Raaaatt Swaaarrmm
May 30, 2008 4:16 PM   Subscribe

The only thing cooler than playing D&D is listening to recordings of people playing D&D! Tycho and Gabe from Penny Arcade and Scott Kurtz of PvP got together with a couple of Wizards of the Coast guys for an episodic D&D romp to promote the upcoming release of D&D 4th edition. The first episode (and pictures!) is available online. Enjoy!
posted by xorry (50 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is an interesting idea that seems doomed to sucking. I'm going to try and listen anyway, though.
posted by empath at 4:20 PM on May 30, 2008


CoC game recording
posted by Artw at 4:20 PM on May 30, 2008


Oooh neat. I have Horror on the Orient Express. It was full of neat hand outs and stuff, but i never played it.
posted by empath at 4:26 PM on May 30, 2008


"And you've learned, while kicking the crap out of goblins and kobolds, that they seem to be taking their orders from a figure named Irontooth."

"OK, so we know that he has at least one tooth..."

"Um, yes."

"And that it is made of iron. I'm going to write this down."
posted by jammy at 4:31 PM on May 30, 2008 [4 favorites]


This is an interesting idea that seems doomed to sucking.

Sadly, yep.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 4:33 PM on May 30, 2008


I'll give it a try, I guess, but I wish the PA guys would go back to their strip-writing podcast. I always enjoy those and they're much too infrequent.
posted by danb at 4:47 PM on May 30, 2008


You know, I was browsing the sci-fi section of a bookstore recently, and I made the mistake of wondering aloud whether D&D might be a fun game to play. A dude appeared out of thin air, tapped me solemnly on the shoulder, and proceeded to talk to me about D&D for nearly an hour. Will this be similar? Also, do you think that guy was maybe a ghost?
posted by Powerful Religious Baby at 5:03 PM on May 30, 2008 [25 favorites]


Sounds more like a high-level rogue to me.
posted by whir at 5:16 PM on May 30, 2008 [1 favorite]


D&D didn't seem to make it to my generation (22), to my experience. Occasionally someone would mention it - "You know, I've always wanted to try Dungeons and Dragons" but it never happened. I think part of it was a vague sense we would have no idea what we were doing or would just do it poorly without someone to show us what was up and run the game.

There was only one kid my age I've known who played it, during high school. He reported that playing D&D, while fun, was quite uncool, but playing D&D, not while recording, but while chainsmoking cigs, was cool.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 5:27 PM on May 30, 2008


I have complete respect for these guys because they got paid to do something that was totally fun for them and completely boring for everyone else. Scott, Gabe and Tycho, I salute you.
posted by GuyZero at 5:35 PM on May 30, 2008


There better be a damn Rat King in a PA strip sometime soon.
posted by CKmtl at 5:55 PM on May 30, 2008


Convert "Keep of the Borderlands" to 4th Edition and I would listen.
posted by Senator at 6:20 PM on May 30, 2008


I played through high school, and just started playing again a couple months ago. I suppose I was probably on the tail end of the game's influence (I'm 26), before video games really got to the point of totally displacing table top gaming.

I still think there's a really wonderful thing about getting together with some close friends and playing make believe (albeit with dice and character sheets) for a few hours. There's a social aspect to D&D that I feel no MMORPG can approach.

Additionally, with D&D, unlike any video game, the limits really are one's imagination. Which means certain boundaries intrinsic to video games can be broken ('Wish' spell, anyone?), though there are certainly other boundaries not present in video games (things start getting a bit less fleshed out when the player's wander too far from the expected path).

I'm kind of fearing fourth edition, personally; I understand the reasons for the simplifications to the rules: complicated rules are what computer games are really good at; there isn't any real reason for a table-top game to try to compete with that; indeed, it should play on the strengths of the medium, as outlined above. But I also thought the third edition hit a kind of magical balance between being relatively simple and still having that aire of arcane knowledge that comes with requiring memorization of three full volumes to effectively run the game.
posted by kaibutsu at 6:20 PM on May 30, 2008


How could they have had webcomickers playing D&D without inviting Rich Burlew? All I know about D&D I learned from "Order of the Stick"!
posted by wendell at 6:44 PM on May 30, 2008


Speaking of D&D, the Gary Gygax obit thread is a good read. Especially this post.
posted by danb at 6:51 PM on May 30, 2008


I used to be pretty heavily into role-playing games when I was 13 or 14 or so. Looking back, the big unspoken secret was that, while it was lots of fun to talk about the games, generate new characters, think up new scenarios and settings, pore through the various manuals, etc., it wasn't that much fun to actually play them. The gaming sessions would run approximately like this podcast: "Uh, you're walking down the dark corridor and a kobold attacks you. What do you do?" "I slash him with my sword!" Followed by lots of rather beside the point table look-ups and dice rolling. It was all fairly tedious. Maybe we just suffered from not having a really great, natural storyteller to guide the sessions. But then, how many of those are there?

That's not to say I didn't have fun with RPG's, because I certainly did. But the ratio of playing time to what was ostensibly "prep-time" was astonishingly low. I think they basically served as a way to foster collaborative storytelling, with just enough structure to make it seem like you weren't just engaging in pure fictionalizing, but were actually participating in some sort of rules-bound, objective-laden game. I don't think my 14 year olds friends and I would be able to have nearly as much fun just writing short stories with each other (we probably wouldn't have even gotten off the ground with that).
posted by decoherence at 6:55 PM on May 30, 2008 [3 favorites]


You ran away from yours? Coward! I followed mine out to his car and got to look at all the sweet rulebooks that he kept in his trunk.
posted by Powerful Religious Baby at 7:11 PM on May 30, 2008 [1 favorite]


TheOnlyCoolTim: "D&D didn't seem to make it to my generation (22), to my experience. ..

That's interesting and I believe it. You were born in 86' (abouts), grew up post 93' Internet revolution. D&D by then was mature and monolithic in complexity, not attractive for new young players looking for something they could call their own. Perhaps that is the rationale behind version 4, reboot for the next generation. Like most things D&D was a victim of its success.
posted by stbalbach at 7:11 PM on May 30, 2008


Once, I was sitting in a Border's Cafe with 2 of my friends. It was me, the skinny guy who was into the occult, skimming through the necronomicon, my short friend who had shoplifted the new copy of 2600 and was winking at the nerdy girl in glasses behind the bar, my friend Ogre who was on the football team, and a stranger dressed all in black approached us and asked us if we were interested in doing a job for him.

We said what does this look like, a D&D game? Then we ordered more grog from the serving wench behind the bar, pickpocket his wallet and left to go find a brothel.
posted by empath at 7:20 PM on May 30, 2008 [9 favorites]


Things fall apart
The centre cannot hold
Mere level grind is is loosed upon the world
posted by Artw at 7:26 PM on May 30, 2008 [2 favorites]


I find the amount of WoW lingo in this... disconcerting.

We certainly never called fighters "tanks" or had "buffs" or "aggros" back in my nerd-days.
posted by flaterik at 7:28 PM on May 30, 2008 [4 favorites]


NuD&D is, I beleive, optimised for that shit.
posted by Artw at 7:35 PM on May 30, 2008


More RPG themed podcasts for the interested. Some have actual play, some interview game designers and others talk about a variety of topics related to RPGs.
posted by clockworkjoe at 7:42 PM on May 30, 2008


From the sounds of it, this is not the D&D I remember with all of its weapon speeds, non-weapon specializations, and THAC0s.

These kids can get the hell outta my dungeon.
posted by never used baby shoes at 8:13 PM on May 30, 2008 [1 favorite]


I'm 19 and until recently played table top RPGs weekly, mostly D&D and Hackmaster. There's definitely still kids my age playing them, and my most reliable gaming group was comprised primarily of 24 year olds. It might just be a regional niche or something, but i know at least a dozen peers that either play regularly or have played regularly.
posted by p3on at 8:19 PM on May 30, 2008


It was all fairly tedious.

This is a little like saying you went running once and it was waaaay to hard. So back to reading Runner's World. Play 2-12 hours a week. With the same people. For 2 years. (Or 5 - welcome to my teenage years). At some point, it actually gets really, really awesome. But it is next to impossible if you only have 2-3 hours at a go once or twice a month. Like any hobby honestly.
posted by GuyZero at 8:43 PM on May 30, 2008 [1 favorite]


Everything I've heard about 4th edition has been bad. EVERYTHING.

Example: Instead of random treasure, the DM decides in advance which treasure each character will get over the level, and parcels it out to him during the 8-10 encounters he'll be having.

World of Warcraft is great for what it is. But it is not D&D, not by a damn long shot.
posted by JHarris at 9:25 PM on May 30, 2008


D&D didn't seem to make it to my generation (22), to my experience. Occasionally someone would mention it - "You know, I've always wanted to try Dungeons and Dragons" but it never happened. I think part of it was a vague sense we would have no idea what we were doing or would just do it poorly without someone to show us what was up and run the game.

I'm from the same generation (21 here), and I pretty much agree. In my experience it's better to be guided into tabletop RPGs by someone with...er, experience. In high school my friends and I learned the hard way when the President of our Sci-Fi/Fantasy club* thought it would be fun for us to try the Star Wars RPG. The problem was that none of us had ever played this type of game before, including the prez (and new GM). That it went badly wasn't his fault, of course. The guy did the research, read the source book throughly, and let each of have a look, so we could try to better understand the game mechanics, but at the time it didn't really stick. We did, however, agree that we couldn't all be jedis and bounty hunters. The fact that we were playing in weekly spurts of fifteen to twenty minutes (our lunch break) didn't help either. A good chunk of that time was spent making sure that everyone was caught up, and that still led to moments like this:

"Okay, so you guys are...no, wait...*scribbles, rolls dice* yeah, you guys are under some serious fire right now. Jenny, I think you're the only one left who can still fight back, so I think now would be the time to use your weapon..."

"Me? I don't have a...we start out with weapons?"

"Yes, it should be right on your sheet, look...*grabs character sheet* Why don't you have a weapon? Weren't you here when I gave them out?"

In the end, we didn't even make it past the first scenario of our first campaign. The sad thing is that this was of group of very smart, creative people. I'm sure that, once we learned the ropes a bit more, we could have had some fun. It's just that with everyone in the group equally in dark we found ourselves facing a big learning curve, and so eventually moved on to different amusements. Later, when I was a college freshman, I was able to join my university's gaming club for a short while and got the chance to try again. This time it was with people who had been gaming for years, and were fortunately welcoming to people of all experience levels. I had fun (though I've still never played D&D proper, but some games that used the same rule book), even though I was only able to be a member of the club for a single semester.

But I think I still have some horrible old drawings of my Star Wars character though, stashed in a box with some of my old school notes.


*This was probably one of the more on-topic club activities that we participated in. If we had called it the "meet together once a week to watch MST3K DVDs using our supervising teacher's projector" club I don't think we would have gotten staff approval. To be fair, I think there were a couple of times when we talked about Dune.
posted by kosher_jenny at 10:27 PM on May 30, 2008


Additionally, with D&D, unlike any video game, the limits really are one's imagination. Which means certain boundaries intrinsic to video games can be broken ('Wish' spell, anyone?),

Example: Instead of random treasure, the DM decides in advance which treasure each character will get over the level, and parcels it out to him during the 8-10 encounters he'll be having.

World of Warcraft is great for what it is. But it is not D&D, not by a damn long shot.


A lot of what I heard about 4th edition didn't appeal to me (some I thought was cool, like what I saw in the new Star Wars rpg,) but I thought maybe it might just be misunderstood or garbled from 2nd or 3rd hand reports.

Then I heard the Wish spell will not be in 4th edition.

Fuck. That.

I don't need to buy a game that actually removes interesting and imaginative things from an RPG.

I occasionally lose my mind and go read rpg.net, tho, and to hear the fanboys talk about 4th it's as if it's the greatest game ever invented. (And saying things like this for the past 6 months.)
posted by Snyder at 10:56 PM on May 30, 2008


Obligatory.

I played D&D all through high school, until I went off to college three years ago. I was always the DM, and I was the only one who actually knew what we were doing. Sometimes I took a while to come up with an adventure before hand. Sometimes I just winged it. We joked a lot. I always sort of wished that I could play with people who took it more seriously. Now, though, looking back, I think that the best moments are the stupid-funny ones, the ones when someone says "I leap off the tower and staple the dragon to the ground with my swords" and it is stupid and would never work but you just go with it because, what the hell, it's a game of the imagination. If you don't want to imagine a world more awesome than this one, why bother playing?
posted by Hollow at 10:57 PM on May 30, 2008


Oh, and p3on, WHY AREN'T YOU IN TUCSON?
posted by Snyder at 11:03 PM on May 30, 2008


When I remember all the D&D I've played (and wince, remembering all the money my brother and I spent on books we rarely got to use properly), the "Can I have a mountain dew!!!!?" moments come to mind, when I was younger.

I stopped for a while, and got back into it when I was working night shifts in a kitchen. A friend got me and 2 other people into 3rd Edition. I thought 3rd -- with the 3.5 revisions -- was excellent. I see no real reason to change the format of the game. I treated it like, as many people have put it, a Choose Your Own Adventure you write with your friends. We did our best to use to rules to just come up with rolls to determine outcomes; we basically just made up the rest. All your really need is a loot table and the monster stats to make an enjoyable game.

I won't be spending money on 4th... I don't see a need to; I have more-than enough 3.5 stuff to run a big campaign if needed. If I were just getting into the game, 4th seems more streamlined.
posted by Dark Messiah at 11:34 PM on May 30, 2008


When I remember all the D&D I've played (and wince, remembering all the money my brother and I spent on books we rarely got to use properly)

Oh yes!... Nice books and all, but I never did get to use my 3rd Edition manuals.

Similar story to a lot of people here. I've run a couple of games, but because we could at most play for 30-40 minutes at a time in middle school - and, bizarrely, one of our teachers clamped down on it, claiming it was "Satanic" (wtf, rly? Rly), it never got off the ground properly.

Now that I'm older, the whole Satanic angle still looks as ridiculous as it did way back then. I'm 23, incidentally.

In the end we didn't bother with the pen-and-paper and went with the video games instead.
posted by WalterMitty at 1:19 AM on May 31, 2008


Additionally, with D&D, unlike any video game, the limits really are one's imagination. Which means certain boundaries intrinsic to video games can be broken ('Wish' spell, anyone?), though there are certainly other boundaries not present in video games (things start getting a bit less fleshed out when the player's wander too far from the expected path).

The best thing is that the small group dynamics of pencil and paper RPGs prevent a lot of the minimaxing and exploiting that goes on in MMORPGs. I play Eve-Online, and the mechanics are routinely subverted by players looking for an edge in ways that would simply be slapped down in pencil and paper land.

To offer a simple example: Eve-o has a notion of safe and unsafe space; if you commit criminal acts in safe space, one of the punishments is a loss of security status. If it gets low enough, the space police shoot you any time you enter highsec. The intended mechanic is simple: once you're shut out of safe space, low risk ways of making money, low risk shopping trips, and so on, are all out of your reach.

Of course, what actually happens is people roll up shopping and trading alts to subvert those rules, which breaks the punishment mechanic, and also has other undesireable effects (e.g. breaking the insecure space economy).

In a pencil and paper game, the idea that your wanted criminal would be supported by his never-played-except-for-money-making-and-shopping rich merchant distant cousin who would be happy to turn over all his money and stuff to the criminal would be laughed out of the gaming session. Or worse yet, dealt with creatively (oh dear, he's been caught and hung, and under torture revealed your location. Look, here's the watch!).

That said, AD&D was never really my favourite rule set - I much preferred the old Runequest rules and classic Traveller rules/universe to it.
posted by rodgerd at 1:30 AM on May 31, 2008 [1 favorite]


I ran role-playing games more-or-less weekly for 15 years with the same group of people. It was a social experience, something to do on Sundays besides watch football. We'd spend half the time cooking, telling jokes and stories, and jawing about the week's events. It was a ball. I cannot imagine, however, that anyone else outside of our small circle of close-knit friends would actually want to listen in on us. Nor can I imagine listening to these guys.
posted by moonbiter at 2:23 AM on May 31, 2008


Looking back, the big unspoken secret was that, while it was lots of fun to talk about the games, generate new characters, think up new scenarios and settings, pore through the various manuals, etc., it wasn't that much fun to actually play them.

That's a sentiment that, a) I totally understand, and b) I disagree with completely.

At the heart of it, RPGs aren't that hard to play badly. And, to be honest, there is no rulebook that is going to teach you how to have a really good game. It has to be learned, either through trial and error or from people who understand ways to play that are fun. What compounds this is the fact that, at heart, we're talking about what different people find enjoyable — one of the places where it gets really fuzzy and subjective.

But roleplaying is a hobby that, once you figure out a way that it "works right" for you, can be really fun and rewarding. Over the last decade and change, I've had a lot of games that fizzled or flopped; I've sat through the machinations of people who couldn't DM their way out of a wet paper bag. On my own end, I've had times where lack of prep or lack of gameable inspiration led to games that ended...poorly. But I've also had buckets of fun roleplaying. When people with the right mindset get together, it has an electric magic all its own. It takes some doing to get to that point, and a lot of mutual understanding and a certain degree of trust among the participants, but I think the payoff is really great.

And it's kind of a shame that roleplaying isn't as big as it used to be. Sure, you can get the rules and the fantasy with graphics and no hassle of rulebooks or dice in an online game. But nothing about what makes RPGs really fun — the "magic" of a group that really clicks — can be bottled up in a video game. It's just two completely different things.
posted by graymouser at 5:17 AM on May 31, 2008


That CoC audio... there's women playing... that can't be right...
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:14 AM on May 31, 2008


SAN LOSS!
posted by Artw at 8:01 AM on May 31, 2008 [2 favorites]


Because Artw and I are apparently commenting in the same threads I got "SAN LOSS!" as the last comment for two threads in a row... heh.

One of the fun things about playing different RPGs in the "old days" was that every game had different mechanics and it was fun just to see how they played out (e.g. how they could be min-maxed) in addition to checking out the setting. Traveller was very bare-bones, D&D was the baseline, CoC had, yes, the awesome SAN rules, superhero games like Marvel vs V&V and on to bordering-on-dumb games like Gamma World. Sadly I never got to use the 1st Ed rules for converting Gamma World & Boot Hill characters to D&D.

The GURPS idea of having "one ruleset to bind them" (now adopted by d20) is neat in that it shifts designers' energies away from mechanics and towards settings, but I liked the wacky, crazy different rule sets.

Maybe we should have a Silicon Valley MeFi RPG nerd supermeetup.
posted by GuyZero at 9:05 AM on May 31, 2008


Heh. I actually posted that to the wrong thread first, but it seemed to fit.
posted by Artw at 9:12 AM on May 31, 2008


Additionally, with D&D, unlike any video game, the limits really are one's imagination.

Yeah, theoretically and optimally, but we all know it's usually more like...

"You are standing at the entrance to a dungeon. What do you do?"

"You are all at the tavern and a guy comes up to you and asks you if you want to retrieve the Bigby's Jeweled Codpiece from the dragon's lair."

"Fuck it, does anyone have any pot?"
posted by DecemberBoy at 12:43 PM on May 31, 2008


And now I've actually listened to some of the D&D audio... dear God, I'd like to think the games I participated in were a bit less boring and asinine.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:44 PM on May 31, 2008


Holy fuck. When did D&D threads start getting so depressing?

Ok, first of all:

the ratio of playing time to what was ostensibly "prep-time" was astonishingly low

This is wrong. And sad. And tragically wrong and sad when it comes to D&D, the simplest, "roll up characters and let's play in 10 minutes, k?" RPG ever. There are better RPGs out there (see my AskMe thread for some suggestions on that front); the virtue of D&D is that everyone (god, do I have to put that in quotes, now?) knows it and it's simple. Hate what I'm hearing about 4th ed, but then I've missed 3rd so what the hell. 2nd isn't bad once you toss out half the rules.

I've been perusing the local RPG billboard and awfully tempted by "never played" groups of willing players looking for a DM, but this thread makes me realize they're probably all WoW punks.

Now I'm sad. I'm gonna go look at some D.A. Trampier.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 12:53 AM on June 1, 2008


Thanks for the reminder of that post, DanB. I found myself wanting to favorite it, only to notice I already had. Sometimes, I wish MeFi was set so that one could favorite something twice.

I recall enjoying "table top role playing games" but I also recall them being tedious, and my number one argument about such games was regarding the complexity of the dice system. All the tables and rules of engagement and combat percentiles and the thousands of other things seemed to exist primarily to suck the fun out of the actual role playing. Then my group tried diceless role playing which wasn't an improvement.

The dice were supposed to function as an objective arbiter, to keep players from arguing with one another or with the GM. However, oftentimes games would deteriorate into an argument over the wording or interpretation of the rules. Power players would memorize the parts of the rulebooks where loopholes existed allowing them more flexibility than the original game designers may have anticipated, and GMs would memorize the parts of the rulebooks that focused on how GMs were the final word on rulebook interpretation.

I just wanted to play the role, but the rolls kept getting in the way.
posted by ZachsMind at 5:57 AM on June 1, 2008 [1 favorite]


I love DnD 3rd ed. I've played several campaigns, with a variety of dms and players. Currently the playgroup I'm with rotates DM'ing on an approximately yearly-or-so basis, so we all get a go. I'm in the process of writing up a zero-combat campaign to run next year, for instance. The campaign running presently is a bit of a munchkin/creature campaign: we've got a goblin, a brass dragon, a half-celestial/half-elf, a centaur and an elf in the party. The elf feels a bit left out, being the only non-weird race in the party sometimes.

4th ed, from what I've heard and read, sounds to me like Warhammer + MotG, both of which I've played and enjoyed, but both of which were ultimately not quite what I was looking for in a pastime.

I am one of those people who believes in house rules and DM fiat. Sufficiently creative solutions that bend the rules work at least once. The most fun games I've ever had were with a DM who was willing to play fast-and-loose with the rules when it was appropriate, as well as create new rules (with inventive loopholes) as the game required. The least fun games I've had were with rules lawyers who were going "But it will fall a foot short!" and crap like that.

Oh, datapoint: I'm 27. I hit RPGs when I was around oh, 18 or thereabouts, but it wasn't until I was about 22-ish that we had a regular group.
posted by ysabet at 7:27 AM on June 2, 2008


Played a few RPGs in my youth, though I was always more into reading them than playing them. Child of the 80's, I am.

As for the podcast? Fucking hilarious. I loved it. Really did. It has the right amount of piss-taking to not put me off the inherent silliness of D&D and enough information for me to be interested in what is going on in both story and game mechanics. I think the guys from PA and Kurtz from PvP are geniuinely funny individuals. Maybe it helps that I'm highly attuned to their sense of humour (and a giant fucking nerd) but I found the entire podcast to be excellent and can not wait for the next one.

Also, no matter what I have to name next, be it a computer, kitten or child, they will be called Chet Awesomelaser.
posted by slimepuppy at 11:02 AM on June 5, 2008


The new one is up on the RSS feed.

DM: "And then he cackles maniacally."
Player: "Is that his Minor Action?"
DM: "Uh, that's a Free Action. Cackling is a Free Action."
[Laughter.]
Player: "You can cackle as many times as you want per round."
DM: "Yeah."
posted by sdodd at 7:14 PM on June 5, 2008


Even as a lifelong video game nerd who's never played D&D, I'm really enjoying these podcasts. I happen to like Scott Kurtz and the PA guys anyway, but the game is interesting to follow as well. Sounds like it really helps to have a professional DM, though.
posted by danb at 11:17 PM on June 5, 2008


I've had a good time with these so far. It's not lulzaminute, as I thought they'd be shooting for, but it's actually been fun to listen in on the game. As with decoherence, I had more fun talking about the games than playing them, because I never had a decent DM. This sounds like the kind of game I would have very much enjoyed playing back then.
posted by middleclasstool at 3:23 PM on June 8, 2008


Y'know I guess I am pretty geeky. These are kind of compelling for me, and not even because they're particularly funny. I just miss having a gaming group.
posted by juv3nal at 1:15 PM on June 23, 2008


« Older When you can walk the rice paper en pointe and...   |   I feel safer. Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments