Episode 116 — What Goes Into a Great Online TTRPG Experience?

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Episode 116 — What Goes Into a Great Online TTRPG Experience?
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We cover a lot of ground in this episode! We talk about health and injury rules, the quirky LitRPG genre, and rethinking alien species in tabletops RPGs. And of course we move onto our main topic: what has the last few years taught us about what makes for a great virtual RPG?

Episode notes:

Episode 115 — The 30-Year D&D Campaign (with Bryn Mills)

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Episode 115 — The 30-Year D&D Campaign (with Bryn Mills)
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What’s the longest RPG campaign you’ve ever run? Six months? A year? Two? We’re pretty sure you can’t beat our guest for this episode, who’s been running a weekly D&D campaign for nearly three decades straight. Join us as we learn about Bryn’s truly epic D&D campaign and try to identify the secret of his GMing success.

Episode 114 — Making Food and Meals a Part of an RPG Campaign (with Jeremy Bai)

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Episode 114 — Making Food and Meals a Part of an RPG Campaign (with Jeremy Bai)
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Chris and Andy are joined by Jeremy Bai, a prolific translator and author whose RPG Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades: Wuxia Roleplaying brings the wuxia genre to your game table! We begin by talking to Jeremy about his various projects, RPG-related and otherwise, before discussing different ways that you can make food, drink, and meals more than just background flavor in your RPG campaign.

Episode 114 notes:

Episode 113 – Running Hacking Scenes (with James Pozenel)

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Episode 113 - Running Hacking Scenes (with James Pozenel)
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Andy and Chris are joined by James Pozenel of Horse Shark Games to talk about the best way to handle hacking scenes in your TTRPGs (as well as others scenes in which one PC is the star of the show). James is uniquely suited to dispense advice on this, since he’s working on a very cool game called Netcrawl that’s due to come out in 2024. It features a LOT of hacking.

Before we talk about hacking mainframes, we discuss some of his other projects for Dungeon Crawl Classics and Mutant Crawl Classics. There’s a lot of them and they all sound rad:

Episode 112 — Running RPGs with Kids

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Episode 112 — Running RPGs with Kids
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What do you need to know to run tabletop RPGs with kids? Guest GMs Liz Decker and Tim Saucer bring their experience organizing games for kids to a special roundtable discussion. Liz runs an RPG club at a local high school, and Tim incorporates RPGs into a summer camp for kids. Both have a lot of insight into running great games with and for kids!

Episode 111 – What Role Does Nostalgia Play in Your Games?

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Episode 111 - What Role Does Nostalgia Play in Your Games?
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Does nostalgia for your youth, and the games you played as a kid, play an active role in the games you play today? And it’s impossible to talk about D&D nostalgia without taking note of the upcoming D&D movie. Listen as they share their hopes and dreams (or lack thereof) for Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

Episode 110 — How Do You Adjust the Tone at Your Gaming Table?

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Episode 110 — How Do You Adjust the Tone at Your Gaming Table?
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How do you fine-tune the tone–whether it’s grim, comedic, or something else–at your gaming table? Chris and Andy talk about this, but not before they muse on the challenge of running murder mysteries in the TTRPG medium, among other things.

Episode 109 — How Do You Incorporate PCs’ Family and Loved Ones?

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Episode 109 — How Do You Incorporate PCs' Family and Loved Ones?
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Family, friends, and loved ones of PCs, when they appear at all, often serve primarily as victims whose plight motivates the PCs. Are there more and better ways to make the PCs’ loved ones a part of the game? Andy and Chris discuss!

Episode 108 — Dealing with GM Distraction

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Episode 108 — Dealing with GM Distraction
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Have you ever struggled to stay focused on the campaign you’re running because you’re distracted by all the shiny new games on your bookshelf that you’d also like to be running? Andy and Chris talk about the challenge of avoiding “shiny object syndrome.”

Episode 107 — What Do You Do When Your Players Get Stuck?

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Episode 107 — What Do You Do When Your Players Get Stuck?
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Andy and Chris go back to their Roll For Topic roots and roll on the old Table of Topics for this one! They (briefly) discuss the OGL and D&D and what it all means to them before diving into just what in the world a GM should do when their players have no idea what to do next.