:54
  is that they they start, they are, you know, regional effects.
• 46:58
  And the game does this really genius thing where when you
• 47:01
  start the fight, they almost become layer actions.
• 47:04
  They become more important and they take an active role in the
• 47:07
  battle, which is really cool. Yeah, like they they.
• 47:11
  They become background and then you start the fight and they
• 47:14
  they leap into the foreground. Yeah, and they all have, which
• 47:19
  again is very anime. Yes, and they have very anime.
• 47:24
  They have the best names. I side note, I really I I don't
• 47:29
  know if I could emphasize this enough.
• 47:31
  This game is really really good at taking the anime, the shonen
• 47:39
  anime vibe and pushing it to the forefront like well.
• 47:43
  I mean it really. Hits that shonen vibe like have
• 47:46
  you've watched JoJo or Jujitsu Kaizen?
• 47:48
  Chainsaw man, bleach like it. Oh, it hits it so good.
• 47:52
  Well dude, fucking the, the idol.
• 47:54
  Like the, the image for the idol.
• 47:55
  I, I, I feel like we have to put this in, in the thumbnail 'cause
• 47:59
  it's so evocative. But the, the image for the idol
• 48:02
  is like a skinny, you know, anime looking character with his
• 48:05
  hands in his pockets. And there's this awful Cthulhu
• 48:09
  woman inside a mouth, like hugging him from behind with all
• 48:14
  of these hands scattering across him.
• 48:15
  It looks like when, Oh no, what's her name from Chainsaw
• 48:19
  man? When she, she fully manifests
• 48:21
  the ghost devil and all the hands start touching down and
• 48:24
  like tracking towards dude. It has such good imagery.
• 48:28
  It's fantastic. It it really, there's this,
• 48:34
  there's a, there's a kind of a funny thing where I feel like.
• 48:39
  I feel like it's. Undeniable that tabletop broadly
• 48:43
  as a hobby is taking from anime a lot these days.
• 48:48
  And some. Games try to pretend like
• 48:51
  they're not and some games just lean into it wholesale.
• 48:56
  Right. Like 5 E is anime as fuck dude.
• 49:01
  Right, like if you start looking at some of the abilities that
• 49:06
  player characters get in 5E these days.
• 49:09
  It's some anime. Ass nonsense, right?
• 49:12
  It's fucking anime like superpower bullshit, but 5 E
• 49:17
  kind of tries to pretend like that's not what it's doing.
• 49:21
  This game is like, yeah, that's a different a whole other
• 49:26
  discussion. This game is like, no, no, no,
• 49:29
  no, no, we're fucking weebs and we're gonna do the weeb thing.
• 49:34
  I mean, they literally give you discount Sacharu Gojo on episode
• 49:38
  Yeah 100%. Like, yeah, it's so unabashed
• 49:42
  with the and. I love it because.
• 49:46
  Yeah, like why? Ignore your.
• 49:50
  When it's when it's so. Clear the roots you're pulling
• 49:52
  from. Why are you trying to pretend
• 49:54
  like you're not? You know it.
• 49:56
  It's. Weird it is.
• 49:57
  Weird. I I don't know.
• 49:58
  No, I, I don't know why 5 E is doing this weird thing that's
• 50:02
  trying to pretend like it's not pulling from Anna William.
• 50:04
  It's so clearly is, you know, I don't know, it's very odd.
• 50:10
  It's funny, actually. I was listening to an episode of
• 50:12
  the Eldridge Roller cast today and they were literally talking
• 50:15
  about the idea of the class fantasy.
• 50:21
  And one of the guys, so one of the people on the Eldridge
• 50:25
  Roller cast, Sean Merwin is he's an older dude.
• 50:29
  He's like mid 60s or whatever. And he's been playing DND since
• 50:32
  like early 2nd edition, right? And he literally said he was
• 50:38
  like I'm. Asking this.
• 50:40
  Question to you guys as my younger Co host and he straight
• 50:45
  up said because I don't watch anime and I don't play a lot of
• 50:49
  video games so do you think the class fantasy has changed
• 50:54
  because of those things? So the old fucking grognard
• 50:59
  who's been playing since like first or second edition is
• 51:03
  acknowledging that the game is 100% taking from these
• 51:07
  subcultures, but the game itself doesn't acknowledge that for
• 51:12
  some. Reason.
• 51:16
  Like, it's weird, you know? I don't know.
• 51:19
  I know it is weird. It is weird.
• 51:21
  Like I don't know what to do with that.
• 51:23
  It's weird. It almost feels like.
• 51:26
  Because there's also like a. Marvelification, right.
• 51:28
  It's everything in D&D is like really shiny now, really
• 51:30
  vibrant. Yeah, yeah.
• 51:32
  But like if you, you do a little, you do a little scratchy
• 51:35
  at the corner and you're like. There's a lot of shown in
• 51:38
  battle. Anime and then, you know, no,
• 51:40
  no, no, you didn't see that. You didn't see that?
• 51:43
  No, we did we. Saw it even even.
• 51:45
  Marvel the. MCU is doing shown in battle
• 51:50
  anime shit in the movies. Yeah.
• 51:53
  You know, like. Listen, I.
• 51:58
  All right, we're both. We're both.
• 52:00
  What would be? Considered somewhat wizened
• 52:02
  weebs these days. But sight to me not.
• 52:07
  As old magics fly, what they, what they were, Yeah.
• 52:10
  Listen, I like, I'm not trying to be that guy, but I look at a
• 52:13
  lot of stuff right now and I'm like, is that a JoJo?
• 52:17
  Reference. Is that a bleach?
• 52:18
  Reference. Is that a DPZ reference?
• 52:20
  Wait a minute. You know, No.
• 52:22
  Yeah. And a lot of times, yeah, it's
• 52:23
  hard to ignore. It is.
• 52:25
  It is. It is.
• 52:27
  It's hard to ignore. Sorry, we're going to get out a
• 52:31
  little. Bit of a tangent, I just like
• 52:32
  that this I like that this game is embracing that that aspect of
• 52:38
  the hobby and like really leaning into it.
• 52:42
  That's what I was trying. That's what I was getting into.
• 52:45
  I, I don't think it has a choice.
• 52:47
  I I think it has to acknowledge it because if it doesn't, it
• 52:51
  loses out on a massive part of its like core identity you.
• 52:56
  Know what I mean Like. Can you imagine if if D&D just
• 52:59
  was like inspired by Tolkien? What?
• 53:02
  No, what? That's not true.
• 53:03
  Wait, what could? How could that be true?
• 53:05
  I mean, you should point at everything.
• 53:08
  Yeah. Like, listen, Tolkien is still a
• 53:11
  factor. Like we can't ignore Tolkien in
• 53:13
  the same way that you can ignore Frank Herbert in in modern
• 53:17
  sci-fi. But you have to acknowledge that
• 53:20
  Tolkien is being fused with Kubo and Toriyama.
• 53:24
  No, no, no, that's that's kind of what I'm saying, right?
• 53:26
  Is that like D&D can't do that any more than Kane can, Right.
• 53:31
  If if if you if it tried Kane as a premise doesn't work.
• 53:37
  Because you take away. All of the bombastic fight back
• 53:41
  that you have yes right yeah, you you can't like you lose all
• 53:46
  of that identity and then it's just Warhammer without any of
• 53:51
  the big guns it's. Just.
• 53:54
  Warhammer and then it. It wouldn't even have the
• 53:57
  decency. To be dark tied where that's
• 53:59
  kind of the point, you know? Right, right.
• 54:01
  Right. Yeah, yeah.
• 54:03
  So it it needs to embrace. All of like the good, the bad.
• 54:07
  And the ugly 100% like does it make any sense that this like
• 54:11
  clandestine organization is dressing up their exorcist like,
• 54:14
  you know, in fucking school uniforms?
• 54:16
  No, but that's like a really evocative outfit.
• 54:19
  It looks sick, especially when you mix it with the like the
• 54:22
  nuns habit, like the the one character she's got the school
• 54:24
  uniform with the habit top with the little cat ear, the the the
• 54:27
  the bear ears on it. You're like, that's a sick image
• 54:31
  that's cool as fuck. Or the one that's got the Desert
• 54:33
  Eagle and she's smoking a cigarette and she's wearing like
• 54:35
  a private school uniform. You're like, she looks dope as
• 54:38
  fuck. Honestly, I could do an I.
• 54:45
  I could do a a multi page dissertation on how anime has
• 54:49
  subconsciously suffused western culture as it is currently like.
• 54:59
  It's just validation. It's just validation.
• 55:02
  I don't know how else to put it. I was the weirdo in the early
• 55:05
  2000 watching this shit and be like, yo, this shit's sick.
• 55:09
  And now in the in the 2020 era, everyone else just caught on.
• 55:14
  It was like, hey, yo, this anime shit's pretty sick.
• 55:16
  And I'm like, I know that's what I was telling you.
• 55:18
  The whole it's crazy that I'm having casual talks about anime
• 55:21
  with with my passengers. Oh, right, it's so.
• 55:24
  Crazy. Dude, it's crazy.
• 55:26
  It really is it, It's crazy. I I was having a conversation
• 55:31
  with my boss about anime and how I legitimately think anime is
• 55:37
  like the best, one of the best visual storytelling mediums in
• 55:41
  existence. It's crazy, it really is.
• 55:48
  I. It I feel.
• 55:50
  Like if someone wanted to do like a, a, like a historical
• 55:55
  dissertation for their masters about like cultural influences
• 55:59
  and how the Western style and the Eastern style merged into
• 56:04
  this new thing, it's such a rabbit hole.
• 56:07
  It's such a rabbit hole. It really is.
• 56:10
  If you want a great. Example, just watch Avatar.
• 56:13
  Just watch Avatar. Yeah, no, that's true.
• 56:14
  Yeah, Last Last Airbender. Not the blue people shit.
• 56:17
  Get that blue people shit out here.
• 56:18
  I don't know. I like the blue.
• 56:20
  The blue view is just. Fine, it's fine.
• 56:22
  But Last Airbender is what I'm talking about.
• 56:24
  Fair enough. Is there anything else?
• 56:28
  I want to talk about. Just generally about the the the
• 56:30
  layout of a sins lock. Oh yeah, I mean.
• 56:38
  The. Traces are important, I think.
• 56:39
  It's worth mentioning we. Talked about it a bit last.
• 56:42
  Time if you wanted to run a little bit more dense combat
• 56:47
  focused investigations. Each sin gives you these things
• 56:51
  called traces. They are essentially tinier
• 56:53
  versions of the sins, the minions if you will.
• 56:56
  That it's it's actually interesting.
• 56:58
  It does combat similarly to the way that Fantasy Flight does
• 57:03
  combat in so far as it treats it gives you like a basic or basic
• 57:10
  stress chart for a solo trace. You get expanded ones for groups
• 57:17
  and then massive groups and they're damaged scales
• 57:20
  consistently to that. So it's like a mob in Fantasy
• 57:22
  Flight, which I like a lot. You get to.
• 57:24
  Do the like. Hordes of enemies, things
• 57:26
  without actually having to bog down in the combat with it, you
• 57:29
  know? Yeah.
• 57:31
  Well, so the thing I like about the traces too is I, as I was
• 57:35
  reading through this game initially and it kept talking
• 57:39
  about, oh, you have to fight the sin, the sin is a boss fight,
• 57:41
  blah blah blah. And I was like, that's all well
• 57:44
  and good, but what if I want my players to feel cool and
• 57:48
  powerful and just fight like normie loser minions are?
• 57:52
  Is that an option? And then the game was like
• 57:54
  Traces. And I was like, oh, OK, good.
• 57:56
  So the game is giving me that as an option.
• 58:00
  'Cause I I. Was a little worried that the
• 58:02
  sins were gonna be the only kind of like, enemy types that the
• 58:06
  game was gonna offer, you know? Yeah, no, that that would be a
• 58:09
  bit of an issue. Like, yeah, like I want some
• 58:12
  normie dudes to fight. Just a little bit, you know.
• 58:15
  Like because I think there is value in throwing.
• 58:23
  Loser. Glupshito minions at your
• 58:26
  players to to beat up because. Especially in a game.
• 58:31
  Like this, where you're putting your players through the ringer
• 58:34
  a lot, let them you know. Fuck up some dudes and.
• 58:38
  Take WS yeah like let them have it a little bit every once in a
• 58:41
  while because otherwise they're going to get kind of like
• 58:43
  emotionally exhausted. Oh absolutely.
• 58:46
  I actually so I had AI had an interesting thought while I was
• 58:48
  reading it and I think I almost feel like traces came about
• 58:53
  after the centipede was made because the.
• 58:56
  Centipede the whole. Thing is about having the
• 58:57
  minions, and I feel like it, it makes sense to me that Tom went,
• 59:02
  Oh well, you know, the centipede is the meanest one by far and
• 59:08
  it's the only one with the guys that you can kill.
• 59:11
  Relatively easily. So I feel like maybe it makes
• 59:14
  sense that the other guys have minions too.
• 59:16
  That just seems like a logical step, you know?
• 59:21
  Yes, yeah, I, I. Could see that.
• 59:22
  Yeah. Like they made the the zombie
• 59:26
  style minion dudes for the centipede and then expanded out
• 59:30
  to the other sins. Yeah, I could see that.
• 59:33
  It just, yeah, it just seems. To make the most sense to me.
• 59:37
  That's pretty much all I have. On the sins we can like, let's
• 59:40
  do a quick run through of the other ones because I think
• 59:42
  they're really cool and worth talking about.
• 59:44
  As. Well, as kind of my own.
• 59:45
  Commentary on them. So we've talked quite.
• 59:49
  A bit about the ogre. Oh sorry it's worth mentioning
• 59:53
  the severe attacks are also. I just want to go back to them.
• 59:55
  I like them a lot. The ogre is really cool because
• 59:58
  it just the ogre manifests in like a dilapidated building.
• 1:00:03
  Or or some sort of like urban ruins and it can just drop the
• 1:00:07
  building on you. It just casually.
• 1:00:11
  Does like an earthquake style effect and drops the damn thing
• 1:00:14
  on you, which is really fun. And it does a lot of cool stuff
• 1:00:19
  like if you take enough damage, it rips limbs off and like yeah,
• 1:00:22
  you can get those healed when you get back to Kane.
• 1:00:23
  But like really cool evocative shit that happens in the fight.
• 1:00:26
  Sorry, that's all I want to bring in that after the no I
• 1:00:30
  listen. The.
• 1:00:33
  Severe attacks. Are so simple but so perfect
• 1:00:36
  like they just they hit that note exactly the way you want
• 1:00:41
  them to. You know, they really do like,
• 1:00:43
  cool anime super attack. Like, yeah, they're just.
• 1:00:48
  It's perfect. It's it's.
• 1:00:49
  Simple, elegant to I love. I love design and.
• 1:00:54
  Tabletop games that is simple to the point and evokes exact like
• 1:01:00
  evokes an emotion, you know, like this is trying to hit this
• 1:01:03
  vibe. I just.
• 1:01:04
  That's my favorite kind of design, yeah.
• 1:01:08
  Worth mentioning too that. Each sin represents a different
• 1:01:11
  style of play, which I think is really cool.
• 1:01:15
  Yeah, If we talk about the sin being or the centipede being the
• 1:01:18
  like, zombie apocalypse, what do we do?
• 1:01:21
  You know, frantic fight to survive one.
• 1:01:25
  The ogre represents more of the more classical haunted house
• 1:01:29
  style of investigation. Things are falling apart and
• 1:01:32
  dilapidated and you're trying to trudge through the muck to find
• 1:01:35
  clues. I think that's really neat.
• 1:01:40
  And, you know, moving on to the idol.
• 1:01:44
  The Idol's. Entire MO is the enemy's
• 1:01:49
  everywhere idea, right? Because the idol, as it named
• 1:01:52
  sort of describes, is about cult like behaviour and like a cult
• 1:01:57
  of personality. So you're dealing with cultists
• 1:02:01
  or or just otherwise brainwashed people?
• 1:02:06
  The idols. Primary emotion is desire, and
• 1:02:09
  that can be like intense loneliness, greed or envy, stuff
• 1:02:14
  like that. It manifests in people who are
• 1:02:17
  like failed performers and people who lack fulfillment,
• 1:02:20
  which is kind of fun. It's also the only sin that.
• 1:02:24
  Like does not look like a terrible, awful, scary monster.
• 1:02:27
  It can just look like a normal dude, which is kind of neat.
• 1:02:30
  It's also the only one that's innately visible to other
• 1:02:32
  people. It's also cool.
• 1:02:34
  I also side note, I like that all the sins have their own
• 1:02:36
  little color scheme in them. Yes yeah, or or or or to them in
• 1:02:41
  the book, yes, Ogres are like a a royal blue sort of symbolized
• 1:02:46
  night time. The idol is like a purplish
• 1:02:49
  pink. You know, a very typically seen
• 1:02:51
  as like a sexy colour. The Hound.
• 1:02:55
  Which comes up next is like blood red.
• 1:02:56
  It yeah, did. You notice.
• 1:03:01
  How unorthodox the archives idols are?
• 1:03:08
  I I looked at them briefly. I I know one was a is like
• 1:03:13
  literally an evangelical Christian preacher type
• 1:03:16
  character. So I, I watched a video on the
• 1:03:20
  theory behind that, that idol, which is named our friend, our
• 1:03:24
  friend. And the the the consensus is the
• 1:03:27
  sin itself is the smile. It's like the the it's like a,
• 1:03:32
  what do they call it an an SCP? It's like I was just about to
• 1:03:36
  say, yeah, the idol feels the most SCP esque for sure.
• 1:03:41
  Yeah. Well, like one of the one of
• 1:03:43
  them laughing man was a computer virus.
• 1:03:46
  It was like. A.
• 1:03:47
  It was like a. A creepypasta video that was
• 1:03:49
  going around. Oh, OK.
• 1:03:51
  Yeah, yeah. And like the the most sin one is
• 1:03:56
  Bloody Prince, which is just like this sick armored devil
• 1:04:00
  knight dude that just hangs on people's shoulders.
• 1:04:03
  It's really cool, yeah. But yeah.
• 1:04:06
  That's the most normal 1. I feel like you could also, if
• 1:04:09
  you wanted to tilt this game a little less anime and a little
• 1:04:13
  more towards the SCP vibe, it would be pretty easy.
• 1:04:17
  Oh, easily, Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:04:22
  Well, especially like I think you could have it.
• 1:04:27
  Would get boring after a. While, but you could have mini
• 1:04:30
  campaigns of you're the strike team that takes down hounds or
• 1:04:35
  toads or Lords, you know what I mean?
• 1:04:38
  Yeah, yeah, one specific type. Yeah, yeah like you could have
• 1:04:41
  powers and characters that are like specialized to do this and
• 1:04:43
  you could you could start them at a higher level.
• 1:04:46
  Yeah, you start them at at category 3 or whatever.
• 1:04:50
  Yeah, yeah, that could be sick. Yeah, I could see that actually.
• 1:04:54
  They they have that SCP right. They have like the task forces
• 1:04:56
  and like there's like one of them that only deals with the
• 1:04:59
  highest level of bullshit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:03
  Hammer down I believe is their their code name that.
• 1:05:07
  'D be so cool. Yeah, I, I.
• 1:05:10
  I actually feel like the idol probably would be the most
• 1:05:13
  difficult one to run. Because it's the most.
• 1:05:19
  It's the most indirect. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:22
  OK. I'm happy that we thought about
• 1:05:23
  that the same way because, like, you know, I definitely did.
• 1:05:25
  You're fighting people, which is sort of antithetical to the way
• 1:05:29
  that you think about Kane from the jump and.
• 1:05:33
  You know, it's, it's the other ones there.
• 1:05:36
  There's sort of this idea of, of the ball waiting to drop, but
• 1:05:40
  when you deploy out into the middle of like a cultist church
• 1:05:44
  or whatever and you're talking to people, it's it's a it's
• 1:05:48
  intense and it's really suspenseful, but it's a
• 1:05:51
  different kind of suspense. Like you're almost like, do I
• 1:05:54
  use my crazy powers here? Do I use my guns?
• 1:05:57
  You're like, do I, Yeah. Do I whip out a gun and shoot a
• 1:06:00
  bunch of random bystanders or some shit?
• 1:06:04
  You could get a colt. Or whatever.
• 1:06:06
  Real problematic, real quick. Yeah, it's kind of that scene in
• 1:06:11
  Kingsman. In Kingsman.
• 1:06:13
  Yeah, the the free bird kills all the cultists in the church.
• 1:06:16
  Yeah. Oh my.
• 1:06:18
  God, I I feel like if a player wanted to do that I'd have to
• 1:06:22
  have free bird loaded up ready to go.
• 1:06:24
  Oh yeah Oh yeah for sure dude. Oh it'd be so good.
• 1:06:28
  That seed goes so hard, it really does.
• 1:06:31
  I, I I. Think my favorite thing is when
• 1:06:33
  when the guns start running out of ammo and he's just like he
• 1:06:36
  pulls the your up the upper receiver off his pistol and
• 1:06:39
  starts shaking people with the lower.
• 1:06:41
  Yeah, you're like nice, nice. This team gets fucking.
• 1:06:45
  Gruesome, too. Oh, dude, I love it when he
• 1:06:48
  starts. Like he starts using people to
• 1:06:51
  block attacks from the people with weapons.
• 1:06:53
  Other people. Yeah, yeah, he like, throws the
• 1:06:55
  lady into the axe swing. You're like Jesus.
• 1:06:59
  Or he puts the the. Grenade in the dude's back
• 1:07:01
  pocket. Yeah.
• 1:07:05
  Oh, it's. Great.
• 1:07:06
  Where was it? Yeah, the trauma questions for
• 1:07:09
  the idol are sort of equally roundabout and I think.
• 1:07:14
  Arguably, some of the. Hardest to solve because they
• 1:07:17
  are as follows. What is your dream?
• 1:07:20
  Why did you give up on your dream?
• 1:07:23
  Why do you think you are incapable of being loved?
• 1:07:28
  That's really. Tough, like you can sort of with
• 1:07:31
  the ogre, you can go like, hey, you know, it seems like you know
• 1:07:35
  your your boyfriend or whatever really took a dive recently.
• 1:07:38
  Like do you know what happened? What's going on there?
• 1:07:41
  You know, you can use that in casual conversation, walking up
• 1:07:45
  to someone being like pulling a Lucifer Morningstar from the hit
• 1:07:48
  crime drama Lucifer and being like, what is it you desire?
• 1:07:51
  You know, that's kind of weird. You're just a dude in a suit.
• 1:07:53
  Like what's going on here? It's it's it's a.
• 1:07:57
  Frustrating sin for me, genuinely, because I love the
• 1:08:01
  idea of it, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out how I'd
• 1:08:05
  want to run 1. Yeah, I would have to.
• 1:08:11
  And the toad, I can't figure out.
• 1:08:14
  Yeah, I would have to spend a little extra time thinking about
• 1:08:16
  the idol for sure, because it it has an element of ambiguity to
• 1:08:22
  it. Even dude, even it's.
• 1:08:27
  The countdown clock the the cult I.
• 1:08:31
  Didn't actually, I don't think I.
• 1:08:32
  Looked at that. So yeah, it it just says the
• 1:08:36
  idols gather cults around them, adding steadily to them over
• 1:08:38
  time. It varies from mundane admirers
• 1:08:40
  to like being totally pulled under their spell.
• 1:08:44
  And. This just sort of intrinsically
• 1:08:47
  right? Like people aren't going to be
• 1:08:49
  flocking to this cult en masse randomly, right?
• 1:08:52
  It's like this one, you could almost do an idol as the only
• 1:08:59
  prolonged period of time hunt, right?
• 1:09:01
  Like, oh, you go there to check something out, there's a hint
• 1:09:04
  that maybe there's some stuff going on.
• 1:09:06
  You check it out, nothing's really wrong, but you know
• 1:09:10
  Kane's going to keep an eye on it.
• 1:09:12
  So you leave and you do another mission and then you come back
• 1:09:14
  to that one and now there's like 30 people where there was like 5
• 1:09:18
  before, but you still can't figure something out.
• 1:09:21
  And then you leave and you come back again and now you're
• 1:09:22
  stronger. But Oh no, now it's a category
• 1:09:25
  four thing. Yeah, that's one.
• 1:09:29
  Thing I. I did have a thought actually
• 1:09:31
  with this game. Is the idea that you go into a
• 1:09:34
  mission and then don't necessarily complete the mission
• 1:09:38
  and then you evac? How do?
• 1:09:41
  You handle. That from the GM side of things,
• 1:09:43
  I don't know if the I don't feel like the.
• 1:09:45
  Game gives. You great advice on how you
• 1:09:49
  should do that necessarily. I feel like the game kind of
• 1:09:51
  assumes you're going to solve the mission like you're going to
• 1:09:55
  go into the mission and solve the mission all within one
• 1:09:58
  contained couple of sessions or whatever.
• 1:10:00
  Yes, it it does. It talks about that not a lot
• 1:10:04
  right. It's, you know, when when
• 1:10:05
  something reaches category so pressure level 6.
• 1:10:09
  Yeah. Like, what do you.
• 1:10:12
  Yeah, what do you do if the players fuck up and don't
• 1:10:14
  succeed? I I feel like it leaves you a
• 1:10:16
  little bit hanging on that one. Yeah, I I mean it, it likely.
• 1:10:20
  Turns into. A thing where you.
• 1:10:23
  Have to go back. In now like you, you, you have
• 1:10:26
  to evac the second pressure hit six, right?
• 1:10:29
  Because when the sin when a sin event happens, everything in a
• 1:10:32
  general area dies. So once pressure hits six, it
• 1:10:35
  goes from an investigation slash hunt to an escape mission to get
• 1:10:40
  out of. Like the like.
• 1:10:41
  Estimated blast radius. You can get something like a
• 1:10:43
  text on a phone being like you need to get to the the chopper
• 1:10:46
  at this point when you. Go in, yeah.
• 1:10:48
  I don't know. Because like, you know, Kane
• 1:10:51
  makes it clear they're not sending exorcists in to die.
• 1:10:54
  So you just get penalized. Like maybe you go.
• 1:11:00
  Back to base, but. You lose one of your script
• 1:11:02
  privileges for a mission. Something like that.
• 1:11:05
  Well, the thing I'm curious about is because I didn't see I
• 1:11:11
  I may have missed it, but I didn't see anywhere in the book
• 1:11:14
  where it tells you what to do if a if a sin pushes over, like if
• 1:11:19
  their pressure clock maxes out and then you kind of fail the
• 1:11:24
  mission. I.
• 1:11:26
  Don't think the game. Told has has any guidance on
• 1:11:29
  what you should do after that? Oh I know, I literally just
• 1:11:33
  found it. Additionally, at 6 plus pressure
• 1:11:36
  goes out of control, the sin gains one category, increasing
• 1:11:39
  its power and strength. Like making the host harder to
• 1:11:41
  get. Each sin has a specific
• 1:11:43
  secondary effect of the situation going out of control.
• 1:11:45
  So let's just check those real quick.
• 1:11:46
  Let's do the ogre. But like, if you fail, like
• 1:11:49
  what? Like, I don't think the game
• 1:11:51
  really gives you a lot of guidance on what happens if you
• 1:11:53
  totally fail the mission. You have to pull out.
• 1:11:56
  You know what I mean? I don't think there is when I
• 1:11:59
  think you die. That's, that's kind of the idea
• 1:12:01
  is if you're fighting the sin and you failed to stop it.
• 1:12:05
  Like if you hit pressure level 6 and you hit the, the, the
• 1:12:09
  palace, I think the idea is you fight till you die and just hope
• 1:12:12
  you can make it out alive. Cause 'cause I would think if
• 1:12:17
  you fail the mission but escape. I would like a little bit of.
• 1:12:22
  Guidance on how the players could maybe go back to that same
• 1:12:26
  target and try and recoup their failure, you know.
• 1:12:32
  But I I don't. Yeah, I don't.
• 1:12:33
  Think the game gives you a lot on in that regard, yeah.
• 1:12:36
  And, and maybe it just the idea is that you don't evac out like
• 1:12:40
  you can't. Yeah, maybe you just you're just
• 1:12:42
  fucked. Maybe.
• 1:12:45
  You might be right on that, yeah.
• 1:12:46
  I I could see just given the way that you are treated, you know
• 1:12:48
  they're not going to send you to die.
• 1:12:50
  But if you fuck up so hard that it guarantees your death, I
• 1:12:52
  don't think they're going to take the time to get you out.
• 1:12:54
  Right. Right.
• 1:12:55
  Yeah, that's right. They'd rather you deal some
• 1:12:57
  damage to the sin before they send, you know, B team in to
• 1:13:00
  clean up. Right?
• 1:13:01
  The Yeah, the Super team. Before they drop fortitude.
• 1:13:06
  From the orbital space satellite.
• 1:13:10
  I actually so. Moon wants to run a one shot or
• 1:13:15
  or something for Kane and I was talking about the virtues and
• 1:13:19
  she was like and I have. Those and.
• 1:13:21
  Now I'm now I'm really interested to see what goes on
• 1:13:24
  it. Will be.
• 1:13:27
  Interesting to say the. Yeah, the virtues are.
• 1:13:31
  Kind of a weird narrative. Like they're like a narrative
• 1:13:38
  tactical nuke. They are.
• 1:13:40
  So they're funny, right? Because the way the game
• 1:13:42
  introduces them in the games for Freaks magazine is that you are
• 1:13:46
  kind of training to become the next virtue of that name, right?
• 1:13:51
  Right. Yeah.
• 1:13:52
  So they're taking you on as proteges and they're.
• 1:13:55
  Specifically. Not doing the missions for you
• 1:13:57
  because they're trying to, like, ascertain your worth.
• 1:14:02
  Yeah, See. My problem.
• 1:14:03
  With that is that that gives me the same mentality.
• 1:14:09
  That's the same. Frustration I have with Gojo as
• 1:14:12
  a character in Jujutsu Kaizen where I'm like why is he not
• 1:14:16
  just solving every fucking problem, you know?
• 1:14:19
  Yes. But I think even in.
• 1:14:20
  JJK the the the explanation of he needs people to be as as
• 1:14:24
  close to his level as possible, therefore he can't because then
• 1:14:28
  they. Won't improve.
• 1:14:29
  I would say JJK does an OK job of explaining that, but not an
• 1:14:35
  amazing job. Fair enough.
• 1:14:37
  You know, until JoJo gets until JoJo, until Gojo gets put in the
• 1:14:42
  meat cube. That's a good reason.
• 1:14:45
  The meat cube. Yeah, when he gets put in the
• 1:14:47
  meat cube, that's a valid excuse.
• 1:14:50
  But before that I'm like, I don't know.
• 1:14:52
  This excuse feels a. Little flimsy to me, you know.
• 1:14:55
  Fair enough. Anything else you want to talk
• 1:15:00
  about the the the idol with before we jump to the next one?
• 1:15:03
  Anything you like about it? No, I mean the idol's.
• 1:15:09
  Probably the one I'm like least interested in to be honest.
• 1:15:12
  Oh really? For me it's the toad.
• 1:15:13
  I just, I can't, I barely even know what the toad does.
• 1:15:18
  Like I read it once. I'm like.
• 1:15:27
  Yeah, I guess it's. It's.
• 1:15:28
  Sort of between the idol and the toad, I would say for the ones
• 1:15:31
  I'm like least interested in, yeah.
• 1:15:35
  I get what the toad's getting. At right, like, you know,
• 1:15:38
  billionaire hoarding all their wealth kind of vibe.
• 1:15:41
  Like I get what it's going for. Yeah, I don't know.
• 1:15:47
  I I do think I'm just because I'm so like.
• 1:15:51
  I don't care like it's. Like Oh yeah, this billionaire
• 1:15:53
  went missing and and a part of me is like, OK, just just nuke
• 1:15:57
  the area with Sarah. Why do we care?
• 1:15:59
  Why are we giving? Why are we giving fuck ass
• 1:16:01
  millionaires the time? That's fair, that's fair.
• 1:16:05
  I I'm kind of on your page where the ogre and the hound are the
• 1:16:11
  most straightforward, but the most.
• 1:16:14
  Interesting to me. Like, yeah, well, the Hound is
• 1:16:16
  super cool. Speaking of which, we're moving
• 1:16:18
  on to it. The Hound is sick because it is.
• 1:16:21
  It's the opposite it it. The.
• 1:16:24
  Hound is not quite it's a race against the clock like the
• 1:16:29
  Centipede is, but the ramifications are a lot lower,
• 1:16:32
  right? The Centipede is a race against
• 1:16:34
  the clock insofar as the zombie plague is spreading.
• 1:16:38
  We need to stop it. Where the Hound is, there is a
• 1:16:41
  serial killer going around and he's targeting these people that
• 1:16:45
  we need to investigate. The hounds.
• 1:16:48
  Manifestation is through vengeance.
• 1:16:51
  People who feel wronged, who feel like they've been attacked
• 1:16:54
  in some way, murder victims, you know, people who feel like
• 1:16:58
  they've suffered injustices, you know, tenants evicted by a
• 1:17:02
  landlord and stuff like that. And the hounds whole thing is
• 1:17:08
  rage. It hates you, it hates itself,
• 1:17:13
  it hates everything. And God forbid you stand in
• 1:17:17
  front of it, it is going to manifest a bunch of blades and
• 1:17:21
  guns and it is going to vaporize you on the spot.
• 1:17:27
  It has my favorite. Archived ones because you get a
• 1:17:31
  really good sense of this scale or this the first time you get
• 1:17:35
  the sense of the scale, the highest 1 you get almost
• 1:17:38
  certainly is the centipede. Because the Shibuya.
• 1:17:42
  Incident is listed there. Not literally, but basically.
• 1:17:46
  But basically. There is a.
• 1:17:48
  There is an archive town named Dulahan.
• 1:17:52
  It's category 5. It took 20. 2 minutes to execute
• 1:17:59
  so. Like the the time?
• 1:18:00
  It took for them to deploy into execution was 22 minutes, and in
• 1:18:04
  that 22 minutes 2279 casualties racked up.
• 1:18:12
  The first, second and third Exorcist teams went Kia.
• 1:18:21
  That's. Nuts dude, I love that.
• 1:18:25
  And it's literally it. It you see the picture, it's a
• 1:18:27
  giant. Horse.
• 1:18:29
  Monster walking down a highway with people like.
• 1:18:35
  I can only assume. Are either being crushed or
• 1:18:38
  actively having brain aneurysms as they watch it move.
• 1:18:43
  It's sick. It also.
• 1:18:46
  Loki has the coolest tension. Move the archived like the Canon
• 1:18:52
  quote UN quote. Hunts for the various sins are
• 1:18:55
  very cool. They're so sick, the.
• 1:18:58
  Traumas for the Hound. Are who wronged you?
• 1:19:01
  How were you wronged, and what are you unwilling to sacrifice?
• 1:19:06
  Which is a lot of fun. Yeah, it allow it again.
• 1:19:11
  Very straightforward. You are trying to find who could
• 1:19:15
  have been done dirty enough to want to manifest.
• 1:19:19
  Why? That happened.
• 1:19:20
  And who did it to them? And then maybe the one person
• 1:19:23
  they can you can go to to guarantee that you know you'll
• 1:19:26
  get some answers. I also.
• 1:19:29
  Like their traces, the mirror. I can I always say Miradin, but
• 1:19:33
  I know it's it's Mirmidon. Mirmidons.
• 1:19:36
  Yeah, they're like cool fucking sword fighty like.
• 1:19:42
  They're just like a weird. Gaunt dudes covered in blades,
• 1:19:44
  It's kind of neat. Their pressure.
• 1:19:48
  Is the grudge that they hold and essentially what this does?
• 1:19:52
  Is it it the? Hound is.
• 1:19:54
  Like a demon of corn in Warhammer, it's rage and hate
• 1:19:58
  spread like a virus. Kind of like so like JoJo with
• 1:20:03
  Survivor Man in part 6. It just causes people to seek
• 1:20:07
  out vengeance against what eventually becomes the tiniest
• 1:20:10
  indiscretions. So anyway.
• 1:20:15
  Yeah. So if you can find people
• 1:20:17
  casually stabbing each other in the kidneys, you're probably on
• 1:20:20
  the right path. Yeah again, this game is anime
• 1:20:26
  as fuck. I OK, I want to talk about the
• 1:20:31
  the actual what the severe attack says 'cause this is my
• 1:20:34
  favorite one the. Severe attack for the Hound.
• 1:20:37
  Is called apoplexy or a apoplexy?
• 1:20:41
  I'm not entirely sure. Essentially the hound.
• 1:20:44
  It says the hound can use this ability on A1 rolled on a risk
• 1:20:47
  roll. It can only do this once.
• 1:20:49
  Permission target an exorcist. Any other exorcist nearby must
• 1:20:53
  fly to their aid, and any that don't offer aid cannot
• 1:20:57
  participate. Start with a pool of 66.
• 1:21:01
  Remove one die for every. Yes, for the following questions
• 1:21:04
  you answer. If an answer is no, you can do
• 1:21:07
  something. You or someone aiding you can
• 1:21:10
  immediately take a single action to roll and attempt to rectify
• 1:21:13
  the answer. Basically saying. 66 count for
• 1:21:21
  the direct amount of stress you are going to take.
• 1:21:25
  You don't actually roll on them, but you sort of treat.
• 1:21:28
  Them. As as counters for the levels of
• 1:21:30
  stress that they take. And.
• 1:21:34
  The game the the admin will ask the player or any of the players
• 1:21:38
  a number of questions. Do you have a sword or something
• 1:21:41
  like it? Are you calm, collected, and
• 1:21:43
  focused? Do you have a shield or
• 1:21:46
  something like it? And is the hound hindered,
• 1:21:48
  distracted, or under duress in some way?
• 1:21:53
  Essentially it. Gives one player the big owie,
• 1:21:57
  but it allows other players to defend them and stick their
• 1:22:02
  necks out for them and every. Person.
• 1:22:05
  Who chooses to help will take a portion of the damage in some
• 1:22:09
  way. Which is kind of cool.
• 1:22:13
  And you they can. Further.
• 1:22:14
  Reduce that damage by again, taking those active steps to
• 1:22:16
  help the hound does something else that's really cool and.
• 1:22:23
  Other ones do. This too, but again, I think
• 1:22:24
  this one does it the best in that one of its domains causes
• 1:22:30
  your character to shift their personality, which is really
• 1:22:35
  neat. I'm trying.
• 1:22:37
  To figure out where. It is.
• 1:22:43
  Is it the? Afflictions.
• 1:22:48
  No, not that one. It it gives you a a new agenda.
• 1:22:59
  There's one that gives you the agenda to kill.
• 1:23:05
  Yes, yeah. Oh, right.
• 1:23:06
  Right, right. Yeah.
• 1:23:07
  Basically. Sins can enforce they're not
• 1:23:13
  quite debuffs on the on on players.
• 1:23:16
  They are a conscious decision that players can make to.
• 1:23:21
  Shift their. Character's perspective, you
• 1:23:24
  know. Essentially.
• 1:23:25
  Have the the psychic presence of the sin itself partially corrupt
• 1:23:30
  the player and if they let it happen and it is their choice.
• 1:23:35
  They'll gain boots from. It with the hound you do more
• 1:23:38
  damage, you can take more damage, you just become tougher
• 1:23:42
  and more battle ready but. You.
• 1:23:45
  You. Have to.
• 1:23:46
  Have to permanently change your agenda?
• 1:23:49
  In this instance it's kill, so you'll gain experience for
• 1:23:54
  killing indiscriminately. And that gives you a very.
• 1:23:58
  Easy way to pretty quickly bump your XP up but you're.
• 1:24:03
  Becoming a like. Crazy murderer.
• 1:24:04
  And that could cause problems with the team.
• 1:24:06
  And in certain situations, you know, they might not help you in
• 1:24:10
  a different severe attack because you're just not worth
• 1:24:12
  it, you know? It it adds a really.
• 1:24:16
  Interesting intrapersonal and interpersonal conflict.
• 1:24:20
  I I. Like too that the severe attacks
• 1:24:23
  add the it's 'cause as far as I'm aware, every, as far as I
• 1:24:28
  remember, I should say every severe attack, it is a pool of
• 1:24:32
  60 sixes. And then you subtract dice for
• 1:24:35
  every question that you answer yes to.
• 1:24:38
  And the questions are always relevant to the sin in question.
• 1:24:43
  So it's like if the sin you're fighting is relevant to your
• 1:24:50
  character from a narrative perspective, you can again tilt
• 1:24:56
  that seesaw scale in your favor And so if.
• 1:25:02
  It's a sin. You're fighting where it's
• 1:25:04
  particularly relevant to your characters.
• 1:25:08
  You. Can actually.
• 1:25:09
  Debuff their severe attack quite a bit.
• 1:25:14
  Which is an interesting. Back and forth.
• 1:25:15
  So basically, what'll. End up happening.
• 1:25:19
  Is there's a certain kind of sin that your group will really like
• 1:25:23
  fighting because you can debuff or resist that sin a lot.
• 1:25:27
  And then there's another type of sin that your group will really,
• 1:25:30
  really fucking hate fighting because you can't respond to it
• 1:25:33
  as well. So it creates a, a fun push and
• 1:25:36
  pull between the GM and the players of like, oh, we're
• 1:25:39
  fighting a hound. This is good for US versus oh,
• 1:25:42
  this one's a Lord. We're not very good against the
• 1:25:45
  Lord. This is going to be tricky,
• 1:25:47
  right? It's it's that same.
• 1:25:53
  Idea of fighting a monster who's, you know, I don't know,
• 1:25:57
  weak to radiant damage and you don't have a cleric in the
• 1:26:00
  party. So you're like, oh fuck, we
• 1:26:02
  don't have a cleric. This is going to be tough versus
• 1:26:05
  fighting a monster that's, I don't know, weak to fire damage
• 1:26:08
  and you have a wizard. So you're like, oh, we got this
• 1:26:10
  in the bag. It's that same kind of that
• 1:26:13
  little push and pull. And again as the.
• 1:26:17
  GM you should be pushing, you want to push against that, but
• 1:26:24
  sometimes you also want to let the players have it because
• 1:26:27
  again, in that very shown in battle anime vibe, sometimes the
• 1:26:32
  main characters have the exact skill to dunk on this loser and
• 1:26:36
  sometimes they don't. Right.
• 1:26:42
  Some sometimes Joe Turow's ability to just punch really
• 1:26:46
  hard is exactly the power they need.
• 1:26:49
  And sometimes he cannot punch the enemy because he does not
• 1:26:53
  know where the enemy is. Well, I think that's a perfect
• 1:26:56
  segue because you get that really hard with the next sin,
• 1:27:00
  the centipede. The centipede's whole thing is
• 1:27:04
  hatred, which again, you're like, isn't that the hound?
• 1:27:08
  And the answer is like kind of they they share a similar sort
• 1:27:11
  of and space, but the centipedes whole thing is rather than
• 1:27:17
  vengeance, it's escapism through mass death.
• 1:27:22
  You know, it's your doomsday prepper thinking of the
• 1:27:26
  apocalypse, wanting everyone in your class to die, but you not
• 1:27:30
  necessarily wanting to do it your damn self.
• 1:27:32
  You know, you're just kind of hoping everyone suffers around
• 1:27:35
  you. That's what that's what
• 1:27:37
  manifests centipedes. Fun fact, they are so shitty to
• 1:27:40
  fight that higher level exorcist will dump the job on lower level
• 1:27:44
  ones 'cause they're yeah, they say fuck it.
• 1:27:46
  Yeah, yeah, I did. I did think that was funny.
• 1:27:49
  Their traumas are what are you trying to escape.
• 1:27:53
  Escape. Sorry.
• 1:27:54
  What do you hate most about humanity?
• 1:27:57
  What do you regret the most? And oh, that's a.
• 1:28:00
  Good one. The the archive ones are also
• 1:28:03
  sick. Shout out to Calamity the 4th,
• 1:28:06
  the actual Shibuya incident resulting in 11,000 casualties
• 1:28:10
  over a time of four of two days, six hours and 35 minutes.
• 1:28:16
  People fucking died. I believe they deployed the
• 1:28:21
  virtues to this one. Yeah, virtues were dispatched.
• 1:28:25
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:28:28
  Not not. That's rough, bud.
• 1:28:31
  Yeah. That would be an L.
• 1:28:36
  Actually, this one I think has the coolest pressure.
• 1:28:39
  The infestation, basically it's, it's the zombie virus, right?
• 1:28:43
  It's the thing. But a cool thing that it can do
• 1:28:46
  is if at any point one of the players has fought the infected,
• 1:28:54
  the infested, as they're called, you can just choose that one of
• 1:28:59
  them gets bit, even if no one took damage.
• 1:29:03
  I love that. And you might be like, that's
• 1:29:06
  kind of mean. And like, yes, but this is,
• 1:29:09
  above all else, the mean sin. It's supposed to kind of dunk on
• 1:29:14
  you and make you feel helpless. And the good news is that
• 1:29:18
  because you're an exorcist, you don't die immediately.
• 1:29:20
  It just creates A tension clock for our A Talisman that you have
• 1:29:23
  to beat by killing the sin. So it really adds on that that
• 1:29:28
  pressure, for sure. It's real cool.
• 1:29:37
  Yeah, I don't. Have much else to.
• 1:29:38
  Say, but it's it's just it's I don't, I don't either.
• 1:29:42
  Up next we have the toad. The one I have to say literally
• 1:29:45
  the least against. It manifests through envy,
• 1:29:49
  Materialism, just unchecked avarice, essentially.
• 1:29:53
  Think of every piece of shit billionaire you wish would
• 1:29:56
  spontaneously combust. Those it's them.
• 1:30:00
  Shout out, by the way, it's a. Mr. Worldwide at one of the
• 1:30:03
  archived toads. I can literally not.
• 1:30:07
  Think about his face, because his face is obscured.
• 1:30:09
  It's just Pitbull wait. Does it?
• 1:30:12
  Oh it. Does literally say Mr.
• 1:30:13
  Worldwide? It's just Pitbull.
• 1:30:17
  Yep. All right, fair enough.
• 1:30:18
  It's just Pitbull. Yep.
• 1:30:19
  It's just. It's scanning.
• 1:30:21
  It's scanning. Pitbull is a sin.
• 1:30:22
  Yep. It's trauma questions.
• 1:30:26
  Are what do you deserve that was denied to you while you were
• 1:30:30
  starving? Who was feasting and where do
• 1:30:32
  you draw the line? I don't don't really care about
• 1:30:38
  anything else. Instead, like I'm going to be
• 1:30:40
  in. I'm going to be honest.
• 1:30:41
  Yes, it's a little bias, but like nothing it does
• 1:30:44
  particularly sticks out that I can remember.
• 1:30:48
  Fair enough. Yeah.
• 1:30:51
  After that we have the Lord, which is Loki, kind of the
• 1:30:56
  coolest one. Because it.
• 1:30:59
  It's the it's the special grade curse.
• 1:31:01
  It can sort of take aspects from the other curses or from the
• 1:31:06
  other sins and use it in its own repertoire.
• 1:31:09
  And its main manifestation of motion is fear.
• 1:31:13
  Just sort of like profound loss due to calamity.
• 1:31:17
  There's any bad shit happening to you and you're just.
• 1:31:21
  Frankly unequipped to. Deal with it.
• 1:31:26
  I think one of them was. Literally a dog.
• 1:31:29
  Yeah, balter it. It manifested the shape of a
• 1:31:32
  Basset Hound in England. I kind of love that.
• 1:31:37
  Oh, I missed. That one, it was a.
• 1:31:38
  Dog with a Halo. We don't know anything about it
• 1:31:42
  other than it took two days, two hours and 34 minutes to do to
• 1:31:47
  execute. We got no information on it
• 1:31:49
  beside that. OK then.
• 1:31:53
  It's trauma. Questions are what did you lose?
• 1:31:56
  What is the main thing you would fix about the world and who?
• 1:32:00
  Did you regret? Leaving behind when you ascended
• 1:32:02
  to your Kingdom, right? The Lord's palace is a straight
• 1:32:06
  up palace. It is sort of a mini area in of
• 1:32:09
  itself that you have to deal with.
• 1:32:12
  It's kind of neat, I'm not going to lie.
• 1:32:18
  It's Yeah, I I don't have a. Lot to say about this one,
• 1:32:20
  unfortunately. It's it's cool.
• 1:32:22
  It's got a lot of really cool stuff.
• 1:32:23
  No, I mean, yeah. I don't have anything that I.
• 1:32:27
  Mean it's weird it kind of past the centipede I'm not going to
• 1:32:30
  say that they're sauceless but I feel like ogre hound and
• 1:32:33
  centipede are so evocative yeah yeah the the toad and the Lord
• 1:32:37
  are a little less but the. The Lord does have the.
• 1:32:42
  Guard traces, which I do kind of like the guards are cool, yeah,
• 1:32:46
  yeah, because they are literally like armed guards, yes, so it's
• 1:32:52
  good so they are cool because. It's a good one to use if you.
• 1:32:57
  Want a little extra minions in there?
• 1:32:59
  Yes, and they're cool because they follow rules so the the
• 1:33:03
  Lord can it. It basically can set three laws,
• 1:33:06
  3 forbidden things and anytime those things are checked one.
• 1:33:12
  Of the IT it. Basically says one of the Lords
• 1:33:14
  just shows up and deals damage to an exorcist.
• 1:33:17
  There is almost like this divine rule surrounding the Lord's
• 1:33:22
  active domain and all of its like palace stuff.
• 1:33:25
  It's actually attacking the King's palace.
• 1:33:28
  Yeah, it's, it's really interesting.
• 1:33:30
  The Lord. It shares a color with the.
• 1:33:36
  With the virtue judgement. And their abilities are really
• 1:33:39
  similar. I wonder if there's something
• 1:33:41
  going on with that. I would love to know.
• 1:33:43
  Probably. I would assume so.
• 1:33:47
  After the sins we have. Some you know generic dudes to
• 1:33:50
  fight as well as pseudo sins like mass produced ones and like
• 1:33:53
  cryptids and shit. Not a lot I thought.
• 1:33:58
  It was funny that the what is the game called them.
• 1:34:04
  Pseudo Yeah, yeah, the the. Pseudo sins.
• 1:34:06
  Yeah, I found it funny that the games like yeah, weird cryptids
• 1:34:10
  that exist in the real world like fucking skinwalkers or
• 1:34:14
  poltergeists or pests or the Pale man and shit, those are
• 1:34:18
  just like little mini sins. They're not quite full on sins,
• 1:34:22
  but they're like they're. Little bit sins.
• 1:34:25
  That have some. Powers but.
• 1:34:28
  Not as much powers as the full on sins.
• 1:34:30
  I thought that was pretty funny. Did you notice that the the the
• 1:34:35
  giant behemoth thing from the Mist is listed there?
• 1:34:38
  Yeah, the Titan, yeah. That was pretty funny.
• 1:34:41
  I particularly liked the. The.
• 1:34:45
  Poltergeist. And the Pale Man, because it's
• 1:34:49
  Ghost. And also Slender Man.
• 1:34:51
  Yeah. It's just a fun little little.
• 1:34:54
  Bit of flavour little sauce there.
• 1:34:58
  Oh, they also go into the. Binders, which is like a a
• 1:35:00
  separate faction. There's not a lot of information
• 1:35:04
  on them with a lot of fucking drip.
• 1:35:07
  Yeah, they are drip the fuck out.
• 1:35:08
  They have these sick like devil masks and one of them has a
• 1:35:11
  jacket that says kill all apes. Totally not really evocative of
• 1:35:17
  ghetto from fucking JJK. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:35:21
  It may or may not have that vibe.
• 1:35:26
  But all that aside. In an hour and a half in.
• 1:35:29
  Let's talk about actually running.
• 1:35:30
  The game. Because I'm sure people are
• 1:35:33
  curious about. It Why would we do that?
• 1:35:36
  Yeah, that's a good point. Let's end it right?
• 1:35:37
  Now you know, that's it. I'm done.
• 1:35:38
  I'm done recording hanging up nighty night, all right?
• 1:35:44
  Hang up. Yeah, so just generally talking
• 1:35:49
  about what it was like to run the game.
• 1:35:51
  Like I said, Rendon 2 did 2 one shots, 2 separate parties, same
• 1:35:55
  investigation, a lot of fun. And I've got some thoughts.
• 1:36:00
  First and foremost, if you have any GM ING experience outside of
• 1:36:05
  D&D. And that's very important to
• 1:36:06
  say. And it's not 'cause I'm shitting
• 1:36:07
  on D and. DI find that Kane.
• 1:36:10
  Is quite easy to run. Generally speaking.
• 1:36:14
  The game. Feels really.
• 1:36:15
  Intuitive and it feels almost identical to running a Power by
• 1:36:19
  the Apocalypse game, so if you've got any experience in
• 1:36:21
  that, you're going to be fine, I guarantee you.
• 1:36:27
  Like we had said. Previously, the way the game
• 1:36:29
  expects you to create investigations creates this
• 1:36:33
  really interesting environment in which it feels almost
• 1:36:37
  impossible to box yourself into a corner right the.
• 1:36:42
  Domains that each. Of The Sims use work really
• 1:36:46
  effectively as a motivator in driving force and it keeps the
• 1:36:49
  pace consistent, and I think that's a big thing for me.
• 1:36:53
  That is probably my biggest flaw as AGM.
• 1:36:55
  I'm not great at keeping things paced out.
• 1:36:58
  I often take too much time to focus on things that don't
• 1:37:01
  matter too much, and then things that characters care about.
• 1:37:04
  I sort of breeze past as I've been told recently and we're
• 1:37:08
  working. But Kane is really effective.
• 1:37:11
  Because it but we are Kane is really effective because I have
• 1:37:16
  this thing that hangs over my head just as much as the players
• 1:37:20
  called the pressure meter and I have to abide it.
• 1:37:23
  You know what I mean? I can't give the the players
• 1:37:26
  time to sort of Dick around because if they do that's going
• 1:37:30
  to kick up 1. And like we had said.
• 1:37:34
  Previously they're also super effective.
• 1:37:36
  They they sort of fill multiple roles.
• 1:37:38
  You don't ever feel like you're missing tools, which is another
• 1:37:41
  big thing because again, when I first read the sins stat blocks,
• 1:37:48
  quote UN quote, there is this fear of like, all they can do is
• 1:37:52
  punch. Like, what am I supposed to do?
• 1:37:54
  And the answer is no, that's not true at all.
• 1:37:56
  That's that's where the domains come from.
• 1:37:58
  They shift that role to become active effects in the fight.
• 1:38:05
  I think a perfect example of this is the Ogre's The Unseeing
• 1:38:09
  of Things domain, which effectively just creates like
• 1:38:12
  zones of imperceptible darkness that the ogre can control, and
• 1:38:16
  it also lets the ogre turn completely invisible when it's
• 1:38:20
  covered in any darkness, let alone like the special ones you.
• 1:38:24
  Can use this and I. Did use this in combat to
• 1:38:27
  basically help counteract things like teamwork for the players.
• 1:38:32
  If they did a teamwork thing previously and went, oh, we're
• 1:38:35
  going to narratively do that thing again, I can easily say
• 1:38:39
  the ogre slips into the darkness and now they have to go, OK,
• 1:38:42
  wait, all right, we're not going to teamwork then regroup.
• 1:38:45
  You're never using it to to not let them do a thing, but it
• 1:38:49
  stops them from being able to wombo combo.
• 1:38:51
  Essentially. You're basically saying.
• 1:38:53
  Roblox. In their way, yeah.
• 1:38:55
  You're saying the sin is intelligent, it's learning your
• 1:38:58
  tactics and it's actively adapting around you.
• 1:39:01
  Yeah, it's not just like a brain dead ghost or whatever.
• 1:39:04
  Yeah, I do think it's worth noting and I talked about this
• 1:39:10
  before. I don't think this game is.
• 1:39:14
  Conducive to first time GMs. No. Yeah, I yeah, I don't think
• 1:39:21
  Yeah, I. Don't think it would be a.
• 1:39:22
  Good like fresh new GM game? Probably not.
• 1:39:25
  And Moon is doing this as her first time.
• 1:39:28
  And I you it's not impossible. It's not at all.
• 1:39:31
  If you have a lot of experience as a player, you'll also be
• 1:39:35
  pretty OK. But if you're fresh off, like
• 1:39:38
  you're new to the hobby, I I can't say I'd recommend this
• 1:39:41
  game. Yeah, you might feel a little
• 1:39:43
  uncomfortable this because the game gives you almost too much.
• 1:39:48
  Freedom and power. Yes, it I would argue yeah, it
• 1:39:52
  it kind of expects too much of you to to at that skill level
• 1:39:56
  primarily because it to Gee on this game you need to be.
• 1:40:00
  Very comfortable with. High level improv, you know,
• 1:40:04
  being able to shift pieces of of the investigation and the
• 1:40:07
  information in the background in like real time to make sure that
• 1:40:11
  there's always something for the players to find.
• 1:40:13
  Nothing they do feels completely fruitless.
• 1:40:16
  And that's not to say that you always have to give them exactly
• 1:40:19
  what they're looking for, but you have to rely on the flow
• 1:40:22
  chart that you made and shift things in and out of frame
• 1:40:26
  depending on what they're doing. And I didn't struggle with that
• 1:40:30
  personally, but as I was running it, I literally had the thought
• 1:40:33
  of, oh, this could be tough for somebody.
• 1:40:38
  And. Yeah.
• 1:40:40
  I mean, I stand by that after doing it twice.
• 1:40:42
  Yeah. No, I can see that.
• 1:40:44
  There is I. I think.
• 1:40:47
  Part of the problem too. Is that a lot of people come
• 1:40:51
  into jamming the first time expecting a very.
• 1:40:57
  AD and D. Style experience where the game
• 1:41:01
  tells you what to do almost every step of the way.
• 1:41:06
  And. This game expects you to.
• 1:41:10
  It tells you what to. Do, but it it specifically
• 1:41:13
  leaves gaps where you need to figure.
• 1:41:18
  Out what you want. To do, and if you're not
• 1:41:20
  comfortable doing that kind of shit on the fly, yeah, it's
• 1:41:24
  going to feel a little awkward, a little uncomfortable.
• 1:41:28
  Particularly. I mean rolling the tension die
• 1:41:32
  like. I could definitely.
• 1:41:36
  See people getting a. Little.
• 1:41:43
  Choked. Up, I guess would be the word I
• 1:41:45
  would say where they, the player goes to do something like makes
• 1:41:51
  an action roll and the GM is like, OK, I have an idea for
• 1:41:54
  what I want to do here. And then they roll the tension
• 1:41:56
  die and it does not line up with what they want to do.
• 1:42:00
  And then they stress out a little bit, you know?
• 1:42:04
  Yeah, for sure. And that's why Apocalypse World
• 1:42:08
  has that problem too. But I.
• 1:42:11
  Think the tension die. Is a little swinger than the
• 1:42:15
  degrees of success in Apocalypse World?
• 1:42:18
  Oh absolutely. You know they are 100% swingier.
• 1:42:23
  And and you know, and that's. Good and bad, right, Because on
• 1:42:27
  one end pros it cons it you as the GM don't have to think as
• 1:42:31
  much about being like, Oh, well, what is the degree of says like?
• 1:42:34
  What does that mean? How do I implement that the the
• 1:42:38
  tension die? Just say, OK, tension has
• 1:42:41
  increased, you can now do a thing.
• 1:42:43
  What thing are you doing? Right, Right.
• 1:42:45
  Yeah. And you have a list of, of
• 1:42:47
  tension and pressure moves that you can play with.
• 1:42:49
  And you do have to make a decision on that.
• 1:42:51
  But a lot of that is informed by the narrative.
• 1:42:54
  You know, if you're doing the stuff with the ogre, you're
• 1:42:57
  going to focus on the miasma tension moves more than anything
• 1:43:00
  else. Yeah, I I do think the pressure
• 1:43:03
  Talisman in particular. Is something that.
• 1:43:08
  Neuro GM's might struggle with because.
• 1:43:16
  I don't know, maybe I'm. Wrong.
• 1:43:19
  It's It's hard to say right because I came into this hobby
• 1:43:22
  during 4th edition D&D, so I have a certain I have certain
• 1:43:27
  preconceived notions about how the game works.
• 1:43:30
  If you were to come into the hobby now, I'm not as familiar,
• 1:43:35
  but I've my gut instinct is that the pressure Talisman would
• 1:43:43
  perhaps be a little bit difficult for a newer GM to
• 1:43:47
  manage because you're essentially managing this.
• 1:43:52
  Behind the. Scenes ever present, countdown
• 1:43:55
  clock to disaster, and a newer GM might not want to be beholden
• 1:44:01
  to something like that, you know what I mean?
• 1:44:04
  Well. So it's it's twofold.
• 1:44:05
  Right. It is as behind the scenes as it
• 1:44:08
  is in the player's face. The players always know what
• 1:44:10
  their right. They can always see it.
• 1:44:12
  Yeah, Yeah. Which means that you have to
• 1:44:14
  have a good understanding of pacing yourself.
• 1:44:17
  And again. That might be my weakness.
• 1:44:20
  But I do understand pacing, you know.
• 1:44:22
  Not that I can always practically and effectively
• 1:44:26
  implement, but. Knowing like OK this.
• 1:44:29
  Is dragging for a bit. Let's speed this up.
• 1:44:31
  OK, This is you know, you know. The players should stick.
• 1:44:34
  Around here, because there's important stuff to find and what
• 1:44:37
  that means for the mounting pressure that.
• 1:44:40
  That can be a bit of a chuckle. Yeah.
• 1:44:42
  It's like you have to keep a couple of extra plates spinning
• 1:44:48
  at the same time, which. If your.
• 1:44:52
  Understanding of tabletop just comes from watching something
• 1:44:56
  like Critical Role. You might not be used to that
• 1:44:59
  idea of the extra spinning plates, Yes, because if you
• 1:45:05
  watch something like Critical Role and that's your your inroad
• 1:45:09
  to the hobby, you're probably gonna assume that.
• 1:45:14
  You have. Control over every single plate.
• 1:45:18
  Whereas in a game like Kane or Apocalypse World or something
• 1:45:22
  similar, you don't really have control over every single plate
• 1:45:25
  that's spinning. You have to kind of.
• 1:45:29
  Concede a. Degree of control to the game
• 1:45:32
  itself. So yeah, I could see the
• 1:45:40
  straight, yeah, I, I basically, yes, I'm, I'm agreeing with
• 1:45:44
  your, your overall general statement of a newer GM running
• 1:45:48
  this game might have a little bit of tension.
• 1:45:55
  But it might not be bad. Right, like.
• 1:45:59
  That's The funny thing. Some people will respond to the
• 1:46:02
  tension negatively and kind of breakdown and not be able to
• 1:46:05
  handle it, and some people will take that tension and latch onto
• 1:46:08
  it and be like, this is fucking sick.
• 1:46:10
  You know what I mean? So.
• 1:46:14
  You just kind of have to. Kind of.
• 1:46:16
  I guess you have to know. Who you have to.
• 1:46:20
  Know yourself well enough as a person to decide if this is a
• 1:46:24
  game that you could GM right out the gate with no other knowledge
• 1:46:28
  or not. Like you have to sort of gauge
• 1:46:30
  that on your own. Like we like, no one can really
• 1:46:33
  tell you. Right.
• 1:46:37
  And I. I think to a similar point.
• 1:46:42
  While I do adore the way that the sin fights are structured,
• 1:46:47
  I. Think it would very.
• 1:46:48
  Easily confuse a new GM, especially one with only D&D
• 1:46:51
  experience. Yeah, because you look at, you
• 1:46:55
  know, it says attacks with you go, oh, those are attacks.
• 1:46:58
  Where are the attacks? And the game tells you that you
• 1:47:02
  have to use the wrist dye. But I think when you're running
• 1:47:05
  the game, you're going, wait, how do I do?
• 1:47:08
  How do I, how do I counter attack?
• 1:47:09
  How do I do damage? What do I do?
• 1:47:10
  How do I defend myself? Yeah, it's not.
• 1:47:12
  It's not immediately obvious, not.
• 1:47:16
  Not sure and. Again, especially because trying
• 1:47:18
  to figure it out, I was like, oh, oh, right, right, right,
• 1:47:21
  right. OK, OK.
• 1:47:23
  Especially. Because a lot of people come
• 1:47:26
  into the hobby with this idea of the attack role, right?
• 1:47:32
  The. Attack role is.
• 1:47:37
  Almost a sacred. Cow in the DND sphere, right?
• 1:47:42
  The idea of I'm trying to hit an enemy, so I make an attack roll
• 1:47:48
  where I roll a die and add modifiers and check against an
• 1:47:52
  armor class of some kind. That's kind of a sacred cow in
• 1:47:56
  the core D&D sphere. So as soon as you play another
• 1:48:02
  game that does not have a attack roll, because this game does not
• 1:48:06
  have attack rolls at all. There's gonna be that.
• 1:48:11
  Element of. Like disconnect there's.
• 1:48:15
  Gonna be that moment of pause and for some people there'll be
• 1:48:18
  the moment of pause and you get it really quick and for other
• 1:48:21
  people there'll be that moment of pause and you kind of.
• 1:48:25
  You will lose the plot. A little bit you're like, I
• 1:48:28
  don't know what to do from here. And I don't really.
• 1:48:32
  Have a good answer other than read Apocalypse World because
• 1:48:38
  Apocalypse World explains it really well.
• 1:48:41
  I I take a shot. Every time Josh mentions
• 1:48:44
  Apocalypse world, no look I I hate that I have to agree but
• 1:48:46
  it's like. If you really want.
• 1:48:49
  Some pointers on how to play this game, you're you're going
• 1:48:52
  to have to take a look at Apocalypse World.
• 1:48:53
  It's true it it. It really it it.
• 1:48:58
  Is a. It is.
• 1:49:01
  Really, the game that caused a massive paradigm shift in the
• 1:49:05
  hobby, broadly speaking. And so a lot of games are
• 1:49:11
  referencing Apocalypse World, even if you don't know they're
• 1:49:14
  referencing Apocalypse World. So if you've read Apocalypse
• 1:49:18
  World, these other games make a lot of intuitive sense, right?
• 1:49:24
  For me, I read Kane and I have no confusion.
• 1:49:28
  I know exactly what the game is getting at.
• 1:49:31
  If you've. Only played DND Kane.
• 1:49:35
  Will seem. Very alien because Kane is a
• 1:49:40
  little bit assuming that, you know, Apocalypse World.
• 1:49:44
  Like it's not saying that explicitly, but it's sort of
• 1:49:47
  implying that, right? And then you get into this weird
• 1:49:50
  situation of. If you haven't read.
• 1:49:54
  Apocalypse World, can you decode the game?
• 1:49:58
  And unfortunately, I don't know, like I, I can't, I cannot tell
• 1:50:07
  you whether it will be easy or hard to read because I have read
• 1:50:12
  the source material that these games are pulling from so to.
• 1:50:17
  Me it's. Obvious.
• 1:50:19
  I don't know what it's like coming into a game like this
• 1:50:22
  with no extra background information.
• 1:50:26
  And there's no way for me. To acknowledge that scenario
• 1:50:29
  because I can't. I can't like remove the
• 1:50:32
  knowledge I have from my brain, you know what I mean?
• 1:50:35
  I right like I can't. I can't agree what I've read.
• 1:50:39
  She will never agree to this, but I almost want to invite Moon
• 1:50:44
  on. To see what she thinks.
• 1:50:48
  After she runs her thing. I would like her to agree.
• 1:50:53
  To that, I think that'd be a great idea.
• 1:50:56
  Perhaps try to convince? Her I will try.
• 1:50:59
  I don't think she'll do it try but I.
• 1:51:01
  Would like to. Because I would love to hear it.
• 1:51:03
  Because genuinely, and, and I don't mean this to sound Snooty,
• 1:51:10
  I really don't, but this is one of those things where if you,
• 1:51:19
  what's a good comparison? What's a good OK?
• 1:51:28
  Let's. Take the video game.
• 1:51:29
  Example right? If you're someone who's.
• 1:51:32
  Been playing video games since the dawn of Mario Bros.
• 1:51:37
  Like the original Mario Bros, right?
• 1:51:41
  You will have. A very intrinsic understanding
• 1:51:45
  of like, platformer games, right?
• 1:51:50
  Whereas if. You're a 13 year old child now
• 1:51:55
  and you play Donkey Kong Bonanza right now on your new switch to
• 1:52:00
  that your mom bought you for Christmas.
• 1:52:03
  You. Don't.
• 1:52:04
  Have that intrinsic knowledge that Mario Bros on the Super
• 1:52:10
  Nintendo imparted to you because you never played that game
• 1:52:14
  because you weren't alive. So.
• 1:52:19
  You're gonna come in with all of these fresh new assumptions
• 1:52:23
  about how this style of game works based on Donkey Kong
• 1:52:27
  Bonanza. Which in a way.
• 1:52:31
  You're almost getting a different lesson, because Donkey
• 1:52:34
  Kong Bonanza is a completely different game.
• 1:52:38
  It's kind of the same. Scenario, If you start playing
• 1:52:42
  tabletop right now and you play Cane without any knowledge of
• 1:52:46
  Apocalypse World, having never looked at that game, you're
• 1:52:50
  going to come in with different assumptions than I would as
• 1:52:56
  someone who read Apocalypse World back when it came out or
• 1:53:00
  or around when it came out. So I would love to.
• 1:53:04
  Hear Yeah what? Someone who came to the hobby
• 1:53:09
  without having read Apocalypse World and looks at a game like
• 1:53:12
  Kane and what kind of thoughts they have about it without that
• 1:53:17
  background knowledge. Right.
• 1:53:21
  It's a. It's a.
• 1:53:22
  It's. A very straight and this is not
• 1:53:24
  me saying that you're wrong for doing it that way, this is just
• 1:53:29
  a reality of. I, I, I mean, it's a reality.
• 1:53:35
  Of all hobbies I guess is what I'm really getting at.
• 1:53:37
  Because if you read a modern sci-fi novel, but you don't know
• 1:53:44
  anything about Dune, you're going to have all these
• 1:53:47
  assumptions about sci-fi without any information from Dune, which
• 1:53:53
  is the book that's really informing all of the modern
• 1:53:56
  sci-fi. But you don't know that.
• 1:53:58
  So you're coming up with like these fresh new, like it's it,
• 1:54:02
  this is how genres evolve, right?
• 1:54:05
  Right. It's good and bad.
• 1:54:07
  It it's it's bad because. This is kind of funny because.
• 1:54:14
  I was literally just having this argument with an older guy who
• 1:54:18
  is friends with my aunt on the 4th of July and we were talking
• 1:54:21
  about video games and he was saying how it's bad that a lot
• 1:54:26
  of kids these days play Fortnite and don't understand that
• 1:54:30
  Fortnite is really comes from Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
• 1:54:36
  And I'm like, well, you're, you're right in a sense, but
• 1:54:41
  you're also wrong in a sense because that's how you evolve a
• 1:54:45
  genre is new people come into the genre with no preconceived
• 1:54:49
  notions. And because they have no
• 1:54:51
  preconceived notions, they push the genre.
• 1:54:54
  Into. A new direction because they're
• 1:54:56
  not shackled by the old ways. I I see what you're all saying.
• 1:55:02
  I I agree with him in so far as at some point they should go and
• 1:55:06
  learn about their history. You should, yeah.
• 1:55:09
  You should. Absolutely.
• 1:55:11
  But there is a, there is a creative freedom you get for not
• 1:55:16
  knowing that history, you know? Yeah.
• 1:55:19
  Like he goes well. Like.
• 1:55:22
  The person playing. Cain, who's never read
• 1:55:24
  Apocalypse World, has all of this creative freedom because
• 1:55:29
  they're not shackled by any of the old ideas that people have
• 1:55:32
  about Pbta. But.
• 1:55:35
  The person who's. Read Apocalypse World is going
• 1:55:38
  to intrinsically understand what Kane is doing from the jump much
• 1:55:44
  easier. So it's like a push and.
• 1:55:47
  Pull. I I'm not really.
• 1:55:52
  I don't. I don't have a point here.
• 1:55:53
  This is just like a a thing. I'm not go.
• 1:55:56
  I I have no end point to this, but it's an interesting, I
• 1:55:59
  thought experience. You know what I'm saying?
• 1:56:01
  No, no, I'm her said and again I'll I'll I'll ask her if she
• 1:56:04
  wants to jump in yes, I guess that's really what I'm getting.
• 1:56:08
  If you can get mood to agree with this, I would love to hear
• 1:56:11
  what she has to say because it's it's a.
• 1:56:14
  Fascinating. Like mental experiment.
• 1:56:17
  Solely, but surely we're just going.
• 1:56:18
  To invite all of our streamer friends out of this podcast.
• 1:56:20
  Yes, yes, 100%. Well, because, and it's
• 1:56:24
  interesting too, because it applies to so many other
• 1:56:27
  hobbies, right? Like if you think about books,
• 1:56:30
  comic books, video games, RPGs, movies, right?
• 1:56:37
  I'm not. Someone who's very knowledgeable
• 1:56:39
  about movies, right? I've, I've said this before, I'm
• 1:56:42
  not a movie guy. I will watch shitty, bad movies
• 1:56:46
  and be entertained and not look that deeply into them.
• 1:56:49
  I've never really been a movie guy, right?
• 1:56:51
  So I'll go and watch, you know? The latest Marvel?
• 1:56:57
  Movie or whatever, and I'll enjoy it and then someone will
• 1:57:01
  tell me how, oh, that Marvel movie is pulling from Citizen
• 1:57:06
  Kane in this way and that way. And I go, oh, I had no fucking
• 1:57:11
  clue about that. But now that you've told me
• 1:57:13
  that, that's interesting. Now I'm looking at it in this
• 1:57:16
  different light, but when I went and watched it initially I had
• 1:57:20
  one opinion and then you gave me this extra information and that
• 1:57:23
  informed my opinion differently and then it shifts.
• 1:57:28
  And it just gives you. This.
• 1:57:31
  Kaleidoscope of. Ideas.
• 1:57:35
  And. RPGs.
• 1:57:38
  Do the same thing I. Guess it's more interesting I
• 1:57:42
  it's more interesting with RPGs because when you run an RPG, you
• 1:57:47
  are actively transforming the genre via yourself, running it,
• 1:57:52
  right? Even if it's just you're
• 1:57:54
  transforming it for your group, you're still transforming it in
• 1:57:57
  some fashion because RPGs can't exist in a bubble.
• 1:58:00
  They need AGM to create the game in some fashion.
• 1:58:03
  So that makes it a little bit more interesting.
• 1:58:07
  Yeah, that's it. Right.
• 1:58:09
  Yeah. In the I I get well.
• 1:58:12
  I guess it is kind of similar to video games too, right, That the
• 1:58:15
  playing of the video game creates a different narrative to
• 1:58:18
  the video game. It's the same kind of idea.
• 1:58:21
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:58:22
  I mean, I think the thing that that invokes that thought the
• 1:58:23
  most is Fire Emblem, right? The the, the, you know, people
• 1:58:27
  play the. I have to save all my, you know,
• 1:58:29
  pretty boys, my Foos or the this is my brutal war SIM where
• 1:58:34
  people die. Yeah.
• 1:58:35
  Yeah. Well, there's a lot of, I mean,
• 1:58:36
  Fire Emblem, Mass Effect survival games like Dune or
• 1:58:41
  Conan or or V Rising, right? There's all these.
• 1:58:44
  There's a lot of genres that invoke that feeling.
• 1:58:46
  And if we're a different way, but even in a game like Final
• 1:58:50
  Fantasy, which is much more linear, narrative driven, that
• 1:58:54
  element is still there. It's just in little smaller bits
• 1:58:59
  and pieces along the way, you know?
• 1:59:04
  It's it's. It's this whole.
• 1:59:09
  I guess I'm just. Arguing for fair use and the
• 1:59:12
  idea of Fair use and transformative content, I guess,
• 1:59:16
  is really what it seems like it. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm
• 1:59:19
  getting at in a way. Yeah.
• 1:59:21
  I don't know. Fair enough.
• 1:59:23
  And I I hate to to stop you, but.
• 1:59:27
  No, no, no, it's fair. I I I'm rambling.
• 1:59:29
  I'm rant, take such a fucking piss and I'm fighting for my
• 1:59:33
  life over here. No no, ultimately I'm rambling
• 1:59:36
  because I don't really have a point to get to other than I am
• 1:59:39
  agreeing with you of the fact that yes, this game is probably
• 1:59:42
  not a good first GM game. But it would be interesting to
• 1:59:45
  hear someone running this as their first game.
• 1:59:48
  Right, that was a really long winded way for me to agree with
• 1:59:52
  you. Fair enough.
• 1:59:54
  Now, when it comes to actually running the game I said about?
• 1:59:57
  Six times already. I ran 21 shots of this using the
• 2:00:00
  same investigation both times, and while I did do this,
• 2:00:03
  technically only one of those investigations finished.
• 2:00:07
  And I I have. To say it impresses me.
• 2:00:12
  Just how? Differently the investigations
• 2:00:15
  can feel even using the same base content and like, yeah, no
• 2:00:20
  duh, but hear me out. There are some things when you
• 2:00:24
  write them that are sort of they, they become ubiquitous and
• 2:00:29
  I don't know if there is a rhyme or reason to it and what.
• 2:00:34
  I mean by that. Is when you think about.
• 2:00:39
  Old. What is it old?
• 2:00:40
  Bone Grinder from Curse of Strad, right?
• 2:00:44
  People have a million. Stories about about old bone
• 2:00:46
  grinder, but almost every single one of those stories ends up
• 2:00:51
  with and then we did a weird thing to kill the hags, not we
• 2:00:55
  made a deal, not we Nope the fuck out.
• 2:00:58
  We it not it. It's almost always we damn near
• 2:01:01
  broke this game because fuck those hags like clockwork.
• 2:01:07
  This game is not that and it and it's it's it's.
• 2:01:12
  Crazy. How much shit can change, and
• 2:01:16
  you really have to, to lend it to the blasphemies and the
• 2:01:20
  agendas, creating entirely different thought processes to
• 2:01:25
  the answers or to answer the questions that you put in front
• 2:01:29
  of them. It really is.
• 2:01:32
  It really is a testament to how a good writing prompt can
• 2:01:36
  explode human creativity in all these different directions.
• 2:01:41
  Absolutely. And you know, it's an improv
• 2:01:44
  class. It's a very good improv class.
• 2:01:46
  Yes, it is. 100% bad and and. And I have what I think are some
• 2:01:55
  very interesting and fun examples of that.
• 2:01:58
  So First things first, Matt's character had the blasphemy
• 2:02:05
  gate, right? The you know I can control
• 2:02:07
  space. And there was a.
• 2:02:10
  Situation where this is where Matt, as in been on podcast.
• 2:02:16
  Matt. Matt, Matt Gutcha.
• 2:02:19
  Yes, Matt. Yeah.
• 2:02:20
  OK. And in the situation, there was
• 2:02:24
  a massive ravine caused by the ogre and he used gait.
• 2:02:29
  And I don't remember exactly which gait ability it is, but it
• 2:02:32
  was the one where you basically do the hand thing from JoJo and
• 2:02:35
  you erase space to close the gap in the ravine.
• 2:02:41
  Just erasing a. Chunk of the physical space of
• 2:02:45
  like reality to close the gap. That's super interesting.
• 2:02:49
  And that turned the checks from hard.
• 2:02:52
  And what is it hard risky to normal risky, which is really
• 2:02:54
  cool. Another.
• 2:02:57
  Fun one, which was not necessarily a blasphemy, but the
• 2:03:00
  fact that you can do the Weave magical bullshit button with
• 2:03:03
  your Psyche skill, right? Right.
• 2:03:06
  Serif did that and effectively wrestled control of the the of
• 2:03:12
  the palace away from the ogre to keep the place from crumbling,
• 2:03:17
  which is super creative. And I love that.
• 2:03:19
  That's like a thing that she pulled off, and it partially
• 2:03:24
  came in with her firebug agenda of Find a Way, right?
• 2:03:29
  I was like, oh, the place is crumbling.
• 2:03:30
  You're not really sure where to go, you're not sure how to get
• 2:03:32
  out. What do you do?
• 2:03:34
  And she was like, oh, well, I want to find a way and I'm going
• 2:03:37
  to make the way myself. I'm going to hold this bitch
• 2:03:40
  together with my bare brain. And she did my bare brain.
• 2:03:47
  Another fun one. My mom did this actually, which
• 2:03:49
  is funny because I ran one for her and my cousin she took I I
• 2:03:55
  would love I I would love to talk about her.
• 2:04:00
  Experience with. Playing this game, but yeah, I
• 2:04:03
  don't I don't think that's I know it won't, but I was just I
• 2:04:08
  would be so curious because she is coming from a completely like
• 2:04:13
  0 information space. You know what I mean?
• 2:04:17
  I think we should try to get or mom.
• 2:04:23
  So funny thing. About my mom is she has played
• 2:04:25
  DND way back in the day like second or third edition.
• 2:04:32
  Because my. Because my uncle played D and DA
• 2:04:35
  lot, that's why I have all those old books.
• 2:04:38
  So she has actually. Played, it's just been a long
• 2:04:41
  time. Gotcha.
• 2:04:43
  Yeah, yeah. So she had a lot of fun using
• 2:04:49
  the. I think it's sympathy where you
• 2:04:51
  can talk to the objects and got a lot of use out of psychometry
• 2:04:56
  to just be like, oh, this is a clue.
• 2:04:59
  Let's figure out about the clue and just used it on everything.
• 2:05:02
  She was like, I'm going to fight gear.
• 2:05:03
  I'm just, we're just going to read the history of every single
• 2:05:06
  thing that we find to get answers.
• 2:05:08
  And yeah, they basically psychometry is one of those DM
• 2:05:14
  hand me the notebook buttons. And I think she realized that,
• 2:05:18
  right. I had to give her correct
• 2:05:20
  information because it's from what she realized at some point
• 2:05:24
  she realized it was a way to like get the secret deets.
• 2:05:28
  Yeah, and that's super fucking cool.
• 2:05:33
  Another I didn't put this in my notes, but another honorable
• 2:05:35
  mention is my little brother took edit right the Shapeshifter
• 2:05:38
  1 and. Just started turning into.
• 2:05:42
  Security guards and office workers and police officers just
• 2:05:47
  in, in that thought of like, I have an excuse to ask people for
• 2:05:51
  whatever the fuck I want. That's awesome.
• 2:05:56
  Yeah, and because, you know, when you do the thing, you get
• 2:05:59
  badges and like identification and shit.
• 2:06:02
  So like, I can't be like, I don't know who you are, dude,
• 2:06:06
  you're in a fucking. You're in Virginia.
• 2:06:08
  Like, yeah, you're going to see a cop you don't recognize.
• 2:06:11
  There's not a lot I can do. And I'm.
• 2:06:13
  Not that I want to do. Anything about it, but it is an
• 2:06:15
  interesting that like it's like yeah, you figured it out.
• 2:06:19
  It it it really feels. Like.
• 2:06:27
  I almost don't want to say this because I feel like the
• 2:06:31
  internet's going to be like, oh, just a fucking.
• 2:06:34
  Hater. But.
• 2:06:37
  I don't know man, it feels. Like DND has almost become
• 2:06:40
  invalidated as as. The Inroad.
• 2:06:44
  To the hobby, you know, rather I'm I'm going to keep it so
• 2:06:49
  haunted with you, chief I. Don't.
• 2:06:53
  Disagree. That is the exact conclusion
• 2:06:56
  that I have been coming to in the last six months.
• 2:07:00
  I know, I know. Yeah.
• 2:07:02
  Like, I don't want to say it, like I don't want to shit on
• 2:07:05
  D&D, but it it, it just feels like D&D is sort of behind the
• 2:07:10
  times, like behind the curve, you know?
• 2:07:13
  Right. No, it just feels archaic.
• 2:07:15
  Like, yeah. Yeah, like the the I.
• 2:07:18
  I just I had this thought today, right not?
• 2:07:22
  DND or not? Today, but this week as I was
• 2:07:24
  writing my notes. The fact that acid.
• 2:07:30
  Splash requires a target of a creature.
• 2:07:33
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yes, yes, you can break the
• 2:07:37
  rules and let and use acid splash to like the bust open
• 2:07:40
  locks or chests or whatever. And it's like, oh, yeah, you, we
• 2:07:42
  did that. You can do that in Baldur's
• 2:07:44
  Gate. Yeah, you can do that in
• 2:07:45
  Baldur's Gate because the Larian writers understood the
• 2:07:49
  assignment. Yeah, Yeah, they understand
• 2:07:52
  that. They they almost understand D&D
• 2:07:55
  better than the D&D writers. In a weird way, yes.
• 2:07:59
  And. The fact that in.
• 2:08:01
  D and. DGM can tell you the padlock is
• 2:08:05
  not a creature. You can't hit it with acid
• 2:08:09
  splash. Or you know, I I remember
• 2:08:11
  distinctly remember trying to blow a hole in a ship using
• 2:08:15
  fireball and that seems pretty right.
• 2:08:17
  That makes sense, but the fact that the ship.
• 2:08:21
  Has hit. Points for metric for for sorry
• 2:08:24
  for cubic inches of wood. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:08:29
  What are we doing here? You're completely evaluating the
• 2:08:33
  the fun that you can have by just doing a thing.
• 2:08:36
  You have to constantly worry about the AC of the material,
• 2:08:40
  the hit points of the material. How dense is the material?
• 2:08:43
  Why do I used to think that was cool, and now I'm like, why the
• 2:08:46
  fuck does it matter? Yeah, you're like, wait a
• 2:08:49
  minute, why do I care? It really Because the thing that
• 2:08:53
  made me think that in the moment as you were talking was you
• 2:08:56
  talking about how your mom realized she could use her
• 2:09:00
  character's ability as a give me the information button.
• 2:09:05
  Yeah, it's like D&D just. Wouldn't let you do that.
• 2:09:08
  It wouldn't no, it just would like it would put a like a
• 2:09:11
  really stupid check in front of it, despite the fact that you
• 2:09:14
  would put a burning a resource in your style slot.
• 2:09:17
  Yeah, or it would put a lot of contingencies so that yeah, it
• 2:09:20
  it's just. Yeah, it's like I don't want.
• 2:09:24
  To say DND is invalid as. A part of the hobby.
• 2:09:28
  But it it just. Doesn't feel.
• 2:09:31
  Like the right game to introduce people to the hobby anymore?
• 2:09:35
  No, because I move past it. And to be clear, because this is
• 2:09:39
  inevitably going to happen. We are not saying that if you
• 2:09:42
  enjoy D&D, you are invalid. Yeah.
• 2:09:45
  You could like. Yeah, You could like D What
• 2:09:47
  we're saying is as the Titan of the industry, the thing that
• 2:09:51
  brings people to the hobby, it is becoming increasingly
• 2:09:57
  ineffective. Yeah.
• 2:09:59
  It's like bringing people into the hobby, unless you do the
• 2:10:03
  thing that everyone does but the game does not tell you or expect
• 2:10:07
  you to do, which is just let the rules not matter for new
• 2:10:11
  players. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:10:14
  And again, yes. Can people do that?
• 2:10:17
  Yes. Do they do it?
• 2:10:19
  Absolutely. Yeah.
• 2:10:21
  But the game doesn't tell you. Tell you.
• 2:10:26
  Yeah, yeah. It's such a weird.
• 2:10:31
  It's it's almost. Like if you tried to introduce.
• 2:10:36
  Tabletop is in a weird. Space because it's almost as if
• 2:10:39
  you're like someone who's never played video games and every.
• 2:10:45
  Single. Time you tried to introduce a
• 2:10:48
  person to a video game, you always used Call of Duty.
• 2:10:51
  Like that was the game that everybody used to introduce
• 2:10:54
  people to video games. That would be so ineffective
• 2:11:00
  right? Bro I literally saw someone say
• 2:11:03
  today, I saw a post today where someone's like I'm finally going
• 2:11:05
  to pull the trigger. I want to get into anime.
• 2:11:07
  What's a good first anime? The amount of people who said
• 2:11:10
  one piece. Yeah, which is?
• 2:11:13
  Awful answer. Yeah, it's an awful answer.
• 2:11:16
  What the fuck is wrong? Yeah, yeah.
• 2:11:17
  The thing that to to tell someone if they were going to
• 2:11:20
  gauge whether or not they like it.
• 2:11:21
  The thing that over 1000 episodes that they almost will
• 2:11:25
  never finish. Well, and here's the thing, me
• 2:11:30
  saying One Piece is a bad answer to get someone into anime is not
• 2:11:35
  me saying One Piece is a bad anime.
• 2:11:38
  It's just not a good introducer. When you want to get someone
• 2:11:43
  into something, you cannot fold his out.
• 2:11:47
  You can't drop people in the deep end.
• 2:11:50
  That works with some people. If you have friends who will go,
• 2:11:53
  like getting Sam, our former podcast host, Sam, into Dune.
• 2:11:57
  I know how Sam thinks. I'm gonna go.
• 2:12:00
  You want to learn about the sandworms, bud?
• 2:12:01
  And he's like, yeah, what the fuck's going on with those?
• 2:12:03
  Like, yes, yes, absolutely can do that.
• 2:12:07
  But that's not everybody. No, like my mom, I've talked
• 2:12:11
  about D&D for years. I've run and played the game for
• 2:12:15
  years. And every time I jokingly was
• 2:12:18
  like, you want to try it? It was always.
• 2:12:20
  Like no. That's a lot.
• 2:12:21
  And you're you're always talking about the rules, and that's too
• 2:12:24
  much for me to remember. I don't want to do any of that.
• 2:12:26
  Yeah. Or like to get her into watching
• 2:12:29
  something. I was like, you know, she she
• 2:12:30
  doesn't think highly of animation.
• 2:12:32
  It's a contention point for me. Don't worry.
• 2:12:34
  Don't even get me started on that one.
• 2:12:37
  I was like, OK, well you. Like Game of Thrones, right?
• 2:12:39
  She was like, yeah, I'm like, OK, what if I showed you an
• 2:12:42
  animated series that has the same grit of Game of Thrones and
• 2:12:45
  the same level of writing as Game of Thrones?
• 2:12:47
  And she was like, I don't believe that thing exists.
• 2:12:50
  And I showed her Castlevania and she loved it.
• 2:12:54
  She we were like, oh, we're going to watch it together.
• 2:12:57
  And then I found like, literally I came back a week later from
• 2:12:59
  work and she was like, I watched the rest of their seasons.
• 2:13:02
  I just watched the whole thing. That's great.
• 2:13:04
  First of all, I was like, alright, fuck you for that.
• 2:13:05
  But like, no, I get it. No, I no, no, I love that.
• 2:13:08
  Yeah, I know. I love that.
• 2:13:10
  Well, it's, yeah, it's literally the thing.
• 2:13:13
  It's like, OK, you want to get someone into anime?
• 2:13:18
  It's like, what's a good anime? To use and you go, OK, what is
• 2:13:21
  that person like right now? And someone goes, well, they
• 2:13:25
  kind of like westerns. OK, have them watch Cowboy
• 2:13:28
  Bebop. Right, not.
• 2:13:31
  One piece, have them watch Cowboy Bebop right?
• 2:13:34
  And then go, OK, where do I go from there?
• 2:13:37
  OK, try Samurai Champloo. OK, where do I go from there?
• 2:13:41
  OK, maybe get a little more weebie, maybe do like Demon
• 2:13:45
  Slayer, right. Like it's like a progression.
• 2:13:48
  You can't you can't say watch DBZ.
• 2:13:52
  Yeah, no, like, yeah, when So when my younger brother was
• 2:13:58
  getting into anime, he was like, what's the thing I should watch?
• 2:14:01
  And I said Bleach and I. Specifically, said bleach.
• 2:14:06
  Because I was going to rewatch Bleach, right?
• 2:14:10
  So I went. I'm going to watch it with you.
• 2:14:13
  Yeah, which is the way to. Go about it that like that's a
• 2:14:15
  good way to to drop people into the deep end to be like, I'm
• 2:14:18
  going to, I'm not going to leave you to do this on your own.
• 2:14:21
  We're going to do it together. And and that's an instance where
• 2:14:25
  you can drop someone at the deep end.
• 2:14:26
  But if you just tell someone online to watch One Piece as
• 2:14:28
  their first anime, you also have to you knew the highest.
• 2:14:31
  Level. Goober Well, you also knew the
• 2:14:33
  person, right? Like, you knew that the person
• 2:14:36
  you were suggesting to would probably respond positively to
• 2:14:39
  the thing you're suggesting. If, like, you know, if my mom
• 2:14:47
  was, like, all right, show me this anime thing.
• 2:14:49
  I'm not going to show my mom JoJo, right?
• 2:14:51
  Because I know she's not going to respond well to fucking JoJo,
• 2:14:56
  right? Like, yeah, she's not going to
• 2:14:57
  get it. Like, fucking weird.
• 2:14:59
  Yeah, she's she's going to see a man pulling a gun from a piece
• 2:15:06
  of paper and be like, what the fuck is hell Yeah, I was going
• 2:15:09
  to see really sexy, muscly men posing at each other in rainbow
• 2:15:13
  colors, talking about their feelings and be like, what the
• 2:15:15
  fuck is happening right now? But.
• 2:15:18
  But. Conversely, talking to my
• 2:15:20
  girlfriend, I'm trying to sell her on JoJo and how do I sell
• 2:15:24
  her? I'm like, listen, babe, it's
• 2:15:26
  really fucking gay. And I know that's a selling
• 2:15:28
  point. So like, you have to know.
• 2:15:31
  You have to know the person. Yeah.
• 2:15:35
  So yeah, it. It's.
• 2:15:39
  To wrap it back to what? We were talking about RPGs is
• 2:15:41
  the same kind of thing. You really got to know the
• 2:15:43
  person. If you have someone who like, I
• 2:15:48
  don't know, maybe they're really into.
• 2:15:53
  Like what's a good? Maybe they like Star Wars a lot,
• 2:15:57
  right? Maybe they're really into Star
• 2:15:58
  Wars and you go, OK, I have a role-playing game that is Star
• 2:16:02
  Wars. And then you run them Fantasy
• 2:16:05
  Flight, right, The Fantasy Flight Star Wars games.
• 2:16:08
  Or maybe you say, OK, I have something that I can do similar.
• 2:16:10
  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
• 2:16:11
  But not exactly. And you run them stars without a
• 2:16:13
  number. So Are you ready for this?
• 2:16:16
  I did this with the passenger today.
• 2:16:19
  Did you? Really.
• 2:16:20
  Literally. OK, I drove this kid.
• 2:16:22
  He was going, he's a he's, he's a culinary and he's going to
• 2:16:25
  culinary school and he was taught, you know, I told him
• 2:16:29
  that I'm, I'm working for a video game company now and.
• 2:16:32
  He was like, oh. Are you like, are you going to
• 2:16:34
  work on the new Star Wars game? And I was like, oh, I guess he's
• 2:16:36
  into Star Wars. We were talking about it.
• 2:16:38
  And I was like, Nah, man, it's like an RPG.
• 2:16:41
  And he's like, oh, I don't really play those.
• 2:16:42
  I'm like, oh, I mean, I'm addicted.
• 2:16:43
  I play RPGs, tabletop RPGs, And he's like, what's those?
• 2:16:47
  And I was like, well, it's like Dungeons and Dragons.
• 2:16:48
  He goes, oh, that doesn't sound that cool.
• 2:16:50
  And I was like, well, did you know that there's one for Star
• 2:16:51
  Wars? And I immediately sold him.
• 2:16:53
  He was like, oh, yeah. And I talked about Fantasy
• 2:16:56
  Flight and I was like, do you like anime?
• 2:16:58
  He was like, I love anime. I'm like, do you like JJK?
• 2:16:59
  And he was like, yeah, I'm like, well, let me tell you about this
• 2:17:02
  game called Kane. I literally did.
• 2:17:04
  The thing today, yeah. Yes, that's exactly.
• 2:17:08
  And that's exactly what I mean by the end, he went from Nah,
• 2:17:11
  D&D is nerdy too. I'm going to go, I'm going to
• 2:17:14
  fucking go to my local hobby shop and see if I can find
• 2:17:18
  someone to play games with. Yeah, yeah, literally back at
• 2:17:22
  the RPG dealer. Yeah, fucking did it to.
• 2:17:26
  Him so good, I know. To to loop it back.
• 2:17:32
  To a final point, 'cause I wanted to talk to you said we
• 2:17:34
  have drifted, I know drifted into a.
• 2:17:36
  Totally new topic I. Wanted to talk a little bit more
• 2:17:39
  about the domains and stuff where we're two hours and 20
• 2:17:41
  minutes in. So just the last thing I'm going
• 2:17:42
  to say, and this is another kind of dig at D&D.
• 2:17:46
  Honestly, I'll just say the the only reason I went down this
• 2:17:49
  rabbit hole is just 'cause this is the thing I have a lot of
• 2:17:51
  passion about. No, I get it, I get you.
• 2:17:52
  Which is to say, showing people to hobbies that they might not
• 2:17:57
  immediately, you know, have any vibe with, right?
• 2:18:03
  What I will say is of the blasphemies I love that they
• 2:18:08
  often lack. Specific damage.
• 2:18:12
  Numbers, Even if they're combat style blasts.
• 2:18:14
  Yeah, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, and again, this is my
• 2:18:18
  dig at D&D for the fireball thing.
• 2:18:19
  I know. I know exactly where to go with
• 2:18:21
  this. It forces players to think about
• 2:18:24
  their abilities not as ways to hurt things, but as means to
• 2:18:28
  solve problems. Right and.
• 2:18:32
  That is cool. And like it does say oh this
• 2:18:35
  does damage up to category, but it doesn't say it deals 5
• 2:18:40
  damage, it deals 6 damage. It's just telling players that
• 2:18:45
  this thing can damage stuff, not characters, doesn't have a
• 2:18:50
  target. It just says you target
• 2:18:52
  something within category and it talks, talks about space,
• 2:18:58
  people, area. Like it gives you all of that in
• 2:19:02
  the category system and players. Go oh.
• 2:19:05
  Like the perfect 1 is, what is it Severance with tension where
• 2:19:08
  you can make the blade out of your force field?
• 2:19:11
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you could.
• 2:19:12
  Think about that to cut a motherfucker.
• 2:19:14
  But if they're like, if you have to there's like a a building
• 2:19:18
  fell down around you, you can use severance to cut your way
• 2:19:22
  out. Or if you're trying to break
• 2:19:25
  into. Like a bank vault to fight a
• 2:19:26
  toad. You can cut the vault in half
• 2:19:30
  because. It says it cuts through.
• 2:19:31
  Almost anything. You just think about that.
• 2:19:35
  Thing as, oh, almost anything. OK, well this is a thing I can
• 2:19:39
  cut through that, unlike D&D, Yeah, can I?
• 2:19:49
  Do you have any questions about the one shots?
• 2:19:54
  So I kind of rambled about them. I don't know.
• 2:19:58
  We've, we've gone so far afield. I probably did, but I can't
• 2:20:02
  remember him now. I mean, I, I well, here, I'll,
• 2:20:06
  I'll say two things. One, I just think it's really
• 2:20:09
  funny because I feel like anyone who's going to listen to this
• 2:20:11
  without any context is going to think we really fucking hate
• 2:20:14
  D&D. Yeah.
• 2:20:16
  Well. Which is funny.
• 2:20:18
  We don't, it's it. We don't.
• 2:20:21
  If you ran it, I've run it. I have a.
• 2:20:23
  It's a complicated relationship, but.
• 2:20:27
  The. Longer you play.
• 2:20:28
  DND and especially us, because we have to think about these
• 2:20:30
  games critically and just not how not oh, they're fun, right?
• 2:20:34
  Yeah. Like, like every time I do a
• 2:20:38
  tabletop shout out, I'm like, oh, this game's fun.
• 2:20:41
  I'm not going to talk a lot of shit about it, but I do have
• 2:20:43
  critical thoughts about it for sure.
• 2:20:45
  Right, Right. Right.
• 2:20:46
  Yeah. And.
• 2:20:48
  When you think about it. Critically, you realize that DND
• 2:20:51
  has so many weird problems that other games have just solved.
• 2:20:57
  Solved. Elegant.
• 2:20:59
  Not like patchwork shit, they just fixed it.
• 2:21:02
  Oh I'm sorry, well I was just going to say too.
• 2:21:05
  It's funny because. I've now had multiple.
• 2:21:09
  People you you included on this list who have said to me, oh.
• 2:21:15
  I get what you mean. Now about not being that
• 2:21:19
  interested in playing D&D anymore, you know what I mean?
• 2:21:22
  Yeah, like. Girlfriend.
• 2:21:26
  Literally. Said She literally said to me
• 2:21:27
  last week or, or last weekend she was like, yeah.
• 2:21:33
  You know I. Have my D&D campaign with my
• 2:21:35
  friends, and a lot of the time when I'm playing D and DI just
• 2:21:38
  kind of feel like, man, I kind of just wish this was fabulous,
• 2:21:42
  yeah. Dude, fabulous.
• 2:21:44
  Fuck yeah. It's so good, yeah.
• 2:21:49
  And I get what she. Means so it's just funny like.
• 2:21:55
  I don't know. I'm not.
• 2:21:55
  I don't. Want to pat myself on the back
• 2:21:57
  too much, but it is funny to just be like, I'll give this to
• 2:22:00
  you. It's true.
• 2:22:04
  I guess. I I'm just curious, just very
• 2:22:06
  broadly speaking, do you feel like the one shots.
• 2:22:11
  Were. Like successful, which is maybe
• 2:22:17
  a slightly weird way to put in. So my mom and cousin are
• 2:22:19
  actively asking me when I'm coming back to run another one.
• 2:22:23
  OK, I would call that successful for sure.
• 2:22:26
  And we didn't finish the one with, with Paladin, Serath and
• 2:22:29
  Matt. We have to.
• 2:22:31
  I'm just kind of trying to figure out a good day because I,
• 2:22:33
  you know, I talked to the ladies now apparently and I'm trying to
• 2:22:38
  figure out stuff with her. So I know D&D fans who have
• 2:22:43
  girlfriends. Crazy.
• 2:22:44
  I know my my girlfriend's imaginary by the way, I keep
• 2:22:47
  making up stories. She's not real, right, Right.
• 2:22:49
  That's. Why they keep changing her name?
• 2:22:51
  Yeah, yeah, she's not real. Fake.
• 2:22:54
  Verses but. Yeah, we got to finish that one.
• 2:22:58
  But the fact that they, like, we didn't finish and Sarah was
• 2:23:00
  like, all right, when when's the next one?
• 2:23:02
  Then? Like, when when are we going to
• 2:23:03
  finish this? Like, OK, so you got a you got a
• 2:23:07
  when are we doing it again? Response from both parties.
• 2:23:09
  Yes. Yeah.
• 2:23:11
  OK. Yeah.
• 2:23:12
  Yeah. That's pretty much what I
• 2:23:14
  expected. Yeah.
• 2:23:18
  Oh, actually, one final thing. This is a good thing to end on
• 2:23:21
  because I think this is fun. You might be curious as to what
• 2:23:24
  kind of characters the brand new RPG players made.
• 2:23:28
  Oh, yeah. So this is what I told them
• 2:23:32
  exactly. Right.
• 2:23:33
  And I, we talked about it previously.
• 2:23:34
  Kane, I think has the easiest character builder I've ever
• 2:23:37
  seen. It has a pretty.
• 2:23:38
  Yeah, it's very easy. So streamlined, 15 minutes tops.
• 2:23:43
  And I told each I was like that. They were like, OK, so where
• 2:23:46
  like, where are the characters? Like, like we're playing
• 2:23:49
  characters. Where are they?
• 2:23:50
  And I was like, you make them. And they went, oh, I don't know
• 2:23:52
  how to do that. Like, I don't like, what if I
• 2:23:55
  can't think of anything? And I was like, OK.
• 2:23:58
  Think of a character. In media that you like now,
• 2:24:02
  you're not playing that character, right?
• 2:24:05
  My mom loves Supernatural. You're I'm like, you're not
• 2:24:08
  playing Dean Winchester. But think of everything you like
• 2:24:11
  about Dean Winchester. The like, the way his
• 2:24:13
  personality is, the way he talks, the way he acts, and make
• 2:24:16
  a character based on that with your own little flair in it.
• 2:24:21
  And, hilariously, her. Own flair was making
• 2:24:23
  sandwichester. I mean, hey, whatever works,
• 2:24:28
  right? However, that's the trick,
• 2:24:31
  right? However you need to.
• 2:24:32
  I don't want to say rationalize, that's not quite the right word,
• 2:24:38
  but however you make sense of it through whatever your paradigm
• 2:24:43
  is, that what's that's what works, you know?
• 2:24:46
  Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, my mom was like, I want
• 2:24:49
  to make a, a, a character who's like Dean Winchester.
• 2:24:53
  And I was like, what are you going to name the character?
• 2:24:55
  And she was like, oh, we're like, you know, we're agents.
• 2:24:56
  We have like code names. I'm just going to name it
• 2:24:58
  Winchester. And I was like, that's actually
• 2:25:00
  a good idea. That's pretty solid Works.
• 2:25:04
  My little brother who is, you know, he's into anime, but he's
• 2:25:07
  primarily into battle shonen and he really likes Tokyo Revengers.
• 2:25:10
  So he was like, I want to make a dude who kicks ass and, like,
• 2:25:14
  likes to fight people and solves problems.
• 2:25:16
  It's not the character he actually played, which is fun
• 2:25:19
  because the the idea of the character evolved as they played
• 2:25:22
  them. Yeah, but he named his character
• 2:25:25
  Mikey after the character in Tokyo Revengers, and he looked
• 2:25:29
  like Mikey. And it's like, are you actually,
• 2:25:32
  he's like, no, no, like, he's different, but he's, he's got
• 2:25:34
  the blonde hair and the ponytail and his name is Mikey.
• 2:25:36
  I'm like, all right, cool. And then my cousin who played
• 2:25:40
  with us, who I found out really likes fanfiction, which I didn't
• 2:25:44
  know, named her character James, as in James Potter from the
• 2:25:48
  Marauder's Harry Potter fanfiction.
• 2:25:50
  And like, she was like, OK, what powers would James have?
• 2:25:54
  And she went in, She was like, OK, he, he has a he's got, he's
• 2:25:58
  got the, the Patronus charm. So he does shield.
• 2:26:00
  So I want to take tension and then I'll do this because it
• 2:26:03
  does the and she went so in because she tried to do a
• 2:26:06
  character build. Yeah, yeah.
• 2:26:11
  We literally got the three shades of it.
• 2:26:12
  We got, I'm role-playing this character.
• 2:26:15
  I I like this character and I'm just going to make this
• 2:26:18
  character. It was really cool.
• 2:26:22
  Yeah, I, I again, Yeah, that's, that's what you want.
• 2:26:24
  You want the excitement of I'm trying to invoke this character
• 2:26:29
  or this vibe or this concept. Yeah, yeah.
• 2:26:33
  Basically, the game did. The work for you, it did exactly
• 2:26:35
  what you wanted. Yeah.
• 2:26:37
  And it was, it was quick, easy. The characters like the players
• 2:26:40
  like their characters. Yeah.
• 2:26:43
  Yeah. And quite frankly, it would have
• 2:26:46
  been harder with D&D. No, absolutely.
• 2:26:51
  It would have been way fucking harder because then you have to
• 2:26:53
  go, OK, well, what, what kind of race do you want to play?
• 2:26:55
  And they go, what, what do they have?
• 2:26:57
  And then you have to look at the the 5E tools races and go fuck.
• 2:27:02
  Then you go ready. What kind of?
• 2:27:04
  Class do you want to play and like, oh what do they have you
• 2:27:07
  go fuck. Then you're like, you have to
• 2:27:10
  give them. Examples.
• 2:27:12
  And then because it's DND, you always have to do the.
• 2:27:13
  But it doesn't always have to be like that, right?
• 2:27:16
  Like, yeah, because that's what DND does now, yeah.
• 2:27:21
  With Kane. What am I?
• 2:27:23
  You're an exorcist. OK, what do I look like?
• 2:27:26
  You're wearing a shitty business suit.
• 2:27:28
  OK, what are my powers? Here are your powers.
• 2:27:32
  OK. Yeah.
• 2:27:33
  It it it a lot. Of it.
• 2:27:36
  Comes back to that idea of you make better art with
• 2:27:40
  constraints, Yeah. Art.
• 2:27:44
  Agree. Yeah.
• 2:27:49
  I feel. I feel like.
• 2:27:53
  I feel like. Fucking Wattsy's going to call
• 2:27:55
  the Pinkertons on us bro. Let I.
• 2:27:59
  Am in. Texas Call.
• 2:28:01
  Those motherfuckers. Yeah.
• 2:28:03
  I just, I promise. You.
• 2:28:05
  I'm going to turn into Willem Dafoe from from Boondock Saints.
• 2:28:11
  That was a firefight. Yeah, that's going to be me.
• 2:28:14
  When? You call the.
• 2:28:14
  Pinkertons on me Wattsy watch. I just it's a doctrine.
• 2:28:19
  Bitch, I'm really not. Trying to shit on DND it's just.
• 2:28:26
  They're behind the times. Like, yeah.
• 2:28:28
  They're, yeah, they're. Behind they're they, they're I.
• 2:28:31
  I was having a talk about this with a friend of mine where he
• 2:28:35
  was. Like, look man like.
• 2:28:37
  I just don't think DN DS for you.
• 2:28:38
  I'm like, no, no, that's not, that's not the problem.
• 2:28:41
  The problem? Is is.
• 2:28:42
  That I have seen the solution to DN DS problem and the fact that
• 2:28:47
  they refuse to do anything about it.
• 2:28:49
  Best against my nerves. And the general response was
• 2:28:52
  well that's just how they do things.
• 2:28:53
  I'm like, right? But the way they do.
• 2:28:56
  Things is to introduce problems that they refuse to solve.
• 2:29:01
  That's not a good way of doing things.
• 2:29:02
  And at the end of the day, I don't like how they're doing
• 2:29:06
  things right. And yes, does that mean that
• 2:29:08
  maybe I'm, I will play the game less and less?
• 2:29:11
  Sure. But the fact of the matter is
• 2:29:13
  that I don't want to play the games less or less.
• 2:29:15
  I want them to learn from the rest of the industry and stop
• 2:29:19
  pretending that they don't have to.
• 2:29:22
  That's really my biggest thing that frustrates me about D&D is
• 2:29:25
  I I feel like they're designed for the game is not learning
• 2:29:31
  from other games. I feel like they're trying to
• 2:29:34
  design in a bubble and ignoring all the other games out there.
• 2:29:38
  Which is very weird to me because you look at video games
• 2:29:42
  and movies and books and they're all learning from each other all
• 2:29:47
  the time. But DND seems like almost a
• 2:29:49
  little bit afraid to do that and I don't know why, Which is what
• 2:29:56
  do you think about it when it's odd given its origins?
• 2:29:59
  Yes, yes, literally that's what I mean.
• 2:30:02
  Like, it doesn't make any sense. Like why are you so scared of
• 2:30:04
  doing that? It's very.
• 2:30:08
  Weird, I I have to assume it's some sort of very like?
• 2:30:14
  Strange. Edict from the top, you know.
• 2:30:19
  That's the only way it makes. Sense to me, maybe, but I don't
• 2:30:21
  imagine that fucking C-Suite execs even understand that.
• 2:30:27
  Right, they just want results. Typically, Right.
• 2:30:30
  Right. Yeah.
• 2:30:30
  I, I, I don't know. That's true.
• 2:30:32
  Yeah. You have a good point there.
• 2:30:33
  I, I don't know. I can't make sense of it.
• 2:30:35
  I really can't because I, I don't think.
• 2:30:38
  I think at some point you have to just admit that there is
• 2:30:39
  none, I guess. I guess it's kind of like AAA
• 2:30:43
  video games right now. What?
• 2:30:45
  They're only doing the safe thing because that guarantees
• 2:30:48
  the safe thing. Yeah.
• 2:30:50
  Yeah. Because they, they, they
• 2:30:52
  innovation doesn't come from AAA anymore, right?
• 2:30:55
  Innovation comes from Indy, and I guess it it D&D is the AAA of
• 2:31:01
  the tabletop world, it's not going to be for long.
• 2:31:04
  Look, I'm not saying that something's going to usurp it,
• 2:31:06
  but given, you know, Jacra and Perkins jumping to Daggerhart
• 2:31:11
  and the amount of a cult following they have.
• 2:31:15
  I think for. The first time, we're not going
• 2:31:19
  to see the D&D killer, I'm not going to say that, But we could
• 2:31:21
  see an honest D&D competitor, maybe one that that, and people
• 2:31:25
  are always like, that's Pathfinder.
• 2:31:28
  It is to a. It is to a point.
• 2:31:30
  It is, it is to a point, but it's not a real contender like
• 2:31:34
  well, they don't exist in the same price bracket.
• 2:31:37
  The only thing about. Pathfinder is that.
• 2:31:38
  Pathfinder I don't think is trying to push the boundaries
• 2:31:43
  that much. Pathfinder.
• 2:31:45
  I think plays. It pretty safe, no, and to the
• 2:31:47
  point I'm really talking about fans right, I said price
• 2:31:52
  bracket. I didn't.
• 2:31:52
  I didn't mean that, but I mean like, yeah, I know what you
• 2:31:55
  meant. It's spot in the zeitgeist.
• 2:31:58
  Yeah. Pathfinder's not that game.
• 2:32:00
  Pathfinder is for people who like DND but want crunchier DND
• 2:32:04
  if you want. Revitalized.
• 2:32:08
  Revamped DND adjacent it's stagger heart.
• 2:32:14
  Is Staggerhart it? It it it's also maybe draw steel
• 2:32:18
  like it's also maybe DC 20. Like I think there's a couple of
• 2:32:22
  different options out there potentially offering that, you
• 2:32:24
  know, yes. But I think all of that to say,
• 2:32:28
  I think we're going to be hitting more AAA level designers
• 2:32:32
  in the RPG space who will bring innovation back.
• 2:32:35
  I hope so. I would like that.
• 2:32:38
  I would like that a lot. I actually, oh God, we're, we're
• 2:32:42
  so far in. I kind of want to look at Tom's
• 2:32:45
  war game Malagaste Magna Gothica Malagaste.
• 2:32:52
  Because I've played some. Warhammer right?
• 2:32:54
  I've played war games before and I find them tedious at times and
• 2:32:59
  a little bogged down by their own rules.
• 2:33:02
  So I would. Like to play that game and see
• 2:33:04
  how that works. Because maybe the mad lad's done
• 2:33:07
  it again. He may have he.
• 2:33:11
  May have. What all of that shooting on
• 2:33:15
  DND? That's going to be the that's
• 2:33:16
  got to be the clip, right? Just shooting on DND.
• 2:33:19
  Yeah. Maybe.
• 2:33:21
  Maybe. No, I think, I think honestly.
• 2:33:23
  I think it'll just be the the what my what my characters
• 2:33:25
  played, my players made their characters of.
• 2:33:28
  I don't know, I'll figure something out.
• 2:33:29
  God, I'm going to hate rewind listening to this episode.
• 2:33:31
  I always hate listening to long ones.
• 2:33:34
  Yeah, time Sue Speed it is, baby.
• 2:33:37
  Sorry, Brett. Oh, he's going to kill us, Yeah.
• 2:33:44
  That's that's. Been us.
• 2:33:46
  Follow us on. Social.
• 2:33:47
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• 2:33:51
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• 2:33:54
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• 2:33:58
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• 2:34:08
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• 2:34:13
  sky or Twitter if. You are so inclined.
• 2:34:15
  Appreciate it bud. All right.
• 2:34:19
  Goodbye peace, motherfucks.