Latest / Sessions Canceled / Advancing Your GM Skills: Ep. 182

Transcript

Advancing Your GM Skills: Ep. 182 · Sessions Canceled

• 0:15
  All right we return Internet the GM said that the Last of Us is
• 0:19
  the greatest writing ever known to man and we all had to slap
• 0:23
  the shit out of him a little bit so he's he's recovering for the
• 0:25
  time being so since cancelled because.
• 0:27
  I was fucking killing you just talking to us.
• 0:32
  Fucking end you. He also said the drift word in
• 0:39
  books are trayish. Terrible writing, so you know.
• 0:42
  Wow. I mean that that you're
• 0:44
  attacking that on that one. That's fine with me.
• 0:46
  Honestly, I can't speak. I haven't read them at all, so
• 0:48
  you know, I'm just. Taking Watch out while I was in
• 0:55
  New York. I'll probably get around to it.
• 0:57
  Bro there's 3500 books. I'm not, it's not, I don't 30.
• 1:01
  7. There's so many Dunk Ritz Dorden
• 1:05
  has been around the block. I, I don't it's too much.
• 1:12
  It's it's, it's One piece levels of nonsense.
• 1:17
  Like sorry One piece fans, it's not happening.
• 1:19
  That's just too much. I I'm sorry, like unless, unless
• 1:25
  I get it confirmed, it's over. Like it finishes and then for
• 1:29
  some reason I'm like, you know what?
• 1:30
  I need a project for the next year.
• 1:32
  Then maybe that's the only scenario, but probably not.
• 1:38
  Anyway, we're not here to talk about anime, although we do seem
• 1:40
  to bring it up a lot. We do.
• 1:42
  That being said, the character I was talking about Octopus Guy,
• 1:45
  his name is Yoshida. OK, got it.
• 1:48
  Got it. I told you it was about as
• 1:51
  expected as you thought he'd be. That's going to make no sense to
• 1:55
  anyone listening. We were talking about something
• 1:56
  else prior to that. Isaiah is just finishing a
• 1:59
  thought that he didn't finish before.
• 2:01
  This is my emergent. Emergent, emergent gameplay.
• 2:05
  I'll bro I I don't remember what we were talking about but boy
• 2:10
  was I fucking excited when I remembered what I was trying to
• 2:12
  say there. I was going to, I was going to
• 2:14
  get really hyped, but I heard his name was like, I'm just
• 2:16
  going to, I'm going to keep it chill.
• 2:19
  That's fair. That's fair.
• 2:22
  Anyway, tabletop games hashtag we play them.
• 2:28
  We do from time to time. From time to time, probably more
• 2:31
  than we should to be honest. But you know, it's fine.
• 2:33
  That's fine. It's whatever.
• 2:36
  Listen, we could have worse hobbies like alcoholism or crack
• 2:40
  or something, I don't know. I OK, so here's the thing.
• 2:44
  I say that shit all the time. Say what shit all the time.
• 2:49
  Like people are like oh like is this what you do?
• 2:52
  Like every week you play this? Like you play this game for like
• 2:55
  4 hours every Tuesday and Thursday, I'm like would you
• 2:58
  rather I do fucking drugs? Yeah, like, oh, you know, I I
• 3:03
  got. To know what you want me to say
• 3:08
  bro like. Listen, it's not like going out
• 3:11
  to the bar and drinking a shit load every fucking week is that
• 3:15
  much more productive. All right?
• 3:16
  Let's not. Let's.
• 3:18
  Not I, I am. I am having as much if not more
• 3:20
  fun at a fraction of the price. Yeah, and without the health
• 3:27
  effects. True.
• 3:30
  So, you know, anyway, not to not to get into the whole people
• 3:35
  judging each other's hobbies, but definitely there are certain
• 3:38
  people where I'm like, bro, you do not have a leg to stand on.
• 3:43
  But everyone who's listening to this, however, obviously is on
• 3:45
  our side. So tabletop thinks before we do
• 3:51
  that, of course, take a moment, say hello to Jesus and press,
• 3:56
  follow or subscribe on your podcast platform of choice.
• 4:01
  Jesus would be a fan. I think what what?
• 4:07
  Why? What?
• 4:09
  Why? Why say hello to G?
• 4:10
  I'm just. I don't know, say what's up to
• 4:12
  your homeboy Jesus and you're big J, See, you're big J.
• 4:16
  That's what I'm saying. Look, look, Jesus is the homie.
• 4:19
  Listen, the, the, the crazy preachers and everything.
• 4:22
  I don't I don't like them but Jesus was a homie given all all
• 4:25
  historical information we have on him.
• 4:29
  So my mom listens. Oscod please please don't get
• 4:31
  for more ammo to use against me. I'm not, I'm not.
• 4:33
  I didn't, I said. I'm saying I like Jesus.
• 4:38
  I'm pro Jesus. I'm.
• 4:39
  Pro Jesus the guy. You say that, and the next time
• 4:42
  my mom's going to call me, she's like, so Josh said.
• 4:44
  He really likes Jesus. I think you should come to
• 4:45
  church with me. OK, well, maybe not like that,
• 4:49
  maybe not like that. No, I'll go to church for her,
• 4:53
  but I'm going to be dressed up as fucking Ozzy Osbourne from
• 4:55
  Brutal Legend. Oh my God, that'd be a choice.
• 5:02
  Look, I have to torture her in whatever way I can.
• 5:06
  Right, right. Of course.
• 5:08
  Anyway, we could do this, We could do this.
• 5:09
  Stay on track. Listen, this episode's going to
• 5:11
  be a little rambling anyway, because I the, the, the thought
• 5:13
  I have here is not even a fully formed coherent thought really.
• 5:17
  So like, I'm not really 100% sure where we're going to go,
• 5:21
  but we're going to go somewhere I don't.
• 5:23
  Even know about episodes I. Don't even know what the title's
• 5:26
  going to be. It's going to be something there
• 5:27
  are is going to be text attached to this video slash audio.
• 5:31
  And a thumbnail. And a thumbnail.
• 5:33
  Assets. No fucking clue what any of that
• 5:36
  shit's gonna be or look like, so here we go.
• 5:41
  I know I got it. It should just be Quan Chi from
• 5:45
  Chainsaw Man. A picture of Jesus next to.
• 5:51
  It we can't bring in a conversation from before we hit
• 5:54
  record. And yet people will watch the
• 5:57
  video just to know why the thumbnail looks like that.
• 6:01
  Wow, what a diabolical turn of events.
• 6:07
  I need to know why Jesus and Kwanchi from Chainsaw Man are
• 6:10
  related here. They're not, as it turns out.
• 6:16
  Oh my God, but. Anyway.
• 6:19
  You know, you know it's crazy in the in the realm of chainsaw
• 6:21
  man, the Jesus devil has to exist because some people are
• 6:24
  afraid of religion intrinsically which would create devil
• 6:28
  probably looks and acts like Jesus considering that there's
• 6:31
  an Angel devil who is actually really just a homie as much as
• 6:35
  he's a sunder and hates being a homie.
• 6:39
  I feel like the Jesus devil wouldn't be that powerful,
• 6:41
  though. I don't know that there's enough
• 6:45
  of like an energy of fear around him, you know?
• 6:50
  I don't know, tell that, tell that to the the fucking the the
• 6:52
  plague devil, which is the thing that exists and why that one's
• 6:56
  still really strong despite it not being that relevant anymore.
• 7:00
  Well, it's not relevant, but the fear of plagues is still a
• 7:03
  relevant thing, like the fear of a plague happening.
• 7:06
  True. I don't know.
• 7:07
  The fear of religious persecution, I feel like is a
• 7:09
  pretty powerful thing. That's not a fear of Jesus
• 7:11
  though. That's different.
• 7:11
  That would be a different devil. Oh my God.
• 7:19
  There is a character in Part 2 who has a contract with the STD
• 7:23
  Devil and it is as funny as it sounds.
• 7:25
  Oh, that's horrifying. It's oh, I hate that you said
• 7:28
  the funniest thing on the planet.
• 7:31
  Anyway, anyway we can do? We can do this.
• 7:33
  We can do this. Focus.
• 7:38
  I can't. I'm losing it.
• 7:42
  I can't. You've broken me.
• 7:45
  I'm just here to instill chaos. I don't really know what we're
• 7:47
  talking about today. I'm just here for vibes.
• 7:50
  Yeah, I mean, well, that's the thing, right?
• 7:51
  I don't even totally OK, like, so OK, let me give the I guess,
• 7:57
  I guess I'll give the back story here just to try and make it
• 8:00
  make sense because I'm not even really sure exactly what I'm
• 8:03
  trying to say. I'm having an I'm I'm making an
• 8:05
  observation. I'm having a thought, but that's
• 8:08
  about as far as we're getting here.
• 8:10
  OK, so like we've been playing Fabula for a minute, right?
• 8:14
  We've been playing half. Time about a year.
• 8:20
  That sounds about right. I we're looking at we're at like
• 8:23
  29 sessions, I want to say, or something like that.
• 8:26
  So a while and you know in in my personal opinion, yeah, I've
• 8:32
  talked about it before the 30 session campaign is a good
• 8:35
  number. Now granted we're going to go
• 8:37
  beyond 30 sessions for sure. It was fabulous.
• 8:38
  But like, you know, I've talked about that being a good number
• 8:41
  and I think. I was going to say, if you pull
• 8:44
  an Ant on us, I'm going to lose it.
• 8:45
  Just pull it. Just pull the plug at session
• 8:47
  30. Like, hey, guys.
• 8:50
  So next next week is the last session of this campaign.
• 8:52
  It's been fun where I went. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,
• 8:54
  whoa, whoa. What?
• 8:56
  As funny as that would be, no, I would.
• 8:58
  I would not. I would not be doing.
• 9:00
  That I felt current situation little sorry we're we're
• 9:04
  sidetracked we're tangenting yeah in in ants campaign.
• 9:09
  One of our players was siffy and she was like never happy with
• 9:12
  the way her character was built. She just didn't feel like she
• 9:14
  was having as much fun as she could have.
• 9:16
  He spent like a full 4 hours hang like talking with her, re
• 9:22
  specking her character, doing all the stuff she wants and then
• 9:25
  the next session was like campaign's over y'all.
• 9:29
  Oh, that's a little rough, yeah. I was like, why would you?
• 9:34
  Why would you do her like that? Why would you bully her like
• 9:36
  that? Yeah.
• 9:39
  Dick head move. That's a little bit of a Dick
• 9:41
  move, yeah. Yikes.
• 9:45
  Anyway. Man, I know you're listening to
• 9:46
  this. Why?
• 9:47
  Why you like that bro? What the fuck?
• 9:50
  Damn the call. That's crazy.
• 9:52
  No, because even if he's not listening to this, Moon is
• 9:54
  listening to it. So either you call him out or
• 9:57
  I'm calling his out right the fuck here.
• 9:59
  That's crazy. I'm here for violence.
• 10:03
  Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, so yeah, we're we're at
• 10:08
  the 2929 sessions, which like I've said, I like the 32nd
• 10:13
  session range. It's a good one.
• 10:16
  Also, Emmanuel himself has said a thirty session fabulous
• 10:22
  campaign is a good length. So I have backup validation on
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  that one. And so like, you know, after
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  after at the point of playing a game for 30 sessions, I feel
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  like most of the time, I'm sure there's probably some games out
• 10:38
  there where you could take exception with this, but I feel
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  like after 30 sessions you've kind of moved on into a more
• 10:45
  advanced understanding. You have a firmer grasp on
• 10:48
  whatever game you're running, right?
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  Like you're not, you're not constantly rules checking basic
• 10:55
  shit like you're, you're in the flow.
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  You can like make make calls on the fly with like confidence,
• 11:02
  you know, like you're at the you're at the point where you're
• 11:04
  like, yes, I understand this game pretty like on a on a
• 11:07
  decently deep level. And so we've we've hit that
• 11:12
  point. It's fabulous where I'm like,
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  yes, I now have this idea like I, I get this game's vibe, I get
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  what we're doing here. And I, I had this realization
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  that I've sort of like, I've sort of started looking at the
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  game like, like I've started relooking at the game.
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  I've started rereading chunks of the book.
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  I've sort of like, I've sort of started looking at it with fresh
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  eyes because I've now run it for a while.
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  So I have a very good, I have a good grasp on the core.
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  And once I had that grasp on the core, I was kind of like, all
• 11:52
  right, where can I push? Like what can I do that's a
• 11:56
  little more interesting? Where can I like advance along
• 11:59
  the edges? You know what I mean?
• 12:03
  And that's kind of the observation I'm talking about
• 12:05
  this idea of getting into the more advanced play with your
• 12:11
  system of choice and just what that looks like.
• 12:16
  Again, I don't really have a strong thesis statement here.
• 12:18
  I'm just kind of like, it's an interesting observation I've
• 12:20
  made about like A, my own habits, but B, like I think
• 12:24
  habits I've also noticed from other people and like people
• 12:26
  talking about games they're running online and shit like
• 12:29
  that. So I caught my first little
• 12:32
  chunk here. So you've been playing for a
• 12:34
  while. I feel like every GM, after
• 12:39
  playing a system for a while, will hit the point where they're
• 12:41
  ready to advance to more complex elements of the system that they
• 12:44
  are using now. Depending on your system of
• 12:47
  choice, this could mean a bunch of different things.
• 12:49
  In something like D&D, for example, there can be new
• 12:52
  mechanics that start to get introduced in the later levels
• 12:55
  of play, such as legendary actions, but that's not
• 12:59
  necessarily what I want to focus on with this particular
• 13:01
  discussion. The focus on the focus here is
• 13:06
  more about the idea of looking at the system you're running
• 13:08
  with fresh eyes because you started to understand it more
• 13:11
  deeply, right? So that's kind of the like
• 13:16
  thesis statement premise of the whole thing.
• 13:20
  Is that making sense? Let's start there, OK?
• 13:26
  Evening your knowledge through recontextualization of the
• 13:28
  information you already right. I don't even know if
• 13:33
  recontextualizing so much as just like getting it better and
• 13:40
  thus being able to do more advanced shit because you have
• 13:44
  because you understand it better.
• 13:46
  Like have you done this? Like can you think of it like
• 13:49
  does this resonate? Like yes, this is like a a
• 13:51
  mindset or a thing I've done. Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely at
• 13:57
  that point in Lancer where I played it enough.
• 14:01
  I understand it enough that I can start doing more interesting
• 14:05
  things and some more nuanced things in the confines of combat
• 14:09
  like figuring out how to mix mash monsters are, you know,
• 14:14
  enemy stop blocks in a way that doesn't completely cripple the
• 14:17
  game, which can sort of keep in the depth of the players
• 14:19
  experience. Yeah, without crippling the
• 14:22
  game. That's a big one.
• 14:25
  That's a that's a thing you could definitely also do in
• 14:27
  Fabula, or you could just overtune things to the point of
• 14:32
  like stalling out everything. Yeah, it's, it's like, it's like
• 14:42
  this idea, right? There's this thing in art
• 14:48
  broadly, like creative endeavours in general, where
• 14:52
  there's a there's the idea that you always want to revisit
• 14:55
  fundamentals. And the reason that you revisit
• 14:59
  is because, you know, after you've been doing the thing for
• 15:04
  a while, like, let's just go with drawing as the example
• 15:06
  here. But I think this could apply to,
• 15:08
  you know, writing or directing or fucking photography.
• 15:11
  Like I think you apply all sorts of places.
• 15:14
  It's like after you've been drawing for a while, it's good
• 15:16
  to always like reassess your fundamentals.
• 15:18
  So like you've learned your anatomy, but it's always good to
• 15:20
  go back and like relearn your anatomy.
• 15:23
  And it's because it's the idea that you have a more advanced
• 15:28
  knowledge of the entire field, the entire hobby, the entire
• 15:33
  practice. So by reassessing those earlier
• 15:36
  fundamentals with your more advanced knowledge, you will
• 15:42
  then it's like you have to go backward to go forward.
• 15:45
  It's like reassessing that old stuff with better knowledge will
• 15:49
  then unlock a whole nother level that you couldn't have hit
• 15:53
  without doing that first, without going without going like
• 15:57
  you couldn't have hit. All right, here, let's do a
• 16:00
  little video game analogy to really hammer the whole point
• 16:02
  point home. Imagine if a game.
• 16:03
  Had a sex analogy. I could probably figure out a
• 16:07
  sex analogy, but it would take me a minute.
• 16:11
  But like, if you imagine like a levelling up system, right?
• 16:13
  Imagine if a game had you say like, OK to get to level.
• 16:17
  So you get from levels one to 10 and that is like a mostly linear
• 16:21
  journey of like going up, you know, gaming XP as you do.
• 16:24
  Once you hit level 10, the game says to you, OK, you now need to
• 16:28
  go back and redo the challenges that you did at like level 1-2
• 16:33
  and three in order to then hit level 11.
• 16:37
  Like the game locks you out of level 11 until you go back to
• 16:40
  previous stuff and redo some kind of challenge mode now that
• 16:45
  you understand the game better, right?
• 16:49
  It's kind of like how Devil May Cry is like, you have to play
• 16:52
  through the game on Devil Hunter before you can go back and do
• 16:54
  Santa Sparta. And you have to do Santa Sparta
• 16:57
  from level 1 all the way back up, right?
• 16:59
  You can't, like, jump around or anything.
• 17:02
  Yeah. And it's like you now have a
• 17:04
  more intrinsic advanced understanding.
• 17:06
  Now you're going to go back to your fundamentals and start kind
• 17:09
  of from the beginning. Not exactly from the beginning
• 17:12
  because you still have, like, the knowledge and the skill set,
• 17:13
  but kind of from the beginning. And we're going to throw bigger
• 17:17
  shit at you, more complicated shit at you, because you have
• 17:20
  that understanding. It's like that sort of idea.
• 17:24
  And you know, the thing that I think it, I guess the
• 17:29
  interesting bit in the tabletop context is that I think as AGM,
• 17:33
  you do this all the time. I don't know if people
• 17:37
  necessarily think about it in this way, but I definitely feel
• 17:41
  like this applies to GM ING. Pretty pretty 1 to 1, you know
• 17:46
  what I'm saying? Yeah.
• 17:50
  Because I mean like, ultimately, whether whether people make fun
• 17:55
  of you, make fun of you for it or not, GM ING is a hobby that
• 17:59
  requires practice and skill and skill learning.
• 18:01
  Skilling. What was I trying to say there?
• 18:02
  Skill practice. We'll just go with the word
• 18:05
  practice works. Yeah, I'm.
• 18:06
  Going to say skill development. Maybe that's what I was going
• 18:09
  for. I don't know.
• 18:13
  The, the word got really lost on my tongue there.
• 18:19
  And so like, yeah, I, I guess I'm, I'm, I'm observing that I'm
• 18:22
  doing that right now. Fabulous.
• 18:23
  And I've definitely done this before, but it's feeling
• 18:27
  slightly more conscious this time for some reason.
• 18:34
  Now, when you say this time, do you mean this time in general,
• 18:39
  like across all of your GM experience or this time as in,
• 18:45
  well, I'm not really sure what I'd be asking after that point.
• 18:49
  Yes, this time in, in general GMA experience, like I've
• 18:52
  definitely done this before. I, I don't see how I could have
• 18:55
  not done this before, but it, it, it feels a little more at
• 19:00
  front of mind with this campaign for whatever reason.
• 19:04
  And maybe that's because my initial running of Fabula, I
• 19:11
  like kind of started Rocky. So the fact that I'm now sort of
• 19:17
  hitting that advanced stage and then going back and reassess,
• 19:20
  reassessing those fundamentals of the game, I'm noticing that
• 19:25
  more because I felt that initial rockiness.
• 19:29
  So the, I guess what I'm saying is the the bettering of the
• 19:37
  skill is more apparent. I'm seeing the progress more
• 19:41
  clearly. I guess that's what I'm saying.
• 19:44
  It's kind of like the thing where you, when you do something
• 19:48
  like, I don't know, you play a sport for the first time and
• 19:52
  you're like decently good at it right from the jump.
• 19:55
  And because you're kind of good at it right from the jump, you
• 19:58
  can't explain it particularly well to somebody else and you
• 20:03
  can't assess how you understand or like how you learned it very
• 20:08
  well because you just kind of got it, you know what I mean?
• 20:11
  Yeah, yeah. It's like when I when I first
• 20:14
  started to learn to draw, like with any seriousness, I never
• 20:18
  was intimidated by hair, right? I always just thought like hair
• 20:21
  was kind of an interesting thing to draw.
• 20:23
  So like I kind of figured out how to do it pretty
• 20:25
  successfully, like pretty quickly.
• 20:29
  But then subsequently, anytime anyone's tried to ask me how
• 20:33
  exactly to do hair, I don't have a good answer.
• 20:36
  I don't fully know how to explain it.
• 20:38
  And I think it's because I had a relatively smooth Rd. in the
• 20:40
  beginning. So I can't, I can't, I can't
• 20:44
  articulate what the road bumps will be because I kind of
• 20:51
  skipped over. You know what I mean?
• 20:53
  Yeah, yeah. I mean it.
• 20:54
  It there's something to be said about it.
• 20:56
  Just clicks. Yeah, like it just clicks, and
• 20:59
  then when it clicks, it's like you're a bad teacher because you
• 21:01
  can't really explain the struggle bits.
• 21:05
  Yeah, no, I mean, I've definitely been there with with
• 21:07
  certain things. I don't necessarily know why or
• 21:09
  how, but there are things that have just clicked for me.
• 21:12
  Yeah. Like, like actually, you know,
• 21:14
  I'll give you, I'll give you a great example that that works in
• 21:17
  the confines of what we're talking about.
• 21:20
  Improv for me, just clicks. You know what I mean?
• 21:25
  Like people are like, oh, I don't know how you can bounce
• 21:28
  ideas so quickly. I don't really know.
• 21:31
  It's never been something I've struggled with.
• 21:33
  It's always been something I found relatively easy, but you
• 21:37
  know, other than the really generic basic bitch advice that
• 21:40
  everyone gets when it's improv is just like, you know, don't
• 21:43
  worry about saying the wrong thing or just say yes and like
• 21:47
  just keep the rhythm going. I don't know why I particularly
• 21:51
  don't struggle with this when I know that it's not an easy
• 21:54
  skill. Yeah.
• 21:56
  It's one of those things that's like, if you don't struggle with
• 21:59
  the thing, you're less cognizant of the journey of the
• 22:04
  improvement. So I think what I'm getting at
• 22:09
  to like bring it back around to GM ING.
• 22:11
  I think because I had that initial struggle with Fabula,
• 22:15
  I'm more cognizant of this like advancing and then reassessing
• 22:22
  fundamentals portion of the learning process.
• 22:25
  Like it's more upfront in in my brain because I had the initial
• 22:29
  struggle. I'm there's probably been
• 22:33
  another game where this has been the case, but this is the one
• 22:35
  that I I don't know, I'm trying to think.
• 22:41
  I'm trying to think like another game.
• 22:43
  I'm trying to think what the last game I ran that was like,
• 22:48
  God damn, I'm having a struggle. I mean, kind of five EA little
• 22:52
  bit, although I don't think 5E was quite the same kind of
• 22:54
  struggle. So I don't know if that
• 22:56
  comparison works. I.
• 23:02
  Don't know. Anyway, this is this.
• 23:07
  Like I said, this is mostly a conversation slash observation
• 23:11
  kind of point. I don't know if I have anything
• 23:13
  helpful or I don't know if I have a helpful point of advice
• 23:18
  to give in this scenario. Usually I try to go with the
• 23:21
  angle of advice, but this is mostly coming from a place of me
• 23:24
  noticing that I'm looking at the current game I'm running.
• 23:27
  That being Fabula from a different angle because after
• 23:30
  running it for a for a while, I feel like I have a more firm
• 23:33
  grasp on how the mechanics flow. And I feel like that pretty
• 23:37
  much. And sorry.
• 23:40
  And I feel like pretty much everyone has been through this
• 23:42
  feeling at some point. Let me tell you, I spend so much
• 23:48
  of my time feeling like I'm on fraud watch.
• 23:51
  Fraud watch. I see you're not hip with the
• 23:55
  new lingo I. Is this a bit?
• 23:58
  Has this? Has this one passed me by?
• 24:01
  I don't a. Little bit, yeah.
• 24:02
  Am I too unk? A little bit?
• 24:06
  No. But there's a lot of times where
• 24:07
  I'm like where the imposter syndrome just dominates and I'm
• 24:12
  like, I'm terrible, I'm worthless.
• 24:13
  I'm so bad at this I don't even know why I try anymore.
• 24:15
  Oh, in terms of jamming? Yeah, constantly, constantly.
• 24:20
  Does this shit happen? Yeah, I mean, I'm not.
• 24:25
  I'm not so much talking about the idea of imposter syndrome in
• 24:30
  this scenario, but a posture imposter syndrome can definitely
• 24:37
  be related to this feeling for sure.
• 24:43
  So there can be an overlap there because yeah, like the the
• 24:48
  imposter syndrome can re can basically that feeling of
• 24:54
  imposter syndrome might lead you to reassess because you're like,
• 25:00
  I don't get it. You know what I mean?
• 25:01
  Like. All the time.
• 25:04
  Yeah, Yeah, I can kind of get that.
• 25:05
  It's yeah, it's not quite the same thing, but it is, it is
• 25:08
  like a in a similar, in a similar vein.
• 25:14
  I think it's, I think it's particularly interesting because
• 25:18
  what I'm now feeling is OK. I understand the game pretty
• 25:26
  well at this point. I've managed to make it sing in
• 25:30
  a couple of ways. And honestly, I didn't even
• 25:33
  necessarily, I didn't come to this realization completely by
• 25:38
  myself either, because to a certain degree, the best diary
• 25:43
  coming out made me reassess some of my train of thought on the
• 25:49
  game. Like I was already kind of doing
• 25:50
  it. And then I saw a couple of
• 25:52
  things in the best theory that sort of helped me to align my
• 25:58
  thoughts. And I was like, oh, OK, I'm
• 26:02
  getting what the game wants me to do now.
• 26:05
  Like I'm getting it better. And so now I'm in a situation
• 26:08
  where I'm like, all right, how do I actually push the envelope
• 26:12
  and make make the more advanced elements of the game really work
• 26:18
  and be interesting? Because you know, for for both
• 26:24
  for you as AGM, but also for your players, it will get kind
• 26:27
  of boring if you stick to the safe, like the safe elements of
• 26:32
  a game, right? If you keep everything pretty
• 26:34
  straightforward and a little like, I mean you could get a
• 26:38
  little formulaic really I think is the main fear I would say.
• 26:42
  Yeah, for sure. You know, it's the like, you
• 26:50
  know, the monster attacking you with a really big to hit bonus
• 26:55
  isn't like doesn't stay interesting for a particularly
• 26:59
  long period of time, right? Like there's a there's a formula
• 27:02
  to the math and shit. Like you get overly formulaic
• 27:05
  and then yeah, like things, things just Peter out.
• 27:11
  I don't, I don't, I don't know how to put it.
• 27:12
  Like things can Peter out. Oh God, I'm on the, I'm on the
• 27:16
  like stumbling too much right now in terms of if I've been
• 27:23
  actually doing anything differently here in terms of
• 27:28
  running. I haven't really changed my
• 27:29
  methodology that much, but instead I have been trying to
• 27:34
  make more complex moments or mechanics because I don't need
• 27:39
  to worry as much about the am I doing it right feeling right.
• 27:44
  Once you have that grasp of the core game, the am I doing it
• 27:49
  right kind of falls to the wayside, which leaves you space
• 27:52
  to do more complicated mechanics or more complicated just stuff
• 27:57
  in general in your game. Also, outside of the game, I
• 28:02
  have been try, I have been like asking other people for ideas
• 28:07
  and feedback on I on my ideas that I've been doing in the
• 28:11
  game. All in it all in an attempt to
• 28:15
  make the system really sing for me whale Wow operating within
• 28:28
  while operating within its mechanical bounds, right like
• 28:34
  I've been I've been asking people on the fabulous discord.
• 28:38
  I've been a little doing a Reddit, little Reddit perusing.
• 28:41
  Obviously I, I listen to like tabletop podcasts and shit, you
• 28:45
  know, all that, all that caboodle.
• 28:47
  So I've been sort of absorbing that information through other
• 28:50
  avenues. But in terms of how I'm running
• 28:52
  the game, this doesn't necessarily change the way you
• 28:54
  run in any drastic way. It just sort of adds new layers
• 29:00
  to how you run things. I don't know dude.
• 29:08
  Do you have an example yourself before I continue, will you ask?
• 29:13
  This question again. I guess I did.
• 29:16
  Give me I I guess I didn't really ask a question.
• 29:18
  Question. Yeah, I was going.
• 29:19
  To say like give me, give me the.
• 29:20
  Thesis on this oh violent sneeze.
• 29:23
  Hold on. Oh yeah, your chest hurts, don't
• 29:27
  it a. Little bit on that one.
• 29:29
  Ow So like the idea of I understand this game, I
• 29:42
  understand the core of this game more deeply.
• 29:45
  I am now pushing into what I'm calling the advanced stages of
• 29:49
  the game. So by moving into that advanced
• 29:54
  stage, you know I'm going to try and come up with a more
• 29:58
  complicated mechanic for a particular event or something in
• 30:02
  the game. I'm saying, can you think of
• 30:07
  personal examples where that's come up?
• 30:10
  Oh, yeah, absolutely. I'm, I'm doing it right now
• 30:12
  actually, so way too far from my mic.
• 30:17
  I'm doing like a tournament arc for my players right now.
• 30:20
  And, you know, I'm trying to really emulate the feel of a
• 30:24
  tournament arc up to and including like sitting in the
• 30:27
  stands watching the drama, you know, having a team that you
• 30:30
  root for. But a big part of the tournament
• 30:32
  arc is all the shit going on outside of the fighting, right?
• 30:36
  So in between matches in the tournament arc, I'm giving
• 30:40
  players access to some like limited downtime action, you
• 30:44
  know, you know, like scramble to get an extra core bonus to use
• 30:47
  their super, you know, their mech super abilities again.
• 30:49
  Or maybe they have to throw their tank out for another fight
• 30:52
  so that now they need more report repair points.
• 30:55
  So I'm sort of miniaturizing the mechanic and inserting it mid
• 30:59
  mission to see how the players react to it.
• 31:02
  More, more wood chippery action. What wood chippery?
• 31:13
  I'm not pulling any punches on the and I usually don't, but I'm
• 31:16
  like really not pulling punches on them right now because they
• 31:20
  have these disability to be like, Oh, well, you know, we put
• 31:23
  we put cloak in the stagnation, you know, the tankiest Mac in
• 31:26
  the party. We put them out two fights in a
• 31:28
  row. Higher chance that that Mac
• 31:30
  could just die, you know, And if that if they lose their tank in
• 31:37
  Round 2 when there's four rounds of the tournament, that could be
• 31:39
  a problem. But again, given that they can
• 31:44
  actively try to repair the MEC and get more repair ability for
• 31:47
  the MEC, I can be a little more mean.
• 31:50
  Right. So yeah, that, yeah, that's
• 31:52
  pretty much what I'm talking about.
• 31:54
  You're, you're pushing the outer bounds of the mechanics because
• 31:59
  you're like, you're feeling like I have enough of an
• 32:05
  understanding that I know where I can push on the edges of the
• 32:09
  game without it completely breaking.
• 32:15
  Because the hypothetically what you're talking about, you could
• 32:20
  have done something like that in, you know, session #10 right.
• 32:27
  But if you're not as confident in your understanding of the
• 32:32
  math of the game and the action economy and the, you know, how
• 32:38
  much healing your players have it like all those little things.
• 32:41
  If you don't understand those as well, then you might push along
• 32:47
  the edges and just break things completely.
• 32:50
  And that's really what I'm talking about is pushing on
• 32:53
  those edges without things breaking, right?
• 32:57
  Like the idea of, you know, on a, on a basic level, on a, on a,
• 33:07
  a simple example, if you understand how much, if you have
• 33:15
  a good grasp and, and it doesn't have to be like a, it doesn't
• 33:21
  have to be an amazingly perfect understanding, right?
• 33:26
  But if you have a decently good grasp on how much health your
• 33:30
  players have, how much healing they can usually do in a turn
• 33:34
  and how much damage they can usually do in a turn, then you
• 33:39
  have a better chance of throwing out big Oh fuck, Oh no, Oh God
• 33:45
  type abilities without completely breaking the game.
• 33:49
  Right. If you're not confident in how
• 33:52
  much healing your players can potentially output, and then you
• 33:58
  throw a big move at them, like a big ability from an enemy, and
• 34:03
  then turns out, oh, they didn't actually have enough healing to
• 34:07
  be able to push through around after that big hit, then you're
• 34:13
  in trouble. Right?
• 34:13
  Because oh, I thought they could deal with this, but they can't.
• 34:19
  But if you've been running the game for a while, you probably
• 34:22
  do have a decent idea of what that math looks like.
• 34:25
  Ergo, you can hit them really hard for, you know, to simplify
• 34:29
  it for the sake of example, if you know your players can heal
• 34:33
  themselves for rough, roughly 50HP around, then you can hit
• 34:39
  them with a move that does 40HP worth of damage and you know,
• 34:43
  they'll be OK, right? Yeah.
• 34:46
  Like, you know, they'll be able to push beyond that.
• 34:48
  That's kind of what I'm talking about.
• 34:50
  That idea of that, that's really what I'm getting at.
• 34:52
  That idea of I understand it now more intrinsically.
• 34:58
  So I can take the fundamental stuff that I was doing and go
• 35:04
  out from my safety zone, push beyond my comfort area, right?
• 35:10
  And Fabula is actually a pretty good example of this.
• 35:14
  Because in the beginning of Fabula, I didn't understand how
• 35:22
  swingy player HP can be in that game and like the potential to
• 35:28
  go up and down as much as you do in that game.
• 35:32
  And because I didn't understand that I would be hesitant to
• 35:38
  launch like huge single attacks or consistently, you know,
• 35:46
  smack. Like I'm, I'm trying to think of
• 35:50
  like a good example that actually occurred, but I think
• 35:54
  you got the fly. I'm probably not going to come
• 35:56
  up with anything. But like, I would be hesitant to
• 35:57
  throw out a certain degree of damage or a certain frequency of
• 36:02
  attacks because I was like, oh, if I do this, if I do this
• 36:07
  attack X amount of times in a round, they're not going to be
• 36:09
  able to survive. And that's because my brain was
• 36:12
  sort of in that D&D headspace. But in Fabula, the healing is
• 36:17
  much more reliable on a round to round basis.
• 36:19
  It doesn't have the same philosophy in terms of how
• 36:21
  healing works like 5 E does. So no, I actually can hammer
• 36:26
  players pretty consistently and they can pretty consistently get
• 36:30
  out of it. So now when you guys as players,
• 36:35
  if I throw something at you and I see, oh, everyone's really low
• 36:38
  on health, I don't stress it the way I used to because I'm like,
• 36:42
  well, I know they have this tool and they have this tool and they
• 36:45
  have this tool and this mechanic works this way, they'll be fine.
• 36:48
  You know what I mean? Yeah, and I think what so I
• 36:51
  think you, you tapped on something interesting is, you
• 36:55
  know, you have the information, you know that we can handle it,
• 36:59
  but you also don't have that stress if we don't, right?
• 37:04
  Because that's what I'm dealing with right now, right?
• 37:06
  Like I, like I just said, I'm not pulling punches at my
• 37:08
  players. If they don't play smart, they
• 37:10
  won't win, right? I'm not going to hand them AW,
• 37:13
  right. But I'm not stressing out about
• 37:15
  it because I've given them the tools and they have the
• 37:18
  information and the experience. Right.
• 37:20
  You know that play well, Yeah, you know that the necessary
• 37:23
  equipment is present. Yeah.
• 37:26
  Like and if they the win is. Possible, yeah.
• 37:29
  And if they just don't play smart, that's not my fault.
• 37:34
  You know what I mean? Like that's not something I have
• 37:36
  to worry about as much. Right.
• 37:40
  Yeah, it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's that comfort of I know the
• 37:52
  flow that this game expects. Ergo, I can push when I want to
• 37:57
  push and I can pull back when I want to pull back.
• 38:00
  And I can do it more successfully now than I could at
• 38:03
  first because I've hit that more advanced echelon of play.
• 38:07
  And now that I have, once I've hit that more advanced echelon,
• 38:12
  I'm also reassessing my quote UN quote fundamentals, which in my
• 38:17
  case for Fabula literally means I've been quite literally
• 38:21
  rereading the book. Not the whole book, but I've
• 38:25
  been rereading chunks, bits that I'm like, what about this?
• 38:28
  Maybe I should reassess what it says here.
• 38:30
  Maybe that'll give me an idea. You know, the thing that is also
• 38:37
  kind of fun about that space this, this advanced play, if you
• 38:43
  will, is you can, you can stress your players better, right?
• 38:53
  You can, you can put the needle to them a little bit more than
• 38:57
  you could before without completely upending things,
• 39:03
  right? Because when you're first
• 39:06
  starting a campaign, especially if you're playing a new system,
• 39:10
  you could just be like, I don't know, again, just to use D&D,
• 39:13
  you're going to be like, I don't know the player, the characters
• 39:15
  are level 1. I'll just throw a fireball at
• 39:17
  them. They'll be fine.
• 39:18
  And it's like, well, no, the fireball will actually probably
• 39:21
  break them, right? Like that's probably too much.
• 39:24
  But as you get later in the game, you might look at it and
• 39:27
  go, OK, they're level 10. I can throw reliably maybe 3
• 39:34
  fireballs at them and they'll sweat, but they'll still be,
• 39:38
  they'll be fine, right? Like that kind of a thing where
• 39:44
  the ability to know where the bounds are, where the edges are,
• 39:47
  let you push up against the edges closer, and that lets you
• 39:50
  stress your players out just a little bit more.
• 39:53
  And if you stress your players out just a little bit more than
• 39:55
  the tension's just that much better.
• 39:58
  I think you know, I think Jacob from high speed Level 3 put it
• 40:01
  the best, which is you know. You're not trying.
• 40:06
  To. Beat your players.
• 40:09
  You're trying to make the players think you're trying to
• 40:12
  beat your players. Yeah, you know the.
• 40:15
  Feeling of like you're trying to beat them into the ground.
• 40:17
  Yeah. And like, even if they aren't
• 40:19
  actually in that much danger, because you've you've
• 40:21
  mathematically been like, all right, well, you know, they can
• 40:24
  reasonably eat 40 damage around every round for four rounds.
• 40:28
  And then then they'll start running low on resources.
• 40:31
  You know you have that information.
• 40:33
  Yeah. But they don't know that you're
• 40:36
  thinking about that. Right, They don't right.
• 40:38
  They don't know you're doing the math in your head or that you
• 40:39
  did the math prior. Maybe, you know, depending on
• 40:42
  the situation, it's I forget where I wonder if I could, I
• 40:48
  might be able to pull it up if I'm quick with it.
• 40:50
  But somewhere in the bestiary it was a similar thing where the
• 40:57
  book was basically like the point of the game is not to just
• 41:03
  beat your players. Because if you as the GM wanted,
• 41:06
  you could just give a monster an ability where oh, every time
• 41:10
  this monster gets attacked it deals 999 damage to the person
• 41:14
  who attacked it. Like technically rules as
• 41:17
  written in Fabula that's completely allowed for you as
• 41:20
  the GM to do right? You can make an ability like
• 41:23
  that, that's allowed, but that isn't the point, right?
• 41:31
  That Oh, here we go. Yeah, the NPC creation rules
• 41:35
  give you a lot of freedom. You could give an enemy a
• 41:37
  reaction skill, such as after this creature loses hit points,
• 41:41
  they deal 9 billion damage to every enemy can they can see,
• 41:44
  and that would technically be allowed, but that's fucking
• 41:48
  boring. That's not the point, right?
• 41:50
  So it's not that you want to just beat your players, because
• 41:53
  if the objective was to beat your players, you could do it in
• 41:57
  the blink of an eye, right? Because GM ING gives you that
• 42:01
  ultimate power. Yeah.
• 42:03
  I mean, it's it's literally the meme where everyone, everyone
• 42:07
  says all the time, like, oh, rocks, rocks fall from the
• 42:10
  ceiling, deal 909, nine damage, everyone dies, right.
• 42:14
  Like, it's that meme. Obviously that's not the point.
• 42:18
  So it's like, yeah, once you've hit that point where you're in
• 42:23
  this sort of advanced play stage, as I'm now referring to
• 42:26
  it, you know, OK, if I hit them with 40 damage, they'll be
• 42:34
  sweating, but they'll probably be OK.
• 42:37
  If I hit them with 60 damage, they will not be OK.
• 42:41
  So I'm going to go with the 40, you know what I mean?
• 42:43
  That's how you find. You have to find that's place.
• 42:46
  And the only way you can find that place is fumbling through
• 42:49
  the early stages of the game playing, getting to the late
• 42:53
  stages of the game where you have a decent grasp and then
• 42:56
  reassessing the basics to then know, all right, how does the
• 43:02
  damage work in this game? And we're just using damage as
• 43:04
  the example here, but this applies to every mechanic in a
• 43:07
  game, basically. We're also, we're only talking
• 43:13
  tabletop, but this applies to video games.
• 43:16
  And like I said, this applies to drawing and I'm sure it applies
• 43:20
  to music and writing and all that like.
• 43:22
  But this is really this one of those things that applies to
• 43:24
  pretty much any hobby. We're using tabletop as the
• 43:26
  framing device, but it's not necessarily about tabletop.
• 43:30
  Really, I tricked you. I'm just giving you an actual
• 43:36
  life lesson via tabletop stuff. Fun as a great GM, We'll always
• 43:44
  say gaslight your players. Yeah, exactly.
• 43:47
  Always gaslight. It's a very effective method.
• 43:49
  It's gaslight your players. I do also want to note for this
• 43:56
  particular, this topic, this idea, some people might think
• 44:03
  what I mean is using your understanding of a system to
• 44:10
  start hacking away at it, right? To start home brewing.
• 44:14
  But no, what I mean is understanding the system on a
• 44:19
  deeper level and thus being able to do more interesting things
• 44:23
  within the system's mechanics, right?
• 44:25
  I'm really not talking about home brewing.
• 44:29
  Home brewing will be, will and can be born out of this
• 44:34
  mentality, right? It can be really after you, the
• 44:39
  way you want to approach home brewing or the way I think you
• 44:43
  should approach home brewing with the game is you shouldn't
• 44:46
  really start home brewing it until you have reached this
• 44:49
  advanced stage of play where you have that that deeper, more
• 44:54
  concrete understanding of the game.
• 44:56
  That is when you should do home brewing, because doing home
• 44:59
  brewing before that can get messy quick.
• 45:03
  But that's kind of a slightly separate thing.
• 45:06
  I'm talking about operating within the existing mechanics
• 45:13
  and using that knowledge to make the existing mechanics really
• 45:16
  sing for you. To give a sort of basic example,
• 45:27
  right. In D&D, of course you have your
• 45:29
  saving throws. Generally saving throws are used
• 45:33
  in response to something like spells or like special enemy
• 45:37
  attacks. However, after running 5 E for a
• 45:41
  while, you will probably start to to notice and realize there's
• 45:46
  other ways you can apply saving throws to events that they don't
• 45:49
  typically call for a raw or don't come up as often.
• 45:53
  A very classic example is rolling a deck save to to dodge
• 45:57
  the falling rocks, right? That's not 100.
• 46:02
  Like it's sort of a, that's one of those things that it's, it's
• 46:06
  sort of a rules as intended situation.
• 46:09
  It's not necessarily rules as written that you Rolodex save to
• 46:13
  get out of the way from like falling rocks from the ceiling
• 46:16
  or whatever. But if you've been running 5E
• 46:19
  for a while, you've interacted with the saving throw mechanic
• 46:24
  and at some point you're going to realize like, oh, I can apply
• 46:26
  this to lots of different places.
• 46:28
  That can be kind of interesting, especially if I apply it outside
• 46:31
  of combat just because it it's just another it's just another
• 46:38
  Ave. to like stress the players right, add a bit of tension all.
• 46:46
  Right, all right, so I, I, I have a little bit of a tangent
• 46:48
  falling on on the topic of the saving throws.
• 46:53
  I wish that 5th edition put more of the impetus for rolling on
• 47:00
  players, you know. How do you mean?
• 47:06
  So in the same way that Powered by the Apocalypse is like, you
• 47:10
  know, oh, I'm going to, oh God, what's the like?
• 47:16
  I'm just going to use monster hearts.
• 47:23
  The idea it's like, Oh yeah, I'm going to lash out physically,
• 47:27
  right? Like like in the rocks fall
• 47:30
  thing I want the barbarian to go.
• 47:32
  Can I make a strength save to catch the boulder as it falls as
• 47:36
  opposed to dodge it you know? Ah, you want?
• 47:42
  I see. You're saying you want DND to
• 47:44
  give a little more power, a little more control over how the
• 47:52
  players directly respond to stuff.
• 47:55
  Yeah. Rather than simply the GM say
• 47:58
  roll me this, roll me that. Yeah, I think there's a, there's
• 48:07
  a, a weird, how do I want to, how do I want to phrase it?
• 48:14
  There's a bit of an, an argument there, I guess.
• 48:17
  I don't remember the argument. It's not the right word.
• 48:19
  But there's, there's, there's a thing there where some people
• 48:25
  are like, no, the game or the, the GM has to ask for
• 48:30
  everything. And some people are like, no,
• 48:33
  the players should be able to state what they're trying to do
• 48:36
  that that's definitely a, a debate, a back and forth that's
• 48:39
  been had. And I don't, I don't know, I, I,
• 48:46
  I don't know if I fall on 100% one side or the other.
• 48:50
  I mean, I, I guess I prefer a little bit more of the
• 48:54
  Apocalypse world idea there of the players kind of stating how
• 49:00
  they tackle a problem. I, I guess that's really what it
• 49:02
  is, right? The idea of players saying how
• 49:05
  they tackle a problem rather than just stating I deal with
• 49:09
  the problem and that I that agency and, and how the game
• 49:15
  allows it. Right, 'cause technically rules
• 49:18
  as written, if a player attacks with a, you know, a sword, you
• 49:24
  roll with your strength to attack.
• 49:27
  But if the player describes some sort of way, you know, they're
• 49:32
  like, ah, well, what if I, what if I like twirl around the guy
• 49:37
  and, and try to quick draw my blade and like stab him in the
• 49:40
  back quietly? Like, can I roll decks for that?
• 49:42
  You know, like rules is written. No, But you know, maybe AGM
• 49:47
  could kind of be like, well, if you describe kind of the your
• 49:50
  approach, maybe you know, yeah, it would be interesting for 5 E
• 49:57
  to give room for that. It's just not that kind of a
• 50:00
  game I think is the problem. Well, so my, my rebuttal is that
• 50:04
  it can be and players want it to be.
• 50:07
  It can be more often than not, players want that because you,
• 50:11
  because you get the aforementioned example of, oh,
• 50:13
  well, actually, can I try this thing?
• 50:16
  And then you go, well, no, not really.
• 50:18
  So like it's a situation we both agree 5th edition puts way too
• 50:23
  much onus on the GM to have answers for fucking everything
• 50:26
  and not enough tools for the players to make those
• 50:28
  conclusions on their own. I.
• 50:30
  Think 5th edition puts too much onus on the GM for a lot of
• 50:33
  fucking things. Yeah, right.
• 50:35
  Agreed. So rather if the game just
• 50:39
  straight up told the players, describe your approach, describe
• 50:44
  your approach. And this, this would absolutely,
• 50:46
  fundamentally shift the balance on the saving throws.
• 50:52
  It would, yeah. It might be a badge.
• 50:55
  I it would certainly shift things up.
• 50:58
  I don't know if it'd be good or bad, but it was certainly shift
• 51:00
  things up. Well, so like for monster stop
• 51:04
  blocks, you can keep those where they're they're supposed to be,
• 51:06
  right? Dragon's Fire will always do a
• 51:09
  dex, that's fine. But.
• 51:13
  Outside of that, a lot of abilities, as we know, you know,
• 51:17
  it's it's the dex, wisdom, charisma.
• 51:23
  But if you made traps, something that you could solve with
• 51:26
  strength or decks. This kind of goes back to the
• 51:29
  give me the Pathfinder fortitude.
• 51:33
  What is? It the three saving throws,
• 51:35
  Yeah. Fortitude, Reflex and Willpower
• 51:37
  saves. Yeah, like in a similar vein of
• 51:43
  like you can effectively recreate the simplicity of that
• 51:47
  by giving players options. And obviously right in the
• 51:50
  situation of rocks fall, you can't be like, oh, can I fucking
• 51:57
  try to seduce the boulder? But if you're playing a psionic
• 52:01
  sorcerer, you're right. OK, maybe can I, can I do a
• 52:04
  charisma save to like do the Yoda, Yoda force catch of the
• 52:08
  fucking boulder as it's falling? You know what I mean?
• 52:10
  Yeah, I mean, the thing you're asking for is, is basically how
• 52:15
  Defy Danger works in Dungeon World.
• 52:18
  Yeah, 'cause Defy Danger, it says when you act in or when you
• 52:23
  act despite an imminent threat or suffer a calamity, Say how
• 52:27
  you say how you deal with it, and roll if you do it.
• 52:31
  And then it says dot, dot, dot by powering through roll plus
• 52:34
  strength. If you do it by getting out of
• 52:36
  the way or acting fast, roll plus decks.
• 52:37
  If you do it by enduring roll plus con.
• 52:39
  If you do it with quick thinking, roll plus int.
• 52:42
  So yeah, you're talking about like the Defy Danger style
• 52:47
  ability. And, and, and hear me out,
• 52:52
  because 5th edition thinks it's so fucking clever with its, its,
• 52:55
  you know, dynamic difficulty system, You can just tell
• 53:00
  players, OK, this is a situation where maybe you can't conjure up
• 53:04
  enough of your internal abilities to use the force on
• 53:07
  the boulder. It's falling fast enough.
• 53:09
  So maybe the skill check's a little bit higher for you.
• 53:11
  Or, you know, maybe it's it's something where it's you're,
• 53:16
  you're dodging incoming arrow fire.
• 53:19
  OK, well, you can use strength to like, batter the arrows out
• 53:23
  of the way. Sure.
• 53:24
  You're just going to have a higher role.
• 53:27
  Yeah, yeah, Yeah. I mean, yeah, that room is
• 53:39
  there. I would just, you just have to
• 53:42
  kind of, I don't know. I don't know, I'd have to, I'd
• 53:47
  have to think about that more. I'm sure you could kind of slap
• 53:50
  that onto technically that would be home brewing 5V, but it's not
• 53:58
  home brewing it really that much, right?
• 54:01
  You're still operating within the bounds of the mechanics.
• 54:03
  So you're kind of doing what I'm saying where you're looking at
• 54:07
  the the base mechanics now that you've run the game for a while
• 54:10
  and going, all right, how can I push and pull these a bit?
• 54:13
  So yeah, it's, it's, it's, I mean, it's, it's a, it's a, it's
• 54:19
  a sort of mini home brew because it isn't super rules as written,
• 54:24
  but it's not so much of A home brew that it feels like a
• 54:26
  totally new rule. Yeah, it's that.
• 54:37
  I guess that's the kind of funny thing too, is there's often 2
• 54:42
  stages to this thought of, OK, I've hit the advanced play where
• 54:51
  I can. I can push on the bounds of the
• 54:54
  rules as is, but then after a while of operating within that
• 55:01
  advanced space and pushing on the bounds, you're probably
• 55:05
  going to then naturally roll into home brewing anyway.
• 55:12
  But again, I think the best way to get to the home brewing space
• 55:15
  is to 1st operate in this kind of advanced play space.
• 55:20
  Like I don't think you should jump straight to the home brew.
• 55:22
  Maybe that's more of the thesis than anything else.
• 55:27
  You should live in this advanced play space for as long as you
• 55:33
  can, as long as it works, until you start to try and push beyond
• 55:38
  the game, or look for a new game, or try and do something
• 55:41
  different, you know? Yeah, no, 100% agree.
• 55:45
  I, I mean, this is a, this is a philosophy that I carried over
• 55:49
  from D&D in the 1st place, which is if you want to home brew
• 55:53
  something, look around the book, it probably exists already,
• 55:56
  which will let you remain in the advanced play section as opposed
• 56:00
  to the straight up home brew section, right, right.
• 56:03
  Well, and even if it doesn't exist, still trying to just work
• 56:09
  with the game as is for a while until you really get it.
• 56:14
  I I still think it's more helpful than trying to jump
• 56:17
  straight to the home brew. And I mean, you know,
• 56:19
  ultimately, listen, you can jump to the straight home brew,
• 56:21
  right? The cops aren't going to kick
• 56:22
  your door down or anything, but I just think you'll get better
• 56:27
  results if you try and if you try and go learning game,
• 56:33
  intermediate at game, advanced game, home brewing game, right?
• 56:36
  I feel like that should be the path.
• 56:39
  I feel like that gets better results.
• 56:42
  I'm sure there's some people that maybe disagree and say Nah,
• 56:44
  just fuck it, home brew, whatever you want, right for the
• 56:46
  jump. But you know.
• 56:50
  It's fine, they can be wrong. It's something like that.
• 56:53
  Well, like, I mean, look, all jokes aside, if you read the
• 56:57
  book once and you think you're such a master game designer that
• 57:03
  you can crack that bitch open and start fiddling with what's
• 57:07
  going on inside with no practical experience, that is
• 57:10
  like the definition of hubris. And you're just going to make
• 57:14
  your time and the players time a lot worse because you're now
• 57:18
  fighting systems that you don't understand and telling the
• 57:21
  players to fight systems they don't understand.
• 57:25
  Well, the thing that's particularly funny about that
• 57:27
  too is even people who do fancy themselves particularly
• 57:33
  masterful game designers, and when I say that, I mean game
• 57:36
  designers who actively have worked in the industry for
• 57:39
  years, They they will say themselves, you do not know a
• 57:45
  game until you've played it, right?
• 57:48
  Like the people making the games will say, no, you don't know a
• 57:53
  game until you've played a game. That's not to say that reading a
• 57:58
  game and understanding it from just reading it is useless.
• 58:02
  But the idea that you understand it so well that you can
• 58:06
  immediately start ripping it apart it.
• 58:08
  Yeah, it's a little like, I don't know if I'd use the word
• 58:11
  hubris, but it is definitely a little like you're
• 58:15
  overestimating your ability for sure.
• 58:19
  I, I need, I, you know, I don't want to get into a battle of
• 58:22
  definitions, but it is like, definitively speaking,
• 58:24
  hubristic. Yeah, I don't know.
• 58:25
  I don't know. The word hubris sounds mean in
• 58:28
  this context. I.
• 58:29
  Don't know, it's fine. When were you ever afraid of
• 58:31
  being mean? I I'm not mean be mean.
• 58:37
  I don't try to be mean to people.
• 58:41
  I don't know, Mr. People Love me or hate me, It is what it is.
• 58:44
  That's not being mean though, people just find me obnoxious.
• 58:48
  OK, fair enough. When were you ever afraid of
• 58:49
  being obnoxious? No, no, never afraid of being
• 58:52
  obnoxious. That's fine.
• 58:53
  There you go. But yeah, it is.
• 58:59
  Even very skilled game designers who have been at it for a long
• 59:03
  time will not say like, oh, you can just understand the game by
• 59:08
  reading like they all and, and it's not like one or it's not
• 59:11
  like I've heard one or two say that.
• 59:12
  Like they all say that. So.
• 59:15
  Yeah, it's a thing. You got to run it to understand
• 59:18
  it. It's just, it's just, it just is
• 59:21
  what it is. I I do think too like also
• 59:34
  what's kind of interesting about this whole idea is you can you
• 59:48
  can re fall in love with the game, which I think is really
• 59:53
  interesting like this process of learning learning the game,
• 1:00:02
  running it for a while getting a little bit comfortable with it
• 1:00:06
  running it for an extended period of time and being quite
• 1:00:11
  comfortable with it and then. Kind of reassessing what you
• 1:00:16
  know about the game from a knowledgeable standpoint to then
• 1:00:21
  see if there's anything else you can do, any more interesting
• 1:00:23
  angles you could take. It will make you like the game
• 1:00:26
  again a lot of the time because it's almost like you're reading
• 1:00:34
  the game with fresh eyes even though you're not.
• 1:00:37
  But it almost kind of feels like that because I, I don't know how
• 1:00:44
  to put it. You're reading the words again
• 1:00:46
  from a different frame of mind. You know, it's like the thing
• 1:00:51
  where you watch a movie a bunch of times and then you notice
• 1:00:53
  little tidbits every time you rewatch it.
• 1:00:56
  And by noticing the little tidbits, you kind of get to a
• 1:00:59
  point of liking the movie even more than you did before, or
• 1:01:02
  even though you really liked it on that first watch.
• 1:01:04
  You know what I'm saying? You just described why I watch
• 1:01:06
  movies over and over again. Right.
• 1:01:08
  And some people think that's stupid.
• 1:01:10
  And I will admit I'm not somebody who rewatches movies a
• 1:01:14
  lot, but I've done it a little bit.
• 1:01:17
  And yeah, there's a interesting thing that happens where you're
• 1:01:20
  like, they're like, oh, I now really love this thing.
• 1:01:24
  Like, I love this thing the first time, and now I love it
• 1:01:26
  again. And for me personally, looking
• 1:01:32
  looking back at Fabula, going back through the early chapters
• 1:01:36
  of the book and talking about some of some of the mechanics of
• 1:01:40
  the game in like the in the official discord and stuff is
• 1:01:43
  making me like the game again. Because there was a minute there
• 1:01:47
  in the middle where I was like, I'm getting sick of fabulous.
• 1:01:50
  I don't want to run it anymore. But then I sort of took this
• 1:01:54
  tact of looking at it again with semi fresh eyes and it's like,
• 1:02:00
  Oh, I like it again. You know, it's it makes it
• 1:02:04
  interesting. I again, we're talking about
• 1:02:07
  tabletop, but really this applies to so many goddamn
• 1:02:10
  things in life because it's the same.
• 1:02:13
  I like you replay a video game and if it's a game you really
• 1:02:16
  like, you're probably going to like it more after you've
• 1:02:19
  replayed it because you can appreciate things more about it.
• 1:02:25
  And, and sometimes this is a little harder with tabletop, I
• 1:02:29
  will admit, but sometimes when you reread or rewatch or replay
• 1:02:36
  a thing that you maybe didn't like the first time around, the
• 1:02:41
  second time around you might like a lot more.
• 1:02:46
  And I'm just thinking of a funny recent example where it took me
• 1:02:51
  3 attempts of playing The Witcher 1 before I actually
• 1:02:55
  liked that game because my first two attempts were kind of rocky.
• 1:03:01
  But once I came at it that third time, I really came at it with
• 1:03:05
  a, an attempt to genuinely understand it and like earnestly
• 1:03:10
  interact with it. And that made me realize, oh,
• 1:03:13
  it's actually quite a good game. It's kind of a similar, it's,
• 1:03:17
  it's that same headspace we're hitting here.
• 1:03:20
  Like it's all that. It's just learn hobby and then
• 1:03:25
  relearn hobby and then like hobby even more because the
• 1:03:28
  relearning is this interesting process of I know what I'm
• 1:03:34
  doing, but I'm going back to the my foundations to re appreciate
• 1:03:40
  what I'm doing you. Know what's a a perfect example
• 1:03:44
  of this it. What?
• 1:03:46
  My my relationship with Hero Forge because as people who know
• 1:03:51
  me, I I love using this stupid web browser art app.
• 1:03:55
  I've never printed a single model from this fucking website.
• 1:03:58
  It's just my art medium that I've chosen to, to pursue now
• 1:04:02
  that I'm out of art school. And the amount of times where I,
• 1:04:05
  I will, you know, like, oh, I do faces pretty well.
• 1:04:10
  And then I will go, well, let's see if I can push that.
• 1:04:13
  Let me, let me go back and let me, let me try to do faces again
• 1:04:15
  or designing outfits or designing poses.
• 1:04:18
  You just kind of go back and go, OK, but can I make this better?
• 1:04:23
  Yeah, it's. The same.
• 1:04:23
  Can I push it farther? Yeah, it's that same.
• 1:04:29
  It's the same thing that happens when artists go back and redraw
• 1:04:32
  old drawings. You know, would they be like,
• 1:04:36
  oh, I really like this drawing when I did it initially, let me
• 1:04:40
  like redraw it now and see if I can make it, see how much better
• 1:04:43
  I can make it. And then they see how much
• 1:04:45
  better they let they, they make it.
• 1:04:46
  They make it. And then obviously they like the
• 1:04:51
  new, the redraw version they like, but also they then
• 1:04:54
  appreciate the old version more because they can see, it's like,
• 1:05:01
  you can see the fundamentals that you were grasping at in
• 1:05:05
  those early stages. And now that you know those
• 1:05:08
  fundamentals, looking back at them, you're like, ah, I was
• 1:05:11
  kind of doing this thing. Well, and so that and like, Oh,
• 1:05:13
  I was missing, I was messing up here, but I was getting it here.
• 1:05:17
  And, and it, it, it informs the like journey you've made.
• 1:05:22
  And again, when you're in this tabletop context, it's not, you
• 1:05:27
  know, instead of redrawing something or whatever, you go
• 1:05:31
  back. It's like, OK, I tried to do
• 1:05:34
  this one fight where I did this mechanic and it didn't quite
• 1:05:38
  work the the first time. Let me try and do it again now
• 1:05:42
  that I know what I'm doing better.
• 1:05:44
  And then you do it again and you're like, oh, now this, this
• 1:05:48
  mechanic in this particular fight felt really cool the
• 1:05:51
  second time I did it because I had that new, that new angle,
• 1:05:54
  that new understanding, that new appreciation.
• 1:05:59
  Basically. I, I guess what I'm really
• 1:06:01
  getting at is that this is something you should do if you
• 1:06:07
  feel like you're burning out on a game or a campaign is kind of
• 1:06:12
  reassess that fundamentals place that you started at.
• 1:06:15
  Like you've hit the, you've hit the high level.
• 1:06:20
  I'm you've hit the I know what I'm doing stage.
• 1:06:28
  Let me go back to where I started and then see if there's
• 1:06:32
  something I didn't truly appreciate that first time
• 1:06:35
  around. And then if you do that, good
• 1:06:38
  chance you'll feel less burned out on the game because maybe
• 1:06:41
  you'll you'll have a new idea or you'll come up with something
• 1:06:45
  interesting based on a reread, or you'll miss something that
• 1:06:52
  you didn't realize you missed before.
• 1:06:53
  Like I reading through chunks of the chunks of the book and
• 1:06:57
  Fabula, there have definitely been a couple of little
• 1:07:00
  mechanical interactions that I missed the first time around
• 1:07:03
  that I didn't realize I was either doing wrong or or
• 1:07:07
  ignoring. And that made me go, oh, well,
• 1:07:12
  that gives me some potential ideas.
• 1:07:14
  You know it. And it just yeah, I guess, I
• 1:07:22
  guess I'm really talking about a way to both.
• 1:07:27
  This is a method to both get better at GM ING but also
• 1:07:33
  appreciate the GM ING you are doing, like re appreciate your
• 1:07:37
  own work. And again, it really can apply
• 1:07:42
  to a lot of things. It it's kind of funny.
• 1:07:44
  I remember, I remember I had a teacher in well, this was a
• 1:07:50
  teacher outside of high school, but I was high school age.
• 1:07:53
  I was like, I don't know, 1516 and I had a drawing teacher who
• 1:07:57
  he was, he was talking about the idea of, I think it was my, I
• 1:08:03
  think it was a figure drawing class I was taking in high
• 1:08:05
  school and he again, taking at high school age, not in my high
• 1:08:10
  school. It was an after school program
• 1:08:12
  kind of thing. But he was like, the thing
• 1:08:16
  that's good about figure drawing is you can always come back to
• 1:08:20
  figure drawing and reassess where you're at with figure
• 1:08:25
  drawing. And that will almost inevitably,
• 1:08:28
  without fail, improve your skills every time you come back
• 1:08:32
  to figure drawing because figure drawing has this really
• 1:08:35
  intrinsic fundamental element to it that just for whatever reason
• 1:08:42
  seems to push art people's art skills to the next level.
• 1:08:47
  So when you, he was basically saying, when you feel like
• 1:08:49
  you're getting a little stuck, like your art isn't going
• 1:08:52
  anywhere, go back and do some figure drawing and that will
• 1:08:56
  likely push you past that stuck point.
• 1:09:00
  And an analogy he used was he was mentioning how his daughter
• 1:09:03
  was playing a video game where the character has this like
• 1:09:08
  shitty knife that they start with at the beginning of the
• 1:09:11
  game. And every time you improve the
• 1:09:13
  knife, you had to like go back to a previous location and talk
• 1:09:17
  to a previous character to take the basic knife and upgrade it.
• 1:09:21
  And he's basically saying how going back and doing figure
• 1:09:25
  drawing again and reassessing your figure drawing skills is
• 1:09:28
  like upgrading your shitty starting weapon to become a
• 1:09:30
  better weapon. And I wish I could remember what
• 1:09:34
  fucking game it was in my brain. For some reason I always
• 1:09:42
  associated it with Alice in the Madness Returns, but I don't
• 1:09:45
  actually know if that's a thing in that game or not.
• 1:09:48
  No, it is. Yeah.
• 1:09:49
  Upgrading the formal blade. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:09:50
  Is that what it was? So maybe it was Alice in the
• 1:09:52
  Madness because he was talking about he was like, you need to
• 1:09:54
  go back to this MPC and like do missions for this guy to take
• 1:09:57
  this like crappy kitchen knife and make it better.
• 1:10:01
  And I'm like, maybe it was Alice in the Madness, but I don't
• 1:10:04
  know. But anyway.
• 1:10:08
  Game, by the way, if you've not played it.
• 1:10:09
  I, that's a, you know, it's funny you say that.
• 1:10:11
  I've played a little bit of it. I played it, I, I played it with
• 1:10:15
  an ex-girlfriend for a little bit and then I never ended up
• 1:10:18
  like finishing it or anything, but I, I, I probably should.
• 1:10:23
  But anyway, that's really, that is the, that is really the
• 1:10:27
  thesis statement here is I guess, I guess now I am giving
• 1:10:32
  advice. OK, we've hit the advice
• 1:10:34
  portion. I said I didn't have advice.
• 1:10:36
  Now I'm realizing I do have advice.
• 1:10:38
  And the, and the advice is, yes, you should do this thing which
• 1:10:42
  is play the game for a while, Run the game for a while.
• 1:10:46
  Get to the point where you feel like you have a very good grasp
• 1:10:49
  of the game, like the core mechanics of the game, and feel
• 1:10:51
  like you understand the game on a on a pretty deep level.
• 1:10:55
  And then go back and reassess the fundamentals of the game you
• 1:11:01
  are running and it will likely translate to either you running
• 1:11:07
  the game better or you just liking the game more.
• 1:11:11
  And that by extension will probably lead to other good
• 1:11:16
  things down the road more or less.
• 1:11:19
  And whatever reassessing the fundamentals might mean.
• 1:11:21
  Like I'm not saying you have to reread the book necessarily, but
• 1:11:25
  maybe you just look back at your old notes and try and figure out
• 1:11:29
  like OK, I tried to do this mechanic with this session, did
• 1:11:32
  that work or did it? Or maybe I should do it a
• 1:11:34
  different way? Or maybe asking your players
• 1:11:38
  about earlier sessions and how you did XY or Z thing and how
• 1:11:41
  they felt about it. Or like, reassessing could mean
• 1:11:45
  a lot of things, but reassess those early fundamental stages
• 1:11:49
  to then give yourself a leg up on the current stages, assuming
• 1:11:54
  you give a shit about getting better as AGM.
• 1:11:58
  Don't give a fuck. Yeah, like.
• 1:12:00
  Well, I mean, here's the thing, right?
• 1:12:01
  If you don't. Care why are you here?
• 1:12:02
  But like, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:12:04
  True. Why are you here?
• 1:12:05
  But I'm just saying this is really about improving your
• 1:12:09
  jamming seal. If you, if you are fine where
• 1:12:12
  you're at and you're fine just kind of riding, just coasting
• 1:12:15
  with your current jamming, then yeah, you don't necessarily need
• 1:12:17
  to do this. But yeah, if you do want to, I,
• 1:12:21
  I, I hate using this phrase, but if you would like to level up
• 1:12:24
  your GM ING yeah, it's that that reassessment of the
• 1:12:29
  fundamentals, I think really is kind of like a hidden secret in
• 1:12:35
  a way. And it, and again, I have
• 1:12:40
  applied this particular idea to other, I've applied this idea to
• 1:12:43
  drawing for myself many times. So like I know it also works in
• 1:12:47
  that way. I mean, I've also applied it to
• 1:12:49
  video games. I think people do this in video
• 1:12:51
  games kind of automatically anyway.
• 1:12:54
  They just don't realize they're doing it, you know what I mean?
• 1:12:57
  Likely, yeah. It's like when you're playing
• 1:13:00
  the fucking fighting game and you play for a little while and
• 1:13:03
  you figure out your character's like bread and butter combos and
• 1:13:06
  you play ranked for a little while and you climb and you
• 1:13:09
  climb and you're like, and then you hit a point where you start
• 1:13:11
  getting your ass beat again. And you're like, all right, let
• 1:13:13
  me go back and figure out like, what are my character's pokes?
• 1:13:19
  You know, what can I do at this distance?
• 1:13:22
  Like, what are my what are my buttons looking like at these
• 1:13:24
  various engagement ranges? And you kind of like look at
• 1:13:27
  your basic move set of your character all over again, even
• 1:13:30
  though you know it already. But you look at it with this new
• 1:13:34
  understanding. And then you get to this greater
• 1:13:38
  stage of play. Like, yeah, again, I I think
• 1:13:43
  people do it a lot in video games.
• 1:13:45
  Almost automatically. So let me ask you a question.
• 1:13:51
  What, what do you think the reason is why it feels less
• 1:13:54
  common or less intuitive in role-playing games?
• 1:14:01
  Because I, I, I'm, I'm going as far as to say that I think for a
• 1:14:04
  lot of people it doesn't feel into.
• 1:14:07
  Yeah, I think it's harder to, it's harder to gauge.
• 1:14:18
  It's harder to what's the word I want.
• 1:14:25
  So like when you're playing a video game, right, the game has
• 1:14:30
  all sorts of metric metrics and numbers that give you an idea of
• 1:14:40
  where you're at, right? Like the if we just take ranked,
• 1:14:44
  right, if you're playing a fighting game and you get to,
• 1:14:48
  you know, you're playing Street Fighter six and you get to gold
• 1:14:50
  3. And then once you hit gold
• 1:14:53
  three, you keep getting your ass beat.
• 1:14:55
  You'll have a match where you win a match where you lose a
• 1:14:57
  match where you win, a match where you lose.
• 1:14:59
  You'll have three matches in a row where you lose and then two
• 1:15:02
  matches where you win and then three more where you lose.
• 1:15:04
  And that metric of the number going up and down and up and
• 1:15:09
  down, and the fact that you're getting locked at this rank is a
• 1:15:15
  really good way to gauge where you're at.
• 1:15:19
  You're like, OK, I have hit the wall of my current skill set.
• 1:15:24
  So if I want to breakthrough this wall, I have to, I have to
• 1:15:30
  assess what I'm doing wrong to then get to the next level of
• 1:15:36
  skill. I think role-playing games lack
• 1:15:39
  those clear metrics. So you can't always tell when
• 1:15:45
  you're in a rut. You know what I'm saying?
• 1:15:49
  Like, interesting. It's especially, you know, and
• 1:15:54
  let's be honest, most people are playing with their friends,
• 1:16:00
  right? Or at least people they're kind
• 1:16:01
  of friends with. And even if they're doing kind
• 1:16:06
  of a bad job, your friends are probably not going to say
• 1:16:11
  they're they're definitely not going to say you're doing a bad
• 1:16:14
  job, right? That's almost certainly not
• 1:16:15
  going to say you're trash. Yeah, like your friends are
• 1:16:18
  probably not going to say that to you straight up.
• 1:16:21
  Whereas, you know, the guy who just beat your ass in the
• 1:16:24
  lobbies five times in a row might call you trash, right?
• 1:16:30
  Like he might shit dog your ass. So because your friends are not
• 1:16:35
  going to say that to you, you might be in this rut and you
• 1:16:41
  might say to them, OK, hey guys, like I'm feeling like the
• 1:16:45
  campaign is not going well. How do you guys feel?
• 1:16:48
  And they'll be like, no, I think it's fine.
• 1:16:52
  And then you're kind of like, OK, I, that doesn't give me any
• 1:16:56
  information to work with. I don't have a gauge, you know,
• 1:16:59
  like you don't have a ranking score to look at.
• 1:17:02
  You don't have anything to gauge that skill level at.
• 1:17:05
  So it becomes unclear. And if you're not getting direct
• 1:17:08
  feedback from your friends because they're being nice,
• 1:17:11
  which is not their fault, they they should be nice.
• 1:17:14
  I'm not saying they should be mean to you, but because they're
• 1:17:17
  not giving you that direct feedback, you're then in a
• 1:17:18
  position of I don't know where I'm at and I don't know how to
• 1:17:23
  check where I'm at. You don't have anything to look
• 1:17:26
  at and, and there's nothing to check against, you know, there's
• 1:17:30
  no information to, to assess. It's all very nebulous, you
• 1:17:35
  know, like how do your players feel is not like a hard number,
• 1:17:40
  you know what I mean? It's not like a, there's no,
• 1:17:42
  there's no math there. So it, it's hard to notice.
• 1:17:48
  And then you might be in a situation where you feel like,
• 1:17:53
  oh, I'm not it. You might feel like you are
• 1:17:57
  personally in a rut, but your players might say, no, I'm
• 1:18:00
  having fun. And then you're even more
• 1:18:02
  confused because you're like, OK, what I'm feeling isn't
• 1:18:06
  matching what they're feeling. Why is that?
• 1:18:11
  And then is it a problem or am I overthinking it?
• 1:18:17
  And then then you have to gauge that whole scenario of like,
• 1:18:21
  where am I at in that mentality? So I think it's just, I guess
• 1:18:28
  ultimately, to summarize what I'm saying, the problem is that
• 1:18:31
  running a role-playing game is kind of nebulous.
• 1:18:34
  And so the nebulousness of it makes it hard to do that
• 1:18:39
  assessment. And because it's hard to do the
• 1:18:42
  assessment, it is then hard to do the thing where you go back
• 1:18:45
  and reassess your fundamentals because you don't have the
• 1:18:48
  initial assessment information. Does that make sense?
• 1:18:52
  Yeah. So I don't know, like what, I
• 1:19:05
  don't know if there's a solution to that per SE, other than just
• 1:19:09
  having a degree of self-awareness and just trying
• 1:19:13
  to analyse what you're doing as much as you possibly can and
• 1:19:22
  then go from there, you know? Yeah, yeah.
• 1:19:26
  I, I, I mean, I will say one, one thing that I have heard
• 1:19:29
  people say online that I do think is helpful is asking your
• 1:19:35
  players very direct questions, right?
• 1:19:40
  Don't say to your players, are you guys having fun or did you
• 1:19:45
  like that session, right? Those are really vague, not
• 1:19:49
  specific questions that you're probably not going to get
• 1:19:52
  helpful answers out of. But saying to your players, did
• 1:19:57
  you feel like that boss fight was sufficiently tense?
• 1:20:01
  Did you feel like beating that boss was satisfying?
• 1:20:05
  Did you feel like the reward for where the story went after this
• 1:20:11
  arc was satisfied? Right.
• 1:20:13
  Like asking more direct questions I think will help you
• 1:20:17
  to bring. Will help bring yourself closer
• 1:20:20
  to that, to that self analysis, to that assessment point.
• 1:20:29
  Sometimes an anonymous player survey is the way to go.
• 1:20:34
  I've done those. I've also done those.
• 1:20:38
  Those are, you know. Just pros and cons, don't get me
• 1:20:42
  wrong. Yeah, yeah, I was.
• 1:20:44
  Gonna say like the move though. It can be for sure.
• 1:20:48
  The the biggest issue I've found with the anonymous surveys is
• 1:20:52
  that like I've gotten, I've gotten both sides of it.
• 1:20:58
  I've gotten the people give like it's like, ah, OK, I I see why I
• 1:21:03
  see why you would say that, but that's not helpful to me.
• 1:21:05
  That's like a personal complaint you have right?
• 1:21:12
  Oh, God, I'm trying to think of one that I got that I was like,
• 1:21:17
  I think one of my players at one point was like, I don't know
• 1:21:19
  what we're supposed to be doing. And it was like, I don't know
• 1:21:23
  how you don't know that because I I explain it at the start of
• 1:21:28
  every session. You know what I mean?
• 1:21:30
  Like, right. Right.
• 1:21:32
  Yeah, Like, and that that one was twofold unhelpful because 1
• 1:21:36
  is like, do you mean you don't know what your character is
• 1:21:41
  supposed to be doing? Because that's not an answer I
• 1:21:42
  can give you. Right.
• 1:21:43
  Like, that is right. That's where you got to find
• 1:21:46
  some agency fam. But like, if you don't know what
• 1:21:48
  we as a party are doing, I, I, I really don't know what to say.
• 1:21:53
  Right, I don't know how else to recontextualize it.
• 1:21:55
  Yeah, yeah. I, I to be honest, I, I think I
• 1:22:00
  know who sent that, but I, but no, I should say I'm almost
• 1:22:03
  positive. Remember who said that?
• 1:22:04
  But yeah. I yeah, listen, it's not like
• 1:22:09
  it's a perfect system or anything, but it can help get
• 1:22:12
  you to more direct answers and then more direct answers can
• 1:22:16
  help you to assess your own methodology.
• 1:22:20
  You know, look, no, no, no, no assessment method is perfect.
• 1:22:28
  You know what I mean? No, not at all.
• 1:22:31
  So it's funny, actually, I was just listening to a podcast
• 1:22:35
  about a guy who's a philosopher who wrote a book about
• 1:22:42
  gamification and how we've like gamified our lives.
• 1:22:46
  And part of the conversation was about how the idea of metrics
• 1:22:50
  and numbers are really useful for distilling information and
• 1:22:58
  spreading information quickly, but aren't particularly helpful
• 1:23:03
  in assessing the value of very nuanced human interaction.
• 1:23:09
  And that's, that's kind of what we're getting at here, right?
• 1:23:13
  role-playing games are ultimately very nuanced human
• 1:23:16
  interaction. So it is very hard to break them
• 1:23:19
  down into numerical assessment because it is hard to break them
• 1:23:22
  down into numerical assessment. It is hard for you as AGM to
• 1:23:27
  also do that self-assessment. But there's ways that you can
• 1:23:34
  get a little bit closer ultimately.
• 1:23:37
  But it's never going to be a perfect method.
• 1:23:39
  You just have to figure out your personal method, which is why
• 1:23:44
  this whole time I've been talking about this, I have not
• 1:23:46
  been. I've been trying to not ascribe
• 1:23:51
  how you should do this. I'm just saying you should do
• 1:23:54
  it. You know what I mean?
• 1:23:56
  Yeah, this is one of those. There's no.
• 1:23:58
  I'm not going to tell you how. Perfect answer, just kind of
• 1:24:01
  depends on who does it. Yeah, I'm not going to tell you
• 1:24:04
  the methodology. I'm just going to say you should
• 1:24:06
  try and do it. But how you get there, there's
• 1:24:11
  lots of ways you could potentially get there.
• 1:24:13
  So, you know, which sometimes I think some people find a little
• 1:24:17
  bit frustrating as far as advice goes, because I think people
• 1:24:20
  often want the direct how to do it and sometimes you just that
• 1:24:27
  answer just doesn't exist, sorry.
• 1:24:29
  No, that's me, like, right. I'm someone, you know, if we're
• 1:24:35
  talking about art, when it comes to 2D, something I really
• 1:24:38
  struggle with is, and I know like kind of a fundamental
• 1:24:44
  thing. I really struggle with radiation
• 1:24:50
  of value when it comes to color and in 2D art.
• 1:24:54
  That's why I'm a 3D artist. In 2D, yeah, there are
• 1:25:00
  fundamental rules, but a lot of it comes down to just.
• 1:25:03
  It's just vibes bro. It's vibes and work at it till
• 1:25:06
  it till it succeeds. But that doesn't that frustrates
• 1:25:10
  me because I'm someone who needs like structure, right?
• 1:25:14
  Like when it comes to, you know, when it comes to like rendering
• 1:25:18
  lighting in a 3D engine, right. It's like, OK, you're not
• 1:25:21
  getting the results you want. What do?
• 1:25:22
  What do you got right now? OK, mess with your exposure
• 1:25:25
  based mess with your passes. OK, check your diffuse like you
• 1:25:28
  can. There are literal systems you
• 1:25:30
  can watch and fine tune that you can boil down to something close
• 1:25:34
  to a science. Yeah, that doesn't exist in 2D.
• 1:25:39
  Well, it it it does to a point. There are actually some very
• 1:25:43
  technical based 2D artists that do kind of operate in that
• 1:25:47
  space, but it is different and I would say less common.
• 1:25:54
  And this is this is kind of a similar to problem to like when
• 1:25:57
  people ask me for like workout advice or like a workout
• 1:26:02
  routine. And ultimately, I cannot
• 1:26:07
  prescribe to you the perfect routine because I do not live
• 1:26:11
  your life. And when you're designing a
• 1:26:15
  workout routine for yourself, you need to base it around your
• 1:26:20
  life, right? Like your schedule, your
• 1:26:23
  existence, your needs. And not everyone has the same
• 1:26:27
  needs. And so no, one person, you can't
• 1:26:32
  just mimic somebody's workout routine and expect it to work
• 1:26:36
  for you. Florida State, you're going to
• 1:26:39
  have to make modifications because that's just how it
• 1:26:44
  works. You know what I mean?
• 1:26:46
  Yeah. So yeah, it's kind of that idea
• 1:26:49
  of I can tell you how I can tell you the same thing with diet,
• 1:26:54
  right? You cannot describe, you cannot
• 1:26:59
  ascribe a diet plan that will work for everyone.
• 1:27:02
  But what you can do is give people a mentality for how they
• 1:27:06
  should go about making a diet plan and then they can make that
• 1:27:11
  diet plan for themselves. That is what is like long term
• 1:27:16
  effective as opposed to just giving somebody a list of shit
• 1:27:20
  to eat. They're not going to stick to
• 1:27:22
  that. It's just not going to happen.
• 1:27:23
  You know, everyone has their own little opinions and things and
• 1:27:29
  and like what they want to do versus not want to do and things
• 1:27:32
  they're willing to eat, not eat, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:27:35
  It's the same thing. So in this context, like I said,
• 1:27:42
  the idea of reassessing the fundamentals of the game you are
• 1:27:45
  running, what that looks like for you, I cannot tell you how
• 1:27:49
  to do that. But what I can tell you is the
• 1:27:52
  mentality, the headspace of I should go back and reassess my
• 1:27:57
  fundamentals for this game after I have played this game for an
• 1:28:00
  extended period of time is a good mentality to be in.
• 1:28:07
  And that's kind of the, I guess that's kind of the final
• 1:28:10
  thought. We did kind of get to an actual
• 1:28:12
  coherent thought at the end. That's good, because I didn't
• 1:28:16
  think we were going to. I really wasn't sure.
• 1:28:20
  I wasn't 100% sure where I was going with all this.
• 1:28:22
  I, I had, I had AI had a kernel of an idea.
• 1:28:26
  I just wasn't sure where to go with it.
• 1:28:28
  But we kind of got somewhere. Man, I'm just happy it's not me
• 1:28:31
  for once because that's usually how I feel where I'm like, I
• 1:28:33
  have an idea but I don't know how the fuck we're going to get
• 1:28:35
  to the end. Going to get to an end point.
• 1:28:36
  Yeah. Yeah, well, I mostly got to an
• 1:28:38
  end point here, so that's good. Still no clue what a fucking
• 1:28:42
  thumbnailer title is going to look like, but you know what?
• 1:28:44
  That's probably for me. I brother, good fucking luck.
• 1:28:49
  Yeah, I don't know. I don't know.
• 1:28:52
  Expanding intellect meme? Somewhere in there probably.
• 1:28:57
  OK, so in there you have to put Quanchi and Jesus on the
• 1:29:01
  branches of the fucking neurons, but make them like really small.
• 1:29:06
  Like you have to like actually be looking at the screen on a
• 1:29:10
  desktop to catch it. Fair enough, All righty, if you
• 1:29:18
  sat through all this rambling and nonsense, you owe me $5
• 1:29:22
  right now. Give me the money, bitch.
• 1:29:25
  Or I guess you could follow us on social media.
• 1:29:28
  Because they give us the money so we can pay Brett.
• 1:29:30
  Or that too links in the description.
• 1:29:36
  That's it, that's all I got. Bye bye.
• 1:29:37
  Yeah, that's all I got. Peace, motherfuckers.