D&D Red Flags and Player Agency: DM Advice and Real Talk

This week on TableTalk Friday, Seth and Drew catch up on life, gaming, and everything in between!

From tricky table dynamics to finding the sweet spot between story control and player freedom, this episode is full of practical DM advice, real experiences, and the kind of banter only longtime friends can bring.

🎲 Topics Covered:

• The biggest red flags to watch for in a D&D game
• Balancing story control vs. player choice
• Real DM experiences and lessons learned
• General life updates from Seth and Drew

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello and welcome to Table Talk Friday, your weekly dose of D&D hosted by three boys in a bedroom. If you like their style, you can follow them on Instagram, YouTube and other social media platforms. And now, back to the boys.

SPEAKER_02: 0:24

Welcome to Table Talk Friday, a D&D podcast where two best friends are hanging out in separate bedrooms all the way across the country from each other. My name is formerly Seth Pittman, and I'm joined today by one of my best friends, Andrew Romano. Drew, how are you doing? Hello, formerly. I'm doing fantastic today. I'm not going to lie, I got a little nostalgic there because I forgot our intro. Yeah. It's been that long. To be honest, I want to record a couple more of the voice ones again because it's hard for me to remember the exact script every time we start. But I did in the episode I did with Patrick a few weeks ago. I forgot the... Pat, how are you doing today? And I was like, dang it. I forgot it. But I have still had people doing the outro things where I'm like, all right, now take us out. You totally ruined our brand. We might as well just change the name of the podcast. Might as well change the name to like... Table Talk Thursday. Magic the Gathering Saturdays. It's Saturday where we always post. Talk about Magic the Gathering. I'm going to have to wait for one of these topics, but I wanted Pat to be on so bad today so that we can pitch you like a whole thing for Magic. Like, dude, you have to get into it. You have to play. You guys convinced me. I know. You said, let's play. You hyped it up. We're going to do this online thing. We're going to try to like Discord, you know, whatever. We're going to make it work, right? It's just so different. You told me the commander deck that I needed. Yeah, we did that. Yeah, we did that. I know. I was thinking about it, too. I was like, man, we got to get Drew to play because... I think once you start playing, you're going to be like, oh, now I have to go to a store and play, or now I have to have other people play with me. Because I did test out Spell Table the other day, though, because I wanted to learn how to... I wanted to try it online, and it actually worked out pretty well. I joined in with three strangers, and we played Commander, the four of us, and it went really well. I was surprised. Now, what do you know about magic right now? Okay, so... It has been a long time. Now, when I first got into Magic, remember, we were playing D&D, and I was like, oh, no, I can't be bothered. I'm just so busy with D&D, and I couldn't bother. No, no, no, no, no. We were into Magic first. Oh, you're right, you were the other

SPEAKER_03: 2:38

way

SPEAKER_02: 2:38

around. Yeah, we played Magic for months, just you and I. I remember specifically, we were playing like the Kaladesh starter kit decks that we had made. Oh, Kaladesh, yes. And we sat in my room on that tiny little table, and you and I played for hours. One time, one of our games went over an hour with a standard 60-card deck in 20 life because we were at a stalemate, and I eventually pulled it out with one card. Was that the Sphinx? Yeah, it was the Sphinx of Magosi. I still have it in my binder. The Sphinx of Magosi. I remember that, dude. That was crazy. So, Magic is a lot different now in 2025. Probably all the franchising kind of stuff? Yeah, I was going to explain to you Universes Beyond because there's so many other properties coming out into Magic. And, you know, Pat and I talked about it a little bit moderately okay with me. Like, depending on the thing, Spider-Man's about to come out. And I'm like, I don't really... I'm not a big fan of... What?!

UNKNOWN: 0:00

!

SPEAKER_02: 3:34

Yeah, you know that? Next set is Spider-Man. Why? What is driving these weird collabs? Money, baby. The Fortnite-ification. You gotta have money. Final Fantasy was a huge hit. It went crazy, but in my opinion, Final Fantasy makes a lot of sense, right? It's still fantasy. You could even see it being part of the D&D multiverse, right? No, I could see it. Yeah. So Final Fantasy made a lot of sense. Some of my favorite characters from video games were in there. And so, of course, I picked up some Final Fantasy stuff. I bought the cloud deck. I trade it to the cloud deck was one hundred and twenty dollars. But do you think I paid that? No, I I got enough cards in the events that we did at Magic Con that I traded them to a vendor and paid fifty dollars. But yeah, so crazy stuff. But it's good. Oh, the deck is amazing. Like, I love it. It's all equipment, so it's Voltron. You throw Cloud down, and equipment automatically attaches to him, and then you start swinging. Like, it's full-on, like, aggro Voltron. Oh, that is cool. So I love it, and I also made, from Final Fantasy XV, a Noctis deck, which is three different colors, artifacts, again, but not equipment. Noctis can pay three. He has lifelink. He's a 4-3. You pay three life... And you can bring an artifact with paying its cost back from the graveyard to the battlefield. So like cards that like have ETB triggers, like Solemn Simulacrum, you go and get a land out of your deck, put it on the battlefield tapped, right? So you can then swing that creature, let it die. It also has a death trigger. You draw a card, goes to your graveyard, then you pay four again, pay three life, bring it back from the graveyard, do it all again, right? Stuff like that. I love the lifeline combos. Yeah. So it's, um, there's a lot of fun stuff, but I would definitely recommend buy a pre-con deck. Me, you and Pat got to get together so we can do this, you know, because I would love to. Patrick was telling me he's got like a bracket two. There's a whole bracket system for our commander decks are set up and we got to teach you how to play commander. I know you're not into the idea. I know you're not super into the idea of like singleton and all that, not being able to like strategize as much. It's just so fun. So I played it the one time before. I think it was with Pat back in college. And I enjoyed it. It just threw me off. To me, I really like the idea. And it's probably the exact same thing. So I'm probably just, you know, just rambling on about crap. But I like the idea that when you're playing non-commander, you're playing modern or standard, did they call it? Yeah. That you could put up to four in there. Not that you want to have... of every card because that gets really boring too but i feel like you had more options which is a silly argument because there's 100 cards in a commander deck yeah so really i just need to play the game and stop playing yeah honestly what we could do that would make it a lot easier than getting you to go buy something is we can set you up on a virtual thing and just have you like i could i could just send you a deck list and be like here play one of my decks and you go into the play tester on there you broadcast your screen into discord or something And then we can just see you moving the deck virtually so you can try it, right? And then be like, okay, I'm down to spend$40 on this, right? And then next thing you know, two grand's down the drain. And I have no money left and I'm addicted to magic. Luckily, that hasn't happened to me in the same way that I feel like it could have in the past. But I don't want to stick on magic too long because this is a D&D podcast. I have one more life topic outside of this that is not D&D related. And you know how I got you those ROM hacks, those Pokemon ROM hacks in the past? Yeah, I played just the other day. Okay, I've got a pitch for you on this too. A popular YouTuber named Alpharad has, and I bet some people listening know this name, has created a Pokemon ROM hack called Super Mario Mon. And it is a full Pokemon. It is a full Pokemon. Eight gyms battling one. You're playing as Mario. Luigi tags along sometimes. And you are catching things from the Mushroom Kingdom and battling them against Mario characters. And you're racing Bowser because you have to finish first so he doesn't get to Princess Peach and make the wish. Make the wish? Yeah, so the whole overlying story or whatever, the overarching story is you as Mario and Luigi... Princess Peach has created this game because now, like, the hat from Mario Odyssey that, like, captures things, they're using these to capture different creatures from the Mushroom Kingdom because Princess Peach has made a game to where if you participate in this, at the very end, if you capture, get all eight Power Stars first, the eight Power Stars instead of gyms, if you get all eight of them first, you get a wish. I don't know how that works. Oh, okay. So Bowser hears about this and it's flipping out. He's like, why did you not invite me to play this game? I should be playing this game too. And there's a couple of little twists and turns that are really silly of the, that he does. Cause there's specific rules you have to follow. And he's like, I'm not doing that. I'm not following these rules. And, but I started playing this. I played it for like six hours yesterday because at the end of the day, Gabby's been Nuzlocking Pokemon Y on the 3DS and, So she's trying to get really good at nuzlocks and stuff. And so I was like, oh, I'll play one. And so I start playing this. And it has a nuzlock mode and all the kinds of rules you can do on it. It has all this stuff built into the game. Like difficulties, nuzlock mode, all of that. And I was like, hey, you know what? I'll play this game and then I'll try nuzlocking it. It's so fun. It's so cool. Or... Or how repetitive that these Pokemon games have become over time. I hear a lot of people complaining about how it's like the same old crap all the time and they're not putting as many Pokemon on as they used to. For what reason are they not catering to the audience by putting in different game modes like Nuzlocke? They actually do. Indeed, I couldn't tell you because I'm like, this was completely free. It's on my phone. Allegedly, it's allegedly on my phone. you know hypothetically yeah this alleged pokemon rom hack is allegedly on my phone and it's so good and like didn't do any work for it it's just there but one question before we move on because i want to hit on this mario pokemon kind of a vibe it makes me think of this whole pokemon 5e thing that we did for a while what is meta poke mario super mario mon Super Mario? What is meta, you're saying? Yeah, like, what is your go-to? So, like, let's say you're playing Fire Red. So, my starter, I did choose the Fire starter, which was a Bob-omb. And when he evolves, his second stage is one of the Bob-ombs that has the red arms and the boxing gloves. So, he's my main guy right now. All my other guys are just okay. There's this, like, I really don't know some of the creatures. There's so many Mario games and stuff that I'm probably not familiar with. So I don't know all of these creatures, but there's this one that's like a little like bulb looking thing. And it's basically like a grass starter kind of, but not. Piranha Plant is one of the other starters you can get. Oh, heck yeah. But it's like this little grass bulb looking thing and it knows moves like Mega Drain and stuff. And so I've been using this one too and it's been helping me out a good bit. But yeah, Bob-omb's been like my sweeper. And I have the level cap mode on so you can't go above a certain level. Also, they built in like because of the Nuzlocke rules, they give you like the infinite rare candy stuff. That way if you want to just like go to the level cap, go to the next thing, you don't have to spend time grinding. Oh, that's kind of cool. Yeah, so it's been really cool, really fun. I've been enjoying my gaming life recently. Have you been playing anything outside the usual? No, just a little bit of that Pokemon game. There was something Adventures, Dark Adventures. Yeah. Playing a little bit of Hunt. Oh, well, actually, so not super outside of Realm, I'm going to say. Minecraft, we have been playing... Pretty frequently on a weekly basis. Really? I would say maybe the last three months. We had six people on the other day grinding away. We got full netherite gear. We have several houses. We're building our second storage room that's got 300 double chests in it. We're going pretty hard right now. That's crazy. So I leveled up to the plus realm or something like that so it stays open all the time. So we have a Google plan. This is you and the friends I know from before, or this is a different group? This is me, my wife, her sisters, and then Malachi and Tyler. Wow. Okay. That's fun. We've been kicking it, man. We've been having a lot of fun. Even the nights where you don't say a whole lot of words, it's like, let's get on Minecraft and chop some trees for an hour and kick it. Gabi and I are just now starting Act 3 of Baldur's Gate together. So out of the three acts, we finished two full basically D&D campaigns at this point. We're going into Act 3. I think we're at like 50 hours into the game. Really? Okay, you're digging in. Yeah, we've been playing every night. And it's been phenomenal because I've seen so much stuff I didn't see the first time. Like... I'm seeing the same places, but I'm getting different options. Different things are happening. I completely forgot about one thing we were supposed to do. So we ended up triggering one of those in-game events that's like, you can't go back from here. And we didn't read the prompt. We just clicked go on the next thing. And so we missed a quest, but it's changed everything because I was expecting these characters to end up in a place. Next thing I know, they're not there anymore. This is something you've done in your previous playthroughs. Right, I did it. Yeah, I'm hitting a bit of uncharted territory. And in my one run through, there was a character I didn't interact with that's supposed to show up later because I forgot. I just was like, oh, I didn't see it. And then this one, I got a whole new like three, four minutes of cut scene because they actually were there this time and we actually interacted with them. So I'm hitting uncharted territory for a lot of things. And it's it's pretty cool. So now it's gotten me like I'm back on the Pokemon bug. I'm on the Baldur's Gate bug. I got to finish Final Fantasy 16. I've been playing Helldivers 2 consistently. There's so there's so much. And I only came for like a few hours a day. So I don't even have the time to do all of it. No, I've I've been honestly wanting to do nothing but a game, even just the same old stuff. This dog has taken all my time. I

SPEAKER_03: 14:42

wait

SPEAKER_02: 14:42

for him to fall asleep. He's adorable. He's a menace, but he's also just... I love this dog so much, it's ridiculous. Are you guys training him? Yeah, no, we train him every day. We have a whole regiment with him, and I gotta say, I don't know how quickly dogs are supposed to learn. I've had dogs around me my whole life, but I've never had my own. I'm in charge of this dog, making sure his well-being is all that, blah, blah, blah. Morning's so quick. It's not great at like retaining everything, but drawing the connections is like instant. In one morning in like 10 minutes, I said like, I kind of wanted him to like give me his paw, right? So I said paw a couple of times and I grabbed his hand and put it in my hand and gave him a treat. After about 10 minutes, he was doing it, putting his hand in my hand to get the treat. It's crazy how quick they pick up on stuff. I don't know. They're putting something in the water. I don't know. I don't know what it is, but. You know, I had an animal recently. And she has also been learning, but not in the same way. It's like she's so comfortable in the house now that she's learned she can jump from the floor to the counter. Oh, she's like, wow. Yeah, she's she's jumping like, you know, over three feet up into the air to get onto things. And so she's she's discovering her talents. But because of this, what they recommend you do, if you look it up online, is put double sided tape on those surfaces you don't want her on, because the second their claws touch it, they're like, no, no, I'm not going here anymore. Really? So she was getting on our bar stools and getting on a different counter that was a little out of reach. She was like able to get onto it and then jump across to get to the counter. So I put double sided tape up there and she'll go up and she'll just like slowly paw the counter like I just want to be up there. But also her progress, her main progress is in the fact that she will sleep next to us in the bed. It used to be she would like go sit in the windowsill or like kind of roam around at night and keep us up really late now at bedtime she is laid up against one of us yesterday she's sleeping against her head against Gabby the top of Gabby's head she's just like nuzzled up sleeping and then she wakes us up at her like the time she eats in the morning so she's like it's like we're hitting 4 a.m. she usually eats at like 5 and if we're hitting 4 a.m. she's like hey where's my food you guys have not fed me it's been multiple hours. Why are you guys speeders so early? We have to be up early. Army lifestyle, baby. No, you're wrong. I go to bed at 9pm and I get up at like 4 or 5. I gotta start going to bed a little bit early. I've been going to bed around 11, which... is earlier than in the morning. I have most of my life. Yeah, in the morning. And I get up, I want to spend more time with the dog in the morning. I want to sit down and train a little bit more and play with him just so he's got something going on. I think I'm going to go to bed a little bit earlier. But that's taken away more from my gaming lifestyle. I get no games. Everybody gets in the way of games. I'm glad that Gabby likes to game as much as she does because she'll like play her. If I'm like, I want to play Held Irish tonight, she'll like sit and play her Nuzlocke and we'll be in the same space or like, OK, we're grinding Baldur's Gate. We're doing Baldur's Gate tonight. So it's nice to be on there. I was going to I was going to say you have to play it like. You have to do it. It's so good. And it's exactly what you want. I listened. I listened back to a bunch of episodes recently because, you know, I was getting nostalgic for the podcast. And I listened to the episode where Zach and I are just pitching Baldur's Gate to you the whole time. We're just like telling you how great it is. We have that episode. You mean that 12, 13, 14 episodes where it was nothing but. Yes, but this is like right after the game came out and Zach and I were still playing it. And we were like, dude, Drew, you have to play. It's everything you want.

UNKNOWN: 18:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 18:38

I will. I'll get to it. At this point now, what is it? Two years old? Year old? Yeah, almost. I think it's two years old. Is it on discount yet? It has been, but I don't think it's on a huge discount. I've seen it on discount. See, I'm looking for that sale. So at this point, it's July. I could probably wait till Black Friday. No, I think you should just buy it. I know you have enough money to buy Baldur's Gate. I do, but do I want it that bad? I could wait. I could wait for it to get cheaper. Okay, so I'm going to try a little segment with you, okay? I did this on the podcast by myself, and I did this on the podcast with Sean. I have a prompt. I'm going to go over it. We might get into the D&D finance stuff a little bit later, but if not, we can save it for another episode. So, I'm going to pitch this to you. Do I need alcohol for this? No, no, no. So this is user lieenvironmental5207 over on the D&D subreddit says, I'm playing in a new campaign into one that's already been going for a while. I haven't been here long enough to know how a regular session goes yet, but I've played in two so far. Both. Three hours long. Reasonable. Reasonable. I mean, that's about how long ours are. In both of them, for the first hour and a half, 98% of that time was listening to the DM describe our journey on a ship and entry into a new city. The rest of the session is exactly the same. I don't really know why he stipulated the hour and a half here if the whole session was this way. You know, first hour and a half, it was 98% of the DM just narrating. So was the rest of this session. Yeah, you could have just said the whole time, but that's a weird way to phrase it. He asked us how we react to things and what we'd like to do about three times in either session. So... There hasn't been even much chance to roleplay or explore, nor has there been any combat. None. The DM himself and the players all seem awesome, but it feels less like playing D&D and more like listening to a writer describe a fixed story in real time. Just wondering, is this normal? In the campaigns I run, as well as the others that I've been in, 60% of the session has been directed by and played out by the PLAYERS, in all caps. Just looking for some secondary input. Is this normal, Drew? Is this normal? No, absolutely not. I've heard a lot of horror stories from D&D games that just went wrong or the DM was crazy or the players were murder hobos or whatever it would be. I've never heard of a game that was just a cinematic story told by one person. That's so weird. It's not even fun. As a DM, I love talking about my homebrew world that I've worked on for millennia. But I would never sit here and just talk at the players the whole time. It would be boring. If I was in this scenario and I was a player, I would be sitting there and then about five minutes in to just the monologue where I haven't been, nothing's been narrated around me or like you're just describing the whole thing. I'd be five minutes in, I'd start thinking, when do we play? And then 10 minutes in, I'd start thinking, should I say something? Should I speak up? 15 minutes in, I would go, I'm gonna sit back on my phone and look at it until we actually do something. 30 minutes in, I'm leaving. Yeah. I couldn't do it. I think it's difficult, and maybe you feel the same way, but as people who have played with the same group of what I would say are excellent players, and having a very specific scenario, like a certain culture at the table, I don't know how I would react to that, because it's just never happened. I would like to think, like you were saying, 30 minutes in, that I would just kind of start to lounge back a little bit. But I feel like we would question it. Let's just say, you know, Pat's running a game. I feel like you and me would start eyeballing each other. Like, we even rolled this 45 minutes in. Like, should we take a break? Maybe I like chat like, hey, can we talk for a second? Oh, for sure. On anything yet? I mean, there's everybody. We're all playing a game here. I want to I want to play. Yeah. And that's how I would say, like, we have good communication. If we have ever had a problem, we've always been able to talk about it pretty quickly and easily. I don't think we've really had many problems we've had to talk about. Yeah, I don't think so. But like if this scenario came up, which it never will, I would definitely instantly afterwards be like, hey, dude, we didn't play today. You kind of just told us what was going on. I probably wouldn't do it with the whole group there. I'd be like, hey, can I get you for like five minutes? Yeah, I guess like a private moment afterwards. But I don't. I would stay there the whole time, but I just might out of respect. Like, you know, if you were running a game and you did that, like, obviously you've run so many incredible sessions over the years. I'd be like, well, maybe I'll let Seth do his thing here. I don't know. Yeah, maybe if it was a one-time thing, right? Like, wow, that was a lot of exposition. But recently, so Patrick and I did a thing, and Sean and I kind of talked about this last week too, but when Patrick and I were talking, we talked about each of our DM styles and stuff, right? And now... We still have to wait for Chase to DM his. I've been talking to him about him DMing a session for us and everything. But we've seen everybody DM separately. Now, when we described your DM style, we described it as the most work you can put into one session throughout a year. Well, it's because I run one game a year. I know, I know. I know if you had a game for us, it would be different, but we haven't experienced enough because you run one a game a year for our group specifically normally. So how do you think your style is different from the rest of the group? I've been asking all of you guys this. I would say my style is most like Zach's. So I think we both put... And this is not a negative comment. We both put a lot of thought into our sessions, and I would argue way too much. I think about the session and plan the session so much to the point where I don't ever want to do it again. I love running these sessions. but I hate prepping for it because I know it's going to take me tenfold as long to prep for it than to run. And I know you and I have run, or not run, we've played for Zach, and he ran in similar situations. There was, I don't know if you remember that one week where we really wanted to play Eberron, and he said, oh, sorry guys, but I only have ten pages of notes. And you and I both looked at each other, you know, mouths agape, like, what in the world? Ten pages? Well, and that's inevitably why we burned Zach out of playing Eberron with us. Because... Because for the audience out there, I know in the past 120 episodes we did, we talked about Eberron a little bit, but for a little recap, Drew and I were playing, I was a mastermind rogue named Agent 99, and he was a cleric by the name of Glitch. We were two warforged, we were a two-man private investigation agency in Eberron, and we were absolute menaces to society. It wasn't, like, just to put it plainly, we... Every time, every chance we got to talk to someone, oh, we were talking to them. And whatever information they had, we would get. Even if Zach had to make it up because we were taking so long. We went into the apartment next door. We basically kicked, I don't know if it was a man or whoever it was. We kicked him out. We took over his household and made it part of our office. Yeah, we said we need this building, and our excuse for doing all of this was, we were created two years ago. The war ended two years ago, we were created two years ago, we don't know societal norms. And do you remember running through the streets of Eberron, of Sharn, going, we have a writ, we have a writ? We have a writ. He took it from us. He took the writ from us. He gave us a writ that basically said, hey, they're allowed to be here. And we just pretended it let us do whatever we wanted. Not pretend. We made sure it let us do whatever we wanted to do. We got away with a lot. And so after about, you know, six, seven sessions, Zach never wanted to DM that game for us again. Rightfully so. You know, it was a lot of prep to get ready for. But likewise, I do think. Zach gets excited about running a campaign, and then while I've explained this many times in our past stuff, I will happily just run an eternal D&D game, and it'll go forever, right? I'll just show up, I'll DM, and I won't even think twice about it. Whereas I think for other people, it takes a little more social energy for them to do. It does. It absolutely does. And it's crazy that it's supposed to be a game. And it is. I love the game more than anything. It's probably my favorite game of all time. Maybe next to Doom from 1993, 6, 8, wherever it was. But, you know, it's just rough. It's rough on the mind having to run all that. And maybe, you know, I would have more fun prepping if I ran, you know, not just a Christmas one-off, but maybe an Easter one-off, too. I don't know. Yeah, maybe, maybe. I am thinking, like, Sean asked me last week, he asked me, What's next? What's your plan for what we're doing next? Because Patrick's about to wrap up his arc, right? So I am debating on whether I might be like, hey, can I take over and just finish Spelljammer? But at the same time, oh man, I just really want to run the next thing. I really want to. I just don't think we're ready for it yet. I want to see the next arc, for sure. I think... We have put too much thought and hype behind Spelljammer to skip it at this point, personally. Well, the idea wouldn't be to skip it. The idea would be on weeks when people can't be there that aren't me because I would be DMing, we would still run Spelljammer. I think that's kind of what we're doing right now. So if one person's out calibrating the engines like Garrus, we just play some Spelljammer. And I'm cool with that because it's still... Seeing the story is still giving you an opportunity to flesh out your world in this kind of canon adventure that we've been on for five, six years. Yeah. I do. I do. I don't want to rush through Spelljammer, but I do kind of want to check it out. You know, I want to see what the Rock of Brawl or Brawl on the other planets. It's some weird space people. I think it could be cool. Yeah. And we're doing Spelljammer not in any way by the book. I'm only using the spaceships by the book because, frankly, the rules are really redundant. for Spelljammer so really it's going to turn into whatever we make of it this little adventure in space so I don't know maybe when Patrick finishes this one up we'll do the whole wedding thing next week and then after that we'll jump in and try to try to wrap it up try to get through it but I am thinking it'll be one of those where it's like we're not taking big breaks unless two or more people can't make it like oh if only one person can't make it they will sit in the cockpit and They'll sit down on the poop deck, and then we'll move on to the next thing. Because I am very excited for DMing again. I even explained to Sean, I was like, I've never really been a player for very long. I did some very short campaigns, 10 sessions. Curse of Strahd was 13 sessions. Very good number for Curse of Strahd. So... But I was like, yeah, when I started playing Jean and jumping back into like the group because I wasn't back in the group for a while, I took over a little like a year and a half off jumping back into it. I showed up and I was like, I don't know what I'm doing. I have no clue what's happening. Well, I mean, to be fair, you jumped in. I think it was a couple of sessions in. It was session two.

SPEAKER_03: 30:53

So

SPEAKER_02: 30:54

session two for you guys, you went and did your little mission and came back and then met up with me. Your little mission. Your little mission that didn't involve me. So yeah, you guys went out and did that and came back, and I joined in on session two, but it was weird for me jumping into playing a character. Like, now Gene has a little more character, but in the first, like, session, I didn't really know who he was. I'm curious to, like, pick your brain a little bit about, you know, we don't have to do this episode, but... We can. To me, I'm thinking as a DM... what I'm doing is playing a lot of characters. And so like, I obviously there's a huge difference between DMing and being a player, but I wasn't sure how you were going to be when you came back. Cause really you hadn't played in a very long time, but I'm surprised to hear how you're kind of explaining and saying like, Oh, I didn't know what was going on. Kind of thing. Not that you, you know, I don't think you think that you did bad or anything like that, but I feel like that's what DMing is. You're playing, you know, 13 characters. Right, but it's different whenever a lot of what you do is set the scene for the players and let them interact with the world. I would say 80% of what I do is I build the stage and you guys go and play on it. And then the other 20% is me moving on to the next thing and giving a little bit of exposition or monologuing or describing something. But realistically, the amount of shenanigans... I just say, yeah, that works. That happens. Like being able to capture six goblins or make friends with the Thrykreen spaceship that you immobilized in space. So stuff like that, like a lot of times I'm just setting the scene and being like, go ahead and play. Let's see what happens. And that's why I don't put too much thought or prep into it, because in the times where I have put tons and tons of work into a session, we've never done that. The times where I've sat down and put so much thought process or effort into it, I realized you guys write the story for me. You guys already have ideas of what you want to do in your head. And as long as I'm familiar enough in my head with my world and who might be around or what might be around, I can usually say something. And I don't know, you can give me an express review on DMing, but... I don't feel like I do a bad job of that whenever we do that. Oh, no, absolutely. I think there was a question before about how we kind of blend together as DMs, how we kind of mix and match. I think you're really good at kind of a long con approach. So you're really good at kind of tying the story together and pulling back to that random plot point. Like, remember that thing? Remember that spell that Asmodeus randomly cast, you know, two years ago? Yeah, that might be coming up sometime soon, you know? You also excel at pulling up prime opportunities. That's what I'm going to say. I'm going to say being an opportunist of sorts. So if something happens where you think in the heat of the moment and you're good at quickly picking up on it. Like that would be really fun if that happened and then making it happen. Right. I'm thinking about those things and trying to like, how, how can I make that work? And how can I get the players there? And, you know, I don't want to leave them too. And you're just like, Oh, there it is right there. Boom. Take it. Yeah. I, okay. I've never actually thought of it that way because now that you bring it up. Yeah. I think that that's why I don't plan so much. It's because I'm like, I set the stage that things will happen naturally. Right. And I trust that they'll happen and then it'll be a fun time. As opposed to like being like, OK, I'm going to I'm going to plan out every single little thing that they're going to go through and make sure that the big moments happen. I'm just like, they'll probably happen. They do. They always do. Yeah. Every every session, there's something to talk about. So, yeah, I think I actually think Patrick does a good job of that, too, with like just capitalizing on. But I think he does it in a much more Whereas I'll do it in a more narrative or trying to make that player feel very special. I think Patrick, every time he pulls out that moment, I'm cracking up. You know what I mean? Every time that moment comes up, I'm like, oh my god, I cannot believe he's doing this. Patrick is what I'm going to call the daring DM. He's always willing to pull out a wacky scenario where it's exactly that. Like, I cannot believe you just did that. And the story that he tells, I think some of us, I would say even most of us probably, are a little more on the narrative kind of cinematic side. And it's not his style. And I love it. It's very... lighthearted, it's comical, it's humorous, but I'm still thoroughly immersed in the story and I end the sessions thinking like, man, that was just a fun time. Yeah. I just really enjoyed the stuff that happened today. You know? Yeah. Yeah, likewise, whenever I'm playing in this one, so I always try to make my characters have a cool theme around them, right? Like, I got to play my Genasi character at one point who was very much like a Spartan. He wore like a Spartan helmet and had his shield and his spear. But this time with Jean, I really wanted to capitalize on, okay, literal, like, cleric magic is just ki blasts and stuff from Dragon Ball and, like, going, like, all this radiant energy just going all around them. So every time he's doing something, like, I try to narrate it in the most, like, anime ki wave way possible. Like, him sending off a sacred flame, but, like, Actively while it's flying. Shaping it to look like a needle. Or something like that. I really like to over explain. The little things he does. Because realistically. Him being a cleric. Especially a life cleric. Like a full on support. I'm really just casting bless.

SPEAKER_03: 36:48

Bless is still good, though. Bless is the best spell.

SPEAKER_02: 36:53

We slept on Bless for years. There were years where no one cast Bless. And now, anytime I have a character that has the chance to have Bless, I'm not sleeping on it. You can have a martial character, like a paladin that has Bless and its aura around it, and then it's still running in and getting Divine Smites off, but it keeps Bless up the whole time. Because that spell is special. The way it's been working for us. I'm going to challenge you. I'm going to say that Bless is not what it slept on. Because, as you think, unless I'm incorrect, maybe Paladins, I think Clerics are the only ones that can cast Bless.

SPEAKER_03: 37:32

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_02: 37:33

I think so. I have to double-check. Realistically, think about it. I've always loved Bless. I've always claimed it's one of my favorite spells. Even if I don't use it all the time, I've always played Clerics and I've always taken it. It's always like you take Cure Wounds, you take Bless, Aid, and then what else are you taking? Guiding Bolt, of course. But what's your flavor after that? It's always been included in kind of my favorites. I think Clerics are slept on, is what it is. They're the most powerful class. What do you mean? I don't think enough people play Clerics. I think they play the Twilight Cleric. As I think about it, since that has come out, people have been playing that one more than anything. We've had, like, three Twilight Clerics, and there's only six of us, and we've only played, like, three games. Like, three different groups of characters. It's crazy. It's strong. It's flavorful. It's interesting. And there's something about Clerics prior to then that people are just not into. I don't know if it's the support vibe or what it is. Life Cleric and Light Cleric are two of my favorite subclasses in the game. I love both of them. They're awesome. They're all fantastic. Grave Cleric. I mean, come on, that's the coolest thing. Twilight, super freaking cool. Tempest, probably my favorite above all. Forge Cleric is cool. I like Forge. I don't know a whole lot about the later levels of some of the, like the Forge. No, me neither. What was the natural? I can't remember what the natural one is. Yeah, I don't know. Oh, God. Nature. I'm going to call it Nature Cleric. I don't know. But even some of the lesser known ones are not bad. They're just fucked on. You know what? I wasn't going to agree with you at first. I now fully agree because I've only seen Twilight Clerics for the last forever. I know too much about Twilight Cleric having never read the class myself because as the DM, I usually just trust you guys to know what your characters do. That's why Patrick was missing so many abilities for so long because I just trust you guys to figure it out and tell me what your characters do. It's like how we play online and nobody can verify any roles. I just trust that you guys aren't going to lie to me, right? Same deal. I'm like, oh, they know what their character does. They wouldn't lie to me. And same dealio here where like, I don't read any of these classes. I haven't seen them. I haven't read a new class in so long. I just knew like, okay, I'm playing Jean. I'm going to play Life Cleric. Done. Look it up. Put all the stuff on my stat sheet. I'm good. And we've been playing long enough where we can kind of do that. We know you could probably name 80% to 90% of the classes. Like, oh yeah, there was that one. Like, oh, Death Cleric. Yeah, I completely forgot that one existed in the Monster Manual or something, right? Yeah. But we can kind of pick a vibe and then roll with it,

SPEAKER_03: 40:00

you know?

SPEAKER_02: 40:02

Yeah, no, I agree. There's so

SPEAKER_03: 40:03

many classes now.

SPEAKER_02: 40:04

It's all the new stuff, too. I still haven't read through the 2024 handbook. Oh, I don't even own a copy. It's because after talking to you guys, like, one, you know, Wizard has already taken a lot of my money when I go play Magic, right? I am trying my best not to spend too much because I don't want to give Hasbro that much money. But I like the real cards and I don't want to proxy them because then I'll get the urge to get the expensive cards. And I don't want that urge. I want to just have the cards at the power level of the tables I play at. And so it gives you a dilemma because I don't want to give money to Big Hasbro either. No one's taking my money. Yeah, I don't want to give money to Big Hasbro. So I don't own the 2024 handbook. I don't anticipate buying it because I don't know if we're ever going to play it. 5e is just so good and if we need more 5e content guess where we can go there's this website spelled it's called google and you can look up anything you want on it and if you go in there and you look for like player made content you can find the best stuff and use it Like the Tome of Heroes, right? I was like spelljammers here. They've got black powder subclasses in the Tome of Heroes. So pick out like if you want to use Tome of Heroes and go for it. You let me use Tome of Heroes whenever I did. Whenever we did your Christmas one off because I wanted to use the fire and ice like subclass for Paladin. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that was super fun. I didn't think it was that powerful. I was like these other Paladins from the player's handbook are way more powerful, but I want to play this one. Just what we want to play at this point. I played the Voltaren. Was that Purple Dragon Knight? Yeah. Worst class ever. I can't imagine what anyone would ever play it. He had one ability that was like for that subclass. I don't think I got to use it. You're better off just playing a Cavalier. Play anything else. Don't play Purple Dragon Knight. Which is a shame because they're so thematically cool. I love them. They're like this commanding kind of fighter. But the abilities are just so bad. Yeah. But I had to play it just to say that I did. Because I just recently, and I know we've talked about this in previous episodes of the podcast, there were other classes that I, or we'll just say classes, that I hadn't played. And since we've stopped the podcast, I've played every one. I've played Warlock. Wow. And Paladin, I think, that I hadn't played at the time. I've played them all now. I don't know if there's one I haven't played. I mean, there probably is, right? Because I don't play that often. Could be. I've never played Articifer. It's... interesting. Not my favorite class, by any means, but it's... I think it's cool thematically. So, yeah, I don't know. I'll... Hopefully, I get to play more characters in the future. Sean was talking to me a little bit about having another arc planned out for his thing, but he's not done yet. Pat, obviously, is going to have his next thing he wants to do. I would feel bad stepping on everybody's DMing toes if I was like, hey, I have the next three-year campaign ready. Are you guys ready? I don't think you'd be stepping on anybody's toes. I think you should put it out there and put the vibe in that you would like to run again. I would let Pat and Maybe Sean run their course. Yeah, maybe we do like a spell jammer for a little bit, then go into their next arc that they want to do and then run the next big thing. Maybe I'd be into that. Yeah, I think I think that's a good idea. I would run for chase more than anything or than anything. You want him to run something? Yeah. yes he's well he's the only one that hasn't run for anybody i think he was telling me he was like i don't know if i should be on an episode if i haven't dm'd before and i was like dude you don't need to dm what i need is i was like i want you to come in and i want you to tell the story of how we started playing dnd together i want you to tell how i got you to be my friend and how i came to your door every saturday and woke you up because i was bored and alone in college and then I want to, I want to tell the story about like, cause him and I started playing around the same time. He, he started the session after me for the, for the, for the lanky Eric campaign. So he's one session newer to D and D than me. So yeah, I want, I want him to tell those stories as a player and then maybe we can re-interview him on like, you know, talking about his experience as a DM for the first time. That's exactly what you do. You do two weeks in a row with Chase. It's the pre-workout. How's it going? How are you feeling beforehand? The tailgate. Afterwards, you just did it. How did it go? What were you thinking the whole time? What do you think went well? I'd love to actually watch those back-to-back. I think that would be cool. We've got to plan that out. Likewise, Sean pitched an idea. Since you're listening to us plan things and talk things out, Sean was like, I would love to do to actually do a live play, like record some sessions that we play. And I was like, I mean, it's easy for me to set up like I could set it up to where all of our faces are there. And we have like all the audio from my end, like it would be super easy for me to set up. So that might be if everybody is like permission for that in like a start at the start of a campaign, you know, that could be some good content to put out there. Could be. It could be. I think mostly, but I just don't want it to feel performative. Like we're not playing up anything for the audience. I would still want it to just be our sessions. They just happen to me online. Yeah, I think we would have to like sit down and have a talk with everybody. Yeah. And kind of the feel that we're going for. because I'm by no means going to not be myself or not make jokes or not do something I want to do in the game because we're on camera. I'm going to live my character the way I want to play that character. Yeah, exactly. Luckily, I feel like all of our characters typically are putting in the work to just tell a story. No one's doing anything they shouldn't be doing anyways. No one's just a bunch of squirrels or anything. Yeah, no one's just a bunch of squirrels. But yeah. Okay. No, I think we've got a lot of good things to put out there. I have one more piece of advice that I would like us to give since we didn't get into the finance stuff. I know we're getting close to the end of the episode though, but I have one more prompt because I think this one's a little bit fun and we both have good advice to give on it. So DMs, how do you deal? This is from user no status 1219. DMs, how do you deal with questions like why us when the NPC is stronger? I'm talking about questions like if X is so powerful, why doesn't he come and solve this? Why not just ask the city guard? Why doesn't XYZ intervene? Why doesn't this NPC enjoy the party if they want the same thing as us? Why do we have to do all the work? I notice these questions are very common at every table, and I'm looking for clever ways to deal with them when my players will inevitably ask. Hmm. I don't feel like that comes up very often at all at our tables, and I don't know if that's because we're experienced and we've worked through that. Obviously, I've DMed a lot of games, but far and in between, they're very scattered. I wouldn't say I'm a professional DM by any means. I don't think about that usually. Maybe that's something that comes up. I don't know. You've played for me, Seth. Have you ever felt like that was the case? No, but I made this joke in the first session I was in Patrick's campaign. Because remember that he had us helping the city guard. And I looked at the main guy I argued with, remember? Because he was being a jerk to us. Because we were the mercenaries that were hired to help out. And so he's talking to us, and I was like... He was like, yeah, so these guys are apparently supposed to help us, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, hey, they hired us here to do this. If you're so special, why don't you go do it? And so I did argue with the guy, and I was like, no, we're doing your job for you. Oh, you want to go out and patrol? Like... okay, we're going to do the same thing, but over here where things are happening. I feel like that's, that's a good example of like a situation where that didn't kind of unfold though, because you were arguing because he was a jerk. Like I expected that. Like, of course he's not going to help us because you know, he may be better than us for all we know, but he's a douche. Yeah, of course, he's going to do his thing. I remember he asked me, he was like, do you know what the city guard does? And I said, walk around and look for problems. That was a hard job. I was like, walk around and look for problems. And he goes, yeah. And I said, so what do you want us to do? The same thing. And he goes, yes. So it's that I've had such a blast in Patrick's campaign. And I can't think of any other situation like that, like what that user was kind of asking about. But I feel like there's always a reason. Like, if you're immersed kind of in your character and you're thinking about the world at hand or the situation, whatever it may be, you're always thinking, you know, like, we were in a big fight with an angel in hell at the end of one of our campaigns, right? And, you know... She was off doing another thing, and that was fine. She wasn't helping us because she was handling that thing over there, and we had other people that were helping us along the way or that we hadn't seen in a while. They were doing this, or they were playing their own role in the war at hand. Or, for instance, in the battle Hell Riders versus Yinagoo and his gnolls, you guys had your battle happening on the battlefield while you watched Zariel and Yinagoo fight in the sky. yeah that was a big deal and i didn't feel like oh why isn't she over here she clearly had her hands full over there yeah exactly i think having those things happen off screen or like having those characters being involved is important because it's like in storm king's thunder you guys had two giant companions like you had different companions that came along with you for a while and they did help out but combat was notably harder And then likewise, my question to this person's player is if they do ask and they're like, oh, well, if Dern's giving us the quest of the Yawning Portal, the place he has to take care of and owns and doesn't want to adventure anymore, why doesn't he go take care of it? Why is he telling us to do it if he's so powerful? My question would be to those characters, what, you don't want an adventure? You don't want money? I mean, we'll go do it. You don't want to go take on this big challenge, this big, uh, you know, uh, extravagant adventure. Like I think the answer is usually like, Hey, we're paying you to do it. So we don't have to, or, or like get off his butt and go on this adventure. No, he's got you. He's got money to give you. Or like the, the big arch mage hires you, right? He needs you to go do something. He's super powerful. He can cast time stop maybe. But at the same time, he needs you to go do this. Cause he has work to do. He has things to conjure and spells to cast.

UNKNOWN: 51:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 51:15

Do you think it's kind of like an egotistical problem? Maybe. Do you think that the players are just thinking, well, I'm the main character, so why isn't it all happening here? Well, actually, sure, you're the main character of this game, but in this world, there are things larger than you. And that's how it is. I think the best advice you can give for this is make sure, like to the DM specifically, if this is a problem at your table, characters are constantly like, why do we have to do this? Then... Make sure that those NPCs have something going on and they're not just sitting at home. Like you don't want to be invested. Don't have him come walk back in on the NPC and he's just sitting back on the couch drinking and playing Helldivers 2. Maybe maybe they come back and they're in the middle of something crazy or they're yelling at someone or meeting with a high ranking official. Have something going on around the characters. The world does still move while your players are playing. This actually came up in Baldur's Gate. It's not a huge point that's made or anything, but one of the dialogue options that I had to choose at one point was like, if Mistress is so powerful, why doesn't she handle it herself? And one of the characters is like, what's his name? Owl? Like the big god above all the gods? Sure, we'll go with that. Aeos or Owl or something like that. They're like... That is strictly forbidden. Like the gods are not allowed to intervene with what we're doing down here. Could she? Absolutely. But she'd be breaking a lot of rules. Is what they said. So there are answers to those questions when it comes to characters like that. Like, oh, if you're able to communicate with this god, why don't they solve all your problems? That's always interesting in the Divine campaigns, right? We've seen that in recent ones that we've played, where it's like,

SPEAKER_03: 53:05

well, you know,

SPEAKER_02: 53:06

they're really powerful, they're talking to us, but why aren't they talking to that person? Why aren't they giving us... Why are they talking in riddles? For what reason? Why don't you just tell us what we need to do? Yeah, because they're omnipotent. They know everything. Oh, yeah, that's totally fine. Yeah. Yeah. What was that guy's name in Pharaoh? I didn't put it up. Oh, no, you weren't there. That was such a good... We could talk about it another day, but you missed out, man. That was not here right there. I know. I talked to Sean about it a little bit last week. We're like, man, I wish I could have been a part of that. But I told him, I was like, dude, I wish I could have been there, but I was going through the hardest times of my life. And now that they're over, I'm glad to be back in a D&D. Thank you, man. Make the good D&D memories. Heck yeah. And that's the whole thing. Did I go away for a while? Yeah. But finally I'm able to come back and do this kind of stuff. And it feels really good to be able to sit down and play or sit down and record a couple episodes of the podcast so we can all talk about it. It's nice that I got the experiences that I got, but as we've said in many, many episodes of Table Talk Friday, a D&D podcast on Table Talk Friday, or patreon.com slash tabletalkfriday over on Patreon. More on the YouTube channel. You know, all these places that may or may not be posted. This is like the one hobby that can't go away. Especially for our group, because if we didn't have this, I feel like we might not be going to Sean's wedding next week. Or... It's possible. Or like, we might not have all this stuff planned, and we might not be planning to all see each other at all these times. We might have all fallen apart. So... You gotta have, you gotta have something that keeps you all together. You know, the older you get, I think it's more important to whether it's Minecraft or D and D or I don't know, book club, you know, whatever you got, just have some fun. Maybe like with your friends. Yeah, absolutely. It's the most important thing. And with that, thank you guys so much for listening to this episode of Table Talk Friday, a D&D podcast, as I just mentioned, in a very, very stuttery, difficult kind of way. You can find us over on Patreon.com slash Table Talk Friday. We have many, many perks for you. You can get the episodes a week early. You can do an exclusive post show. Listen to that, which we're about to record right after this for maybe 15, 20 minutes before I have to go see Fantastic Four, which I'm very excited to see. outside of that though if you just want to support listen to us on youtube listen to us on all your podcast services all over the globe you know it should be on every single one if you search us up and with that i think i'm gonna need oh my god i didn't even think about which character i could question right now shaw shaw's gonna have to take us out here but but i'm i'm not the back This is blasphemy. You have to do it. I made Patrick do it, and I made Sean do it. I like his voice. Thanks all for watching, listening in on your stones or whatever you got. I'm just a friendly courier. I don't really know what I'm doing here. I'm really just delivering this letter, so if you could just leave me alone, that would be real cool. So, yeah, just have a good time and leave me alone. Thanks, guys.

SPEAKER_01: 56:25

Thank you for listening to Table Talk Friday. For more information, advice, questions, comments, and concerns, you can email the boys at tabletalkfriday at gmail.com. And if you'd like to tell your own stories, why don't you hit them up there? Send an inquiry or something, a sending spell. Thank you very much for listening and please follow and come back next week. Goodbye. Bye-bye.