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Episode 45: “MORE time travel!” (Guardians of Indir, D&D 5e)

The party discusses how to address the elven threat with Karen, Kabuto, and Alfor.

This is the third episode taken from our tenth recording session, recorded back in June 2018. In it, the players and PCs continue their journey to get serious about the next steps in the defense of Indir against the elven aggressors in their council with Karen Balthorek and many other NPCs during the street festival in Indir. Because the players were having a hard time getting focused, Alfor the gnome wizard keeps rewinding time for them so they can continue conversations that they forgot about…hence the title, “MORE Time Travel!”

This is also an episode that screams for some fan artwork, at least of the elevator shoes and the joy & disappointment of eating ice cream. Because we spent some time at the beginning of the session building more character backstories, many of the major NPCs make an appearance in this episode in those conversations (sometimes even without time travel to rewind them); we hear from Karen, Keats, Alfor, and Timbertina, while Scrapheap, Shonda, and Kabuto (who we determined was going to be Karen’s majordomo) are mentioned.

The silliness that I talked about in the last post is fun, but it does tend to make the game really aimless…which of course can be a real problem in any RPG session, but it’s particularly bad when the entire game – world-building, plot, characters, encounters, everything – is being improvised on the spot. So Harold lets them go on for a while, trying to make a decision. This is tough for the players to do; while there are really only two broad options to choose, there isn’t a clear favorite, because the player desires (“I wanna go to the battlefield and lead armies!”) conflicts with many of the characters’ personalities (“I’m no good on a battlefield!”) and either impasse or disgruntlement is a natural outcome. The DM lets them go for a long time before having an NPC step in and provide some information that would help the PCs make a decision.

There is a line of thought in RPG circles that this sort of delay, letting the players twist in the wind without explicit direction, is boring and/or frustrating. Without clear directions, this line of thinking goes, the players’ indecision delays them from getting to “the good stuff.” At the same time, there are others that think that a game should be all about player agency, and that line of thinking asserts that “leading the players” is something that any good GM should strenuously avoid doing. Some might argue that merely providing more information in the way Harold eventually does in this episode is being too heavy-handed. What do you think? How long is appropriate for the players to debate, discuss, and dicker amongst themselves without a resolution? When should a GM step in to cut off circular conversations, if at all? How have you handled situations like this in your games, either as a player or GM?

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Episode 44: “The Map Room” (Guardians of Indir, D&D 5e)

After a short recap, the party steps away from the Indir Festival to discuss next steps with Karen.

This is the second episode taken from our tenth recording session, originally recorded in June 2018. As you may remember – we wrote about it as recently as the previous post – Harold the DM was improvising this campaign, specifically by only creating material for the game DURING the game. We’d had a recording problem – a broken laptop – that meant that the previous session (Session 9, not posted to the podcast yet) was recorded with different software on different equipment with different characters in a different role-playing game. So as we resumed the Guardians of Indir D&D 5e game with this session (Session 10), there had been two months since the last session, during which time Harold had done his best to not think about or prepare anything for the campaign at all. Over the same period, the players were very busy with their schooling, what with final exams and the other hallmarks of finishing their semesters, not to mention those players who were graduating from high school. The end result was that we needed some time to get back into the D&D game. It also goes a long way to explain why the players were all so punchy and unfocused.

Context is everything. Some days the games are just going to be silly, because that’s all the players can handle. That’s one of the beautiful things about role-playing.

The last episode, Episode 43 “Gigner Tokens,” was the beginning of the session, with Harold asking leading questions to help the players remember who their PCs are by prompting them to create more details about their characters. This episode – 43 – is the natural extension of that process, with Harold giving a quick recap of the “story so far” to the group, both to remind them and to remind himself of what was happening in the game. That helped center Harold, and gave him a bit of time to create what was going to happen next…Karen Balthorek summoning the heroes to come up with plans for what to do about the impending mammalian invasion.

There’s some fun bits in here, too, not least of which is the mention of Kabuto – a mysterious name that Harold wrote in his notes during session 8 along with a bunch of other NPC names. He hadn’t looked at those notes in two months, and nobody could recall why he’d written it. Can you?

During the conversation with Karen, Squeak shares some information about the Tower with the rest of the group; this is a reference back to the events covered in episode 30, “Oh, it’s alright,” which none of the other players knew anything about, as that episode hadn’t been posted yet.

Lucia mentions Kai Winn at one point (which should give you an idea what she was watching in summer 2018), and Balasar calls Vhisuna a “Crimmen Al,” which will be an absolute travesty if it doesn’t get used as an NPC name in some future game. “Hey, Crimmen! Long time no see! Everybody, this is my old buddy, Crimmen Al!” “Only my friends call me Crimmen. You can call me Al.”

What’s a little detail that has come up in one of your games, that has later blossomed into something really significant for the campaign?

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Episode 33: “Lunch and Karen” (D&D 5e, Session 8b)

Episode 33 of the Guardians of Indir D&D 5e campaign.

Harold here. So I was posting episodes more often – trying to make some progress and “catch up” to where I think we should be in the podcast (at this point, we should be well past episode 52), but then there was this huge work conference that took up two weeks of my time. So, now that that’s over, here’s the next episode.

This episode contains the last part of our eighth recording session, which was recorded over a year ago, in May 2018. In it, the players continue to create details, riffing off of each other, as they finish training their characters to level 3. This is the first session that we recorded AFTER I had been edited and started releasing episodes of the podcast – we had a full six months’ of game sessions before we released our first episode – but at this point I’m still learning how bad the sound is of all the nervous habits that the players have. It’s all normal stuff that players – and just people in general – normally do in a conversation at a table, but at this point it is finally starting to get curtailed in our podcast. I am painfully aware of the noise of people playing with handfuls of dice (jiggling and rolling them) and players talking over each other which have been up to this point pretty omnipresent in our podcast. To some extent, this is OK, as it accurately presents how people playing a real game sound. But at the same time I realize it is pretty distracting. I do get better at reducing these behaviors: hopefully you’ll hear the change in the next few episodes.

Another note: a few sessions earlier, Blake had started referring to his PC as “Squeaks” instead of its real name, Squeak. Over the course of a few months, we all joined in, and it became painful to edit and listen to in the future (this past year of posting episodes) as we got the character name wrong AGAIN and AGAIN. As I said earlier, this session (number 8) was our first session post-releasing podcast episodes. So at the beginning of the session (Episode 31), I apologized for getting Squeak’s name wrong. During that session, the players all talked about paying a nickel every time anybody said the name wrong again. You’ll hear references to that several times in this episode.

Overall, I’m delighted with this episode and our eighth session in general, because it marks a departure from our “normal” mode of dangerous adventuring, and returns to what we were doing at the beginning of the game (and podcast): world-building and role-playing. The players throw themselves into that creativity and I couldn’t be more pleased. Decades ago, I played in a long-running “Skyrealms of Jorune” campaign run by Joe Adams (nee Coleman), and I was fascinated by how he constructed each session. From his example, I extrapolated a lot of my philosophy of how to run a game. Combat was not the core of the game, even though in SoJ as in Dungeons & Dragons it is the most extensive and largest part of the rules. Combat is an element of the drama that you are telling together. But the character interplay, world-creation, and exploration creates the context that makes the combat interesting, and often necessary. I may have mentioned “Joe’s Golden Ratio” before: it’s what I call the idea that each session of an RPG should consist of only one combat encounter bracketed by investigation, exploration, and interaction…anything and everything that’s in the game that isn’t fighting. Maybe shopping and eating, for example.

Take a listen, and let us know what you think.