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Episode 12b: “Falling for Humans” (Session 4 debrief)

 

This is a teeny, tiny, mini-episode, taken from the last part of our fourth recording session (the “human flashback”). The action has ended and we decompress a bit, calculating falling damage, talking about how we feel about humans in the world, and also evaluating what we’ve learned about the world from this flashback.

 

How have you used flashbacks in your games? Remember that I’d originally planned this flashback as a way to pause the action but develop the game world when one of the players was going to be absent for the session. I think the group had fun with it, which is the main point. In addition, I feel like this flashback really established the personality and place of humans in the lore of the world. What did you think?

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Episode 12: “Falling, Dragons, and Cheese Pizza” (D&D 5e Session 4)

 

OK, so we’re trying to post a new episode every six days. We’ll see how that intention goes. While the episode was posted yesterday, this blog post actually is happening 7 days after the last one…so we’ll see.

 

This episode ends the game we played in session four of our podcast recordings. We will soon post an appendix episode, which contains the debriefing of session four that followed the game session. We had an amazing number of interruptions in this episode: smoke alarms, cooking noise, package deliveries, surprise visitors. What has been the most outrageous interruption in your games?

 

We hope that you enjoy this one, and the human flashback in general. Our next episode should post next Wednesday.

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Episode 11: “Respect Your Elders” (D&D 5e Session 4)

Wow, this episode was a long time coming. The end of summer and the beginning of the school year was a pretty tough adjustment this year, but the long and short of it is that I (Harold) got behind on my editing. I hope it proves worth the wait, and I intend to release the next few episodes more than one a week to catch up. Eventually? Eventually I may actually commit to a particular day of the week to upload new episodes.

 

I find this a fun episode for a number of reasons. The players really begin to experiment with the humans’ abilities, really establishing what awful, entitled jerks the humans of the past were as they get into character with these new PCs. As usual, the recording also contains a number of mistakes I made (listen to how the elves’ weapons keep changing!); DM gaffes are always fun to identify. Finally, I find the episode particularly entertaining because we were so INTO IT when we were playing and recording it, that we never noticed how my wife entered the room and started doing chores in the background…all of which adds an interesting sound bed of clangs, beeps, whirs, and clatters. None of us noticed it at the time…except for three times that the smoke alarm went off. Yes, that’s right: the smoke alarm went off and interrupted our session THREE times. Don’t worry – none of that made it into the recording. But it does lend an interesting rhythm to the session.

 

As always, we hope you enjoy it. Let us know what you think! Thanks for reading this blog, and listening to our game.

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Episode 10: “Human League” (D&D 5e Session 4)

DM Harold here. This episode begins our fourth recording session. I was mistaken before, when I said that the third session was the first session in 2018 – I was going by the time stamp on the audio files, which were updated when I opened the recording software again at the beginning of the fourth session! A rookie mistake.

 

Anyway, this actually marks the beginning of the fourth recording session and the first session in 2018…you can tell by our icebreaker question at the start, and the table’s nervous energy because it’s been weeks since we’ve all seen each other.

 

On that note, going into this session, I believed that we were going to be at least one player short due to schedule conflicts. I knew weeks in advance that we were going to be less than the full group, so I thought about how to play an interesting game that kept the players engaged but didn’t leave out the absent players. I could have prepared a one-off of a different system (and I do such things, later on in the year), but I felt like there was some fun opportunity to use the time to present some “interactive exposition:” that is, instead of just telling the players about some world background, I would have them LIVE it.

 

Well, schedules opened up at the last minute, and we ended up having our full complement of regular players. So, rather than discarding the idea, I offered the players a choice once we got started. You can hear what they chose in this episode.

 

For your entertainment, I will also be posting the players’ character sheets soon. I’ll update this post and the top page of the site when they’re available.

Rakhari-the-Kazarim

Geranda-the-Infractor