Roundtable: Teaching Games Through Actual Play

Hello there, dear listener, this is Brian, and I want you to rob us. Before we get to that, let me tell you a little bit about our year. 2025 is coming to an end, and we had a banner year here at many-sided media. We played games like Hellwailers, Slugblaster, Yezabah's Ben and Breakfast, and Last Train to Bremen. But did you know that those aren't the only games that we played? We actually played a whole lot more. Over on the many-sided media Patreon, we call it the Dicepool, we play even more games and release bonus actual plays and cast talkbacks each and every month. And sometimes, we even get the designers of the games that we play to run them for us. This year, we had Felix Isaacs on to run us through an original 3-part Wild Sea adventure that we called Wild Sea Rackage. I got to play a Mothrin-raveler conspiracy theorist and is probably my favorite character that I got to play all year. And then we had Caleb Zane Hewitton, who was the designer of the Any Award-winning Triangle Agency, who introduced us to an original 3-episode series featuring a brand new anomaly and guest player Taylor Moore. Plus, we played games like Scurry, Token, Tacklebox, and honestly a ton more. I know what you're wondering, when is this heist happening? Well, I'm getting to that, because members of the Dicepool get every episode of my first dungeon and talk at the table, add free. Plus MP3s of the original music we make for our shows, plus cast talkbacks for every episode of my first dungeon, and bonus roundtable discussions featuring folks like Evil Hat publisher Fred Hicks, actual play-staylor, Dr. Emily Friedman, and Dimension 20 creator Brendan Lee Mulligan. So that's all pretty shiny, right? Certainly worth stealing, so here's where the robbery comes in. All you have to do is go to patreon.com/manysidedmedia and sign up to become a member of the Dicepool. You'll pay $10 a month and you will get access to literally everything we have ever made. But don't worry, you have my express, official, legally binding verbal permission to pay $10 one time, download everything we have, cancel your subscription, and then write off into the sunset with 5,231 minutes of TTRPG podcast goodness. That is 87 hours or 3.63 days, and that is just the stuff that we made this year. We got 3 more years of podcast goodness sitting on the Patreon, so you are making away with a king's ransom for just $10. And if that's not highway robbery, I do not know what is. But also, if you want to stay and lend your monthly support to the hard-working crew behind all the shows we make, we certainly would not mind. 2026 is going to be our biggest year yet. We have planned massive seasons of my first dungeon. We have all-star guest lined up for Talk of the Table, and we are even making a few new shows to add to your podcast haul. So please go to patreon.com/manysidedmedia and rob us of everything we have ever made, and if enough of you do, next year's haul will be even bigger. Thanks for listening, and enjoy the show. Today, we are incredibly excited to be hosting 3 fabulous guests who are joining us to talk about pedagogical actual play and how we can teach games through play. First, she is the newly minted Gene Wickstrom Liles endowed, professor of English at Arbor University, and one of the foremost academics studying actual play is our very good friend, Dr. Emily Friedman. Hi, I'm the problem. A truer sentence has never been said. Our next guest is the host of Quinn's Quest, and most notably for this conversation, the actual play podcast play to find out it is Quinn's. Hello, but I was very high energy, hello Brian, hello Elliot, I'm going to keep it up this high, I'm going to keep it this high for the next two hours. We got to start high, so we have somewhere to go down to. And finally, he is the creator and GM of Dimension20, co-creator of World's Beyond Number, and as of yesterday, at time of recording, the new dungeon master for critical role, it is Brennan Lee Mulligan. Hell yeah, thank you so much for having me, delighted to be here. Great to have you. We're so excited to have everybody on this, but this is a real murderer's row of talking about actual plays. We've been looking forward to this for a long time, and I'm very excited to have everybody on the show. Welcome. I love it. And a row with other murderers. That reference is getting dated, I guess, from 1927. Somebody had a comment. So to kind of kick this off, I want to open this up to the five of us are all on this call because we share a goal. And that goal is we would love to see more people play TTRPGs. We would love to see more people in TTRPGs. And in one way or another, each of us has gone to actual play as a way to do that. As a way to teach people, as a way to bring them into the hobby. And so our first question that we want to kind of throw to the table is, why is this the best tool for bringing people into the hobby? And do you agree that this is the best tool for bringing people into the hobby? And I'll start with Dr. Friedman M. No, it's not the best tool, but it's a really effective tool. I hear Quinn's oof, and I co-sign it, is a particularly pungent recruiting tool at this moment. And as the person who is the self-described problem who has brought these nerds together here, one of the things I find really striking is that in our survey data, what we are hearing from audiences is that they are learning something from actual play at this moment in time. Whether or not they're learning effectively, whether or not they're learning the best possible kind of ways to play or games to play or how to play them, I don't know. But certainly, what we do know is that people more than ever before are turning to actual play to do it. And I think that's slightly different than saying it's the most effective tool, but it is the one that it seems to be available at this moment in time. What about you? What are you thinking on this? I have really complicated feelings about this because I started Quinn's quest with a super straightforward goal to get more people playing role-playing games. I felt that the quality of the games was not being matched by a similar level of energy of funding or experience from reviewers, and I just wanted to get people really excited about role-playing games. Then when Quinn's quest started going, well, I thought, okay, let's do a natural play show, and immediately I started amassing a ton of guilt because when you want to make actual play that sounds fantastic, you have to get, you know, like a great audio produced like Brian Flaherty, but you also want to really get it really trim. I thought long and hard about which of my personal friends to bring on board on the project, who were like charming and charismatic and quick. And all of that amasses this, it creates this, this final product, which I think just because you want to make it listenable, you end up making something that people assume they could not do. And to some extent, they couldn't because there is so much professionalism on so many different ends of this project that we are actually playing the only kind. I actually have a lot of DMs, the Emily about this, that like, is it, like, I think literally in the, in the, the episode release that we had today, our new nobulous season, there's a line which Emily quoted back at me, which I say on the mic, which is, I say to my players, okay, but if we were actually playing nobulous, we would probably do this at this point, sort of implying that whatever the hell we're doing right now is not actually playing. And it is, but I don't know, I'm just sat in my discord scene comments from people being like, oh, I couldn't, I couldn't GM like this, I couldn't tell a story like this. And I've actually had in the back of my mind like, I've wanted to do a post on the Quinn's Quest Patreon or somewhere, saying like, yeah, you're correct, you couldn't. This is this contrived project that I think gives people the wrong idea of that they can't be role-playing. I don't know. Maybe I'm overthinking this. Maybe I'm just, it's like 10 p.m. over here, I'm tired. I'm feeling guilty and sad. And I would really love to be rebuffed by Brennan at this point, as to because I'd like to. Do I need you to. Do I need you to give a different answer? No. No. We could all agree and move from somewhere else. I mean, so we must stay in places of conflict, but places of agreement we must egress from it. Oh, wow. The question, to rephrase the question, it is, is actual play the best tool for getting people to play tabletop role-playing games? That's the question. I think both getting people to play and getting people to learn. I would say if you want to know what I think the contribution to the ecosystem of tabletop role-playing games of actual play is, it is the first and far from final step in a many step process that someone needs to go through to actually be sitting at a tablet playing a tabletop game. Virtual play has been absolutely game-changing in terms of raising awareness about these games, to take them from a horrible cultural artifact or something that you would see the D&D episode of community, and there's a hint at what playing might look like, but it's mostly the jokes around the game, right, versus actually seeing, like, "Oh, I can tune in live and I see this thing, okay, I'm hearing, okay, this is sort of what Lucy's supposed to be doing," depending on, of course, what stream you're watching, how high the edit it is, it, it, it, it. There are multiple steps in the process by which a person actually ends up playing a game. What actual play is good at is getting someone from the stage of, "I heard about that and it sounded interesting," to going, "Where would I find a group of people to play with?" Like, call that, like, past the first 10% of, is this even remotely interesting at all, to somewhere around the 40%. Actual play moves you from 10% to 40%. Right. I always, I always end up talking about in terms of, like, activation energy and like a chemical formula of, you have to have a certain amount of energy put into a system before that system begins a reaction. Yeah. And it's like, once you get past that point, then it's kind of all downhill, or it's easier, put that uphill climb to get enough energy to get to that point is very high, especially in terms of road playing. Thinking about a different road playing analogy to this that I think is really true. And by the way, in terms of actual play being the best for teaching a game, I, I have very complex feelings about that because I think it, it depends on what you are trying to teach people about playing a game. Are you trying to teach, are you trying to teach the rules of a game, or are you trying to teach how a group of people has fun playing the game, or are you trying to teach about a method of playing the game, you know, but let me not, let me not retreat into like, refining the question. I'll say that the best, the best example I can give of what I think actual play does well is my old LARP camp, the Wayfinder Experience, I had been hearing about it for years. It was like, oh, there's a camp like, oh, there's thing AGT that later became Wayfinder. Oh, interesting. But I had only heard things about it and you hear things all the time. There was this thing that had a Spring Beltane Festival, had a pagan upstate New York Spring Festival, the Beltane Festival at the, at Stone Mountain Farm Center performing arts, the center for some box studies. There was a, they would be in costume and have big foam sword fights in a yard out by the festival. And you walk along, you're like, wow, and you could come up and they would say, you, if you want to sign up for the next thing, we're going to play Couch the Flag or we're going to do a mass battle and you do that and you're like, whoa, now that's a, that is not signing up for a week of summer camp, but it is a fractional little taste of play that takes something from a thing you've heard of to a thing that you've seen with your own two eyes. And I think that moves people a sizable chunk from raised an eyebrow at a dinner party too. I'm going to Google this later. And I think it's important to remember to disagree with myself, right, is that so much of the history of role playing is an oral tradition. We talk so much about books, I'm a bookish person, I'm a professional bookish person, there are too many big boxes behind me and books. I love a beautiful object. And yet, the history of the, of D&D for a very long time, as well as other games, is somebody teaches you, somebody brings you along. And we can think about actual play and other content creation as, as kind of extending and expanding that beyond, and I say this as the woman on the call and the oldest person on the call. I'm going to throw those things around for a while, is that I remember when, though, my first memory of Dungeons and Dragons is not being a shy, nerdy little boy, like some of my friends on the call, who remembers using it as a way to make friends, right? And to live in the world of imagination or read the books and imagine it, I remember my male cousins playing it and not letting me even see what they were doing, right? And I come into the hobby when D&D is a, it's Nader and it's the rise of White Wolf and it's the rise of Steve Jackson games and things like that, where I could, I was old enough and big enough to pull a book and see it myself and, and be surrounded by theater kids and on a main nerds and whatnot. But so I look at my students and, you know, my teaching is part of that oral tradition and part of that initiation and some of them have already gotten a hint of this through actual play. Brennan, you will be pleased that I had my very first student say, I don't know anything about D&D, but I saw a web tune. Wow. Wow. So yeah, so like, yeah, anything that gets you on the path, I think is a, is a valuable part of that educational ecosystem, but I also want to give credit to the reason why we're having this call it all is because I do think that there is teaching happening in play to find out and especially in particular, seasons of Dimension 20, which almost always has our kind of sympathy, new entrance, unless it's the intrepid heroes seasons, there's always at least one person in the table who needs to kind of learn. And then you've got Dungeons and Drag Queens where everybody is kind of getting their feet under the ground. And so what's activating to me and what feels like the possibility space that we might be stepping into are these places of kind of deliberate and intentional layering of pedagogy. If we're going to be really artificial about actual play or think about it with intention and creation, this is something Taylor and I have talked about in this round table in our previous round table is what would it mean to do it with an eye to to quote Quinn's in a fat past life, the notion of the teach, right? Like what does that look like? Yeah, I, it's funny. I have been asked several times and I actually made a video on how to teach TZRPGs in terms of just like the rules. But the moments that I feel really proud of in play to find out that I, I don't know if I have a told Brian to not include, to not cut these bits out, but I actually think you just understood the products enough that you, it was never a question. Other bits where my players say they don't understand rules and that we, that in and of itself is an entertaining moment or there's a bit of the, the season finale of Nobulous which has my players and I actually, Brian pauses the soundtrack and my players and I say, where the fuck is this story going? Like how are we going to end this in the next 45 minutes and what do we do? What does it mean that your character did this? And the reason I feel proud of those moments is because I feel that that feels a gap in sort of you to assume that, certainly viewing the hobby from the outside that it's as simple as, you know, you learn the rules in the book and then you play the game as if this is a board game. And of course it's not. There's like this incredibly multifaceted sort of web of social nuance there. And I really want PTFO to be a home for my players telling me that maybe they're uncomfortable with a scene or that my depiction of an NPC is problematic or stuff that he was a little close to the bone and again times that I've spoken to him about like feeling really nervous about releasing stuff and feeling I'm not going to call it brave because I'm not in a situation where I'm actually risking anything, but it does feel a little, there's no getting away from the contrivance of actual play, but where I look to teach RPGs in it is through honesty as to moments that I'm utterly flummoxed as a GM and not in a way that, I mean, Lord knows I have watched so many and rewatched so many fabulous tips of Brennan being sort of flummoxed by his players and those are easily my favourite moments of dimension 20 years. I'm sure that's the case of like with lots of people. But for me, I try and make sure what gets captioned Mike is the moments I'm flummoxed in a way that is not funny where my brain is simply not working at top speed and I'm so grateful to my players for doing that as well of saying I don't know who this character is or I don't know what my motivation is or I'm going to ask you to explain this rule again and I'm going to make fun of it. I mean, that's the joy, yeah, and that's another joy of PTFO, it turns out when you record old games you can criticise the rule set in the middle of the story and that is as much a valid part of the story, you know, if we're building a story from this framework that is a book, struggling against that framework that is in the book has to be part of the story and that has to be part of role playing and you have to teach people that that is part of role playing. There's two tools you identified in their quins that I feel like we can talk about as like things that you can tweak in your actual play formula and one of them is like this idea of like the relatability of struggling with a game like you include the fact that, you know, your players are having trouble with the rules and you include you running up against something. And in some ways that those rough edges of play is part of what when somebody listens they go, oh, I ran into that problem, I'm now seeing you run into the problem and then run through it. But ideally you're not just demonstrating that those problems exist, you're also showing things like it's OK for the GM to take 10 seconds to think, which you would never learn, you know, from watching or reading the book or watching a lot of actual play. There's a moment in an episode of Play to Find Out that I really love that you're something happens and you don't know quite what to do and I think the players don't quite know what to do. And I think we leave it in the edit of saying like, hey, let's all take five minutes away from the table and figure out what we want to do next. And I'm like, oh, that's I've like, I think we've done that in recordings of my first dungeon. I'm sure it's happened on a lot of actual plays, but like, I've never thought to leave that in. And I'm like, oh, that is actually interesting to say like, hey, a part of this game might be let's take a beat and reflect rather than just push forward in a very like live performance sense when it doesn't have to be exactly what you're talking about dovetails with the second thing you identified and Brian just use the language as well is that we chose to leave it in. We chose to take it out. The edit is a really powerful tool in how educational you make an actual play like an argument could be made that I don't necessarily know I fully agree with that unedited entirely. You would learn everything about how somebody's playing a game, but I don't think that that's the best choice. But editing all to say is seriously shaking her head. No, I know. All to say editing is one of those tools that you can tweak on the dial on how pedagogy make your actual play and I think that when it comes to my first dungeon and the way Brian edits and sound designs and does post production, it brings us to this idea of and there's one of the threads I want to pull on kind of throughout this conversation of the tension and spectrum between aspirational and educational and how they can accomplish the same goals, but also kind of be in tension. There's a really interesting thought that's being explored here. I think there's a funny I don't know why I made this question in my head. There's a funny moment when dating apps became very popular in my time being a young single fella in New York where it became to rigor to be like these these apps have they've made dating impossible, you know, they've made it impossible. These apps have made dating impossible. First of all, let me be clear, I was I was a man dating women in New York City. So I was on these apps being like another fascinating woman, you know, like times were good. Man, so I was like, I'm having a wonderful time on these apps. I'm meeting delightful people and going on wonderful dates to many of our city's fine restaurants. This is wonderful. But the but there's this thing that I started to I started something started to bother me about that point of view of like it's the apps making it bad. Or like these apps have have are the worst and you told the worst relative to what? Yes. The worst relative to what being someone's like the worst part of these apps is I have a hard time meeting someone good on them unlike before when it was just in the world. And I go like you have this weird thing with actual play, I think like in terms of its use for let's say it's used for onboarding people or it's used for actually instructing people in the play of a game or a manner of play of a game. All of that is sort of pedagogical, right? Even just proselytizing TTRPGs is in and of itself a form of education. If it's very like, even if it's very broad, but within that it's like, okay, is that is that the best? Is that useful relative to what I think to M's point? The system before this what if you if you sort of see actual play, you're someone that has a worry about various named effects and whether they have impacted and whether they have impacted people's tables. The system before that, you know, it's like before actual play, we had a better system called your friend's "Sirly Older Brother" and you're like, that was the former system. Like again, it's like my situation much to M's point was my mom put a flyer in the local gaming store in New Pulse, New York and October country in a group of very generous 20-something year olds who I should follow up with my mom and go, did you pay them? I taught a 10-year-old child how to play a D&D. They killed my bard first session. It was old school like like old school D&D where I came and I was like, I made up a song about the fire giants based on lore I looked up about Muspelheim and Norse mythology and they're like, you're fucking gay, this step done, you're killing this kid right now. So in other words, like it's very funny when people talk about play styles. I think that the big, here's something that is, I think, an in-arduable fact. The preponderance of actual play means an interested party can be exposed to many more play styles with the click of a button than you would be able to discover, discover, hooping it on your own to feet in any other era of these games. Like how many tables could you possibly play with in a lifetime of playing these games? Like if you dedicated your life to it, maybe a couple dozen, but all of those always with you, is it really a damn group of people every time? It's your own circles as opposed to this current moment where you can go on Twitch or go on a podcast catcher and find a million different play styles and different ways of thinking about these games and talking about them. So I think the big pedagogical thing for me about that is when we think about like, is this a worthwhile tool? What is the relationship that actual play has to the hobby of playing TTRPGs and is it a positive one? Really begs the question of what was the relationship between discoverability and pedagogy and prior iterations of the hobby? And is your archery so impressive that all five of us agreed that they were not a good teaching tool and then you've proven all of us including yourself wrong? No, no, it's that we have come to, we have come to two, I think, separate consensuses. One, and one is about the nature of one part of pedagogy, which is to say the kind of, the stuff I do at the introductory level, right, which is this stuff exists, right? And I, I throw, I have, God bless my current students, 28 students are out there clutching copies of a game they thought looked cool. I have not taught them how to teach it, they're teaching themselves, you know, everything from fiasco to heart to everything in between to, you know, I own Fabula Ultima because a student was like, I saw this, can you buy this for me, Dr. Freeman? If it's, if that's going to be the thing that unlocks you, great. And then actual play is, you know, the other, the new kind of version of that kind of discoverability and showing you that it's not just, you know, this is the classic interview that people like Brennan and Mathew, right, which is like explaining to Rolling Stone that, yeah, it's cool now and it's not all like stinky people in a, you know, back of a friendly local game store and look, I'm affable, I'm standing on a bar in Los Angeles, I was made to stand on that bar. They really forced me. I had no interest in standing on that bar. They asked me really hard to stand on that bar. You sold it, you sold it, my friend. Well, if you're going to do it, you better sell it. I mean, you might as well, if you're going to be there, you don't want to be standing on a bar looking apologetic. You've got to own that, but that's your stage now. No, no, but I saw, I think where we are kind of maybe, maybe where the debate is going is about what those next things are, right? And so it was funny on Saturday, I was in front of an audience. We were talking about Matt Mercer's origin story and he was explaining how his first D&D experience was sitting at a table and realizing it could probably be better than the experience he was having, to which I said, Matt, did you invent the Matt Mercer effect at 15 yourself? Because that is what the Mercer effect is, it's just the vague sense that there's a better version of it out there somewhere, that you can either make or find, or if you fall into despair. And that's the thing that we're scared about. That's what the grog and arts are scared about. That's what people who are advocating for the hobby, I think, are worried about, is the idea that discovery happens and then the fear sets in. Then you get a whole bunch of people on the Quinn's Quest discord saying, this is an amazing thing to listen to, but I'm listening to an expert, right? And so this is the thing that I think about a lot, which is, we've got two folks of almost exactly the same age, almost exactly the same amount of experience in the hobby. Brennan calls himself, and other people do a machine built to play Dungeons and Dragons, although it's also worth noting the ways in which Wayfinder is, LARP is deeply embedded in your, in your D&D, among other things, like the traditions of improv. Quinn's comes through this kind of second, like apparatus of game, knowledge, and experience and teaching and personality, with a superpower of being able to convince what a dozen or more people to play regular games with you. I just want to know how to do that, by the way, right? And so we've got this gap where we tell everyone, it's really easy to play. Anybody can play. You can have fun with your friends tonight. That is true. You will not have the same kind of fun that highly skilled people who've been playing for a long time, either one game, many games, or together as a group, will have. And I think the challenge that we're facing is, how do we articulate that without feeling like it's gatekeeping and shutting the door in the face of everybody who's kind of coming in? I have a feeling on this, which is that I think there is a degree to which the thought leaders in the TTRPG space of which I think I'm too new to be responsible for this. But where there's a narrative that we haven't produced yet that I think people would want to grab onto, if it existed, which is, like, people see now, thanks to, like, these fantastic outlets of actual play, like people playing D&D who are very, very talented. And yet the whole community, myself included when I was writing about TTRPG's and shut up and it's down, it's like, no, no, no, you don't have to be good. Like, you know, GM and you're going to suck and that's fine and all of this is true. But we just try it, you know, yeah, you know, you'll get better or it's easy or like, there's this, we all desperately want it to be true because it is at least partially true. The GMing is great fun to do badly and you just got to try it and don't try and be like other GMs. And the narrative that I think we have failed to provide people, and shit, I just use we, which now makes it my problem, but the thing we fail to do is kind of provide an outlet for people who want to be really fucking good, who want to be Brennan, right? Like in the same way that if we think about home cooks, like so many people, myself included, into cooking because they want it to, they know it's hard and they want to get better and they want to climb that Mount Everest of eventually being a truly fantastic home cook. And yeah, sure, there's like endless resources on how to become a bit of DM, right? There's endless tips and there's tricks, you know, you know, Brennan has done how many episodes of adventuring academy, you know, but we have that resource because that resource has to exist because there's demand for it, but we don't have the narrative of, okay, so you want to be a GM, you are going to go on a journey and it's going to be hard. And I'm wearing even saying this because I think that's a very masculine kind of like, it's going to be tough, but if you're a bad enough dude, then you're going to make it. And I think that is, it's to some, maybe the worst possible thing we could be saying. But at the same time, because that narrative doesn't exist, we have this dissonance, which I think is confusing for people and it's letting people kind of disagree with what they see or yeah, that's where I'm at. I, man, I agree with that so much. I think that there's a, I'm rocketing back to improv because I don't think that this is a phenomenon that's unique to actual play, but I think that sometimes these voices come about as a hobby like expands or is like enjoying a cultural moment that some other practice, like in other words, cultures of I have fears about my ability to perform anything I deeply care about are not unique to tabletop role-playing games. It's every actor and chef and engineer and it's everything in the world is, what if I'm not good at a thing I care about, right? That's, there's nowhere you can go that you won't find some version of that. But I think to Quinn's point, there is a, if you want to talk about what the best pedagogical tool is, bar none for TTRPG and learning to play and I know that this, this is maybe controversial. I, I, I think I stand by this, I've said it enough that I hope I would stand by it. You will learn more from running one for our session for your friends and stumbling through it than you will in watching every episode of Adventuring Academy, like the gems of wisdom in Matt Colville's Running the Game series. You won't have the muscle memory to plug that material into. You won't have the nodes, like you literally don't have the nodes to understand how smart what Colville is saying is until you have done enough of it to be like, oh, that plugs in to that weird gap in my knowledge, right? I, I think that there is a thing that happens. I got to a point as an improv teacher where I think I had done the Pat answer that Quinn's is referring to too many times and saw it not work of like, people would come up before an improv 101 show and you would see real nerves. They would go, what if our class show is bad? I talked to me about connections again, talking about second beats again. What if I'm not good? What if I'm bad at this? I don't want to be bad at this. I'm in a go on stage. This is really nerve wracking and you would say some version of, you're going to be great. First of all, no, you're not and that's so mean to say that. Second of all, if you are great or you're not great, so what, this is your, like I started to tell people, this is your 101 class show. If you remain an improviser and that becomes a core part of your identity, you should know that I've been doing this for about six or seven years at that point. I don't remember anything that happened in my 101 class show. I don't remember where it physically was, right? Like, couldn't tell you. And if you're not defining yourself as an improviser, then this is all a fucking lark and what do you care if it goes bad? Either way, you should not put weight on this. But I will say that there was one, this is a moment where someone coming to you in a state of incredible vulnerability with a lot of nerves. Sometimes should not be coddled in a way that actually just makes them spin out further. I had a student one time come up and I guess I was sleep deprived or was just in a weird place. And the student had asked me for a pep talk a couple times and I just reached the edge of my patients because I had started to perceive behind the question a kind of needling sense of I'd like to be as good at this as people who humiliated themselves without humiliating myself. And I went and I just asked them a straightforward question and I said, why do you deserve to be great at this right away? Why is it something, why is it, what's the characteristic in you when every one of these people on stage that you idolize shocked and humiliated themselves multiple times in front of groups of strangers to claw their way desperately to something resembling proficiency? But you and you alone must have a flawless record of only having succeeded at this. And I think that that's not, I think that there is a part of that really sweet desire to be good that is a little bit toxic and must be disabused. Your next favorite game is on my first dungeon. On Sad Space Cowboys, Kamari takes out a lighter from their pocket and goes, this bar's next. Hello Kitty, you see Melody Tuffington flying through the air, jacked to shit massive legs to horny snowmen? The sad part is that Joshua never gave Frosty a penis and everything in between. We've got something for everyone. Learn the game, then hear it in action. That's Snake Eyes - 2, that's a zero. Snake Eyes, that means that we have our very first plot twist, any time somebody rolls doubles, we get a plot twist. So grab some headphones and get lost in a story with us. I'll be honest, I don't know all the rules of it. We'll kind of figure that out as we go, but do you want to just play? I've got some great stories to tell you. And remember, if you're having fun, you're already doing it right. 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Can I ask a question to everybody on this call, Brenan included, because this is the kind of GMI and I've got several friends now in my play group in my late 30s who are all starting to GM for the first time and they all have this and I don't know if they learned it from me, but it's the act of finishing a GM session and everybody had fun and it was really cool. And then you say to the GM like, "How was that?" and they're like, "I think I fucked that scene. I wasn't happy with that villain." And they didn't and you're like, "But everyone had fun and the GM looks at you or I look at them and it's like, they don't care because they just see the failings." I would love to know if that's me being particularly, me and my friends being hard on ourselves or really needing to be good or is that shared among the group. I think after every recording of my first dungeon will get off the Riverside call and Abbey, will Abbey and I will be like, "So what do you think?" and every time I'll be like, "That's fine." It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how good it was. It could be, you know, the finale of our Abbey Blues campaign is like, "The best thing I've ever GMed." And I'll be just like, "That was fine." And then if you ask me again in an hour, I'll be like, "Actually, I, that's laughed." But the five minutes right afterwards or the lowest I will ever feel about anything I ever complete because I've had to complete it. It is done. I can no longer fix it or at least in the manner of actual play like we can't go back and re-record. And so I'm just like, "Ah, that's when it will feel the worst because I don't have any time to reflect on what is good. I only see the flaws." So I don't think that's a unique experience, at least from my opinion. There's an answer to that question that I'm going to put into the category called taco answers, which is we're going to go for tacos and we're going to have this conversation. My high, we're on a podcast answer is we talk a lot about how improv is a really important tool. And other kind of acting traditions are really useful for learning how to play TTRPGs, being better, TTRPGs, all this sort of thing. But for me, the way that, like, that is my inner monologue, but I'm a teacher that has taught as long as you guys have been professional being in public people. And so luckily, there's no, like, recording most of the time of the shit I did 15, 20 years ago. And so I'm able to, in that kind of theatrical tradition, just be like, next time will be better. How are we going to iterate? What's, like, this is why I do stars and wishes with my class is like, I know there's a next time, I mean, not every session, although some people do, but I'm always kind of forward oriented of, I have to accept that sometimes I have a bad day or that I'm never, that there's the version of myself, we had all of us have, in different ways, talked about the version of our self. This is what, you know, Brennan calls the digital corona, the self that walks in front of us into rooms, now that we all have kind of reputations, teachers have that too. But I also have, and I'm guessing you might as well, maybe this is a shared therapy session, the version of myself that I wish I was, and it's, it's illuminated and inspired by the people who I trained with or my peers, I want to be Devani Losers, Stone Cold Jane Austen, amazing award-winning academic and mentor, you know, I want to be my friend, Manu Chander, who's changing the world with brown technology and things like that. I'm not those people, I can only be me. And so luckily, I'm going to pull, this is the only time I'm going to pull this on this rep podcast, when I was your age, I got over it, wow, wow, and I, and I, I don't know what that's like a, no, I mean, it's a nuclear option, but no, but that was the thing is like there comes a point and it comes, I think, for different people at different points, it's just like you, you let go of the self he thought you were making and you realize the main, the one I made is good and the one I light, I, the person I am, as it turned out, when I let go, five years ago, all of a sudden, I started writing about a new art form that didn't exist and I got everything I thought I wanted and more in a very strange way. So, you know, I, so yeah, so I think that, but yeah, but I, that's like an autobiography title, by the way, everything I wanted in a very strange way. Well, well, yeah, more taco, more taco, but to come back, I, so when I, I started running games in a not crappy teenage way, after a long, hey, this separate from the hobby, after I had been a teacher for so long that those muscle memories of you shake it off, you let it go, you know that things are built by people, they are chemistry and they are not exclusively about you. And this is the other fun thing that I think we have to talk about, right, which is when I listen to both of you, especially Brennan and Quinn's, you're often talk about, you know, and we literally co-vill series is called Running the Game, right, that there's this kind of almost a tour, kinds of language around, you know, for dimension 20, there has to be somebody in charge, right, to make sure that the minis get built and the sets get built in six months or whatever. But I guess for me, I've been trying to think about what it, like thinking alternatively, where it's not my responsibility to feel guilty about how a, how a session went, because can I play the kinds of games or play in a particular kind of way, the means that that burden is not on me. And that's a question mark that's something I'm still searching and thinking about. We're certainly around something that I think like is, is a thing that we bring up on this show a lot and, and in conversations just around the industry is that there's so much about actual play and TGRPGs that is easily translatable to other art forms and we can talk about in other art forms and people accept about other art forms in some ways easier, like, like, I'm struck by the way Brennan, you were talking about like, why do you deserve to be good right away? Like, that's a thing a painter understands, like, very easily. It's just like, yeah, of course, in order to be a better painter, I have to do the brushstrokes like my, and practice and practice hands and practice faces and everything. And there's a certain gap sometimes, I think, in the way people talk about RPGs where they seem to not want to apply that same lens to it because there's maybe baggage around the idea of like, but it's a game. So it should be fun. So I shouldn't have to work hard to be good at it, which is like, weird tension. Exactly. I think that's a great point. Elliot. Chess is a game. You don't want to take Chess seriously, you want to get better at chess? The idea of like coming up to someone and being like, hey, I watched a Gary Kasperov video. I'm worried I might lose my first chess game and you're like, yeah, you're well, my dog. I don't know what to tell you. Like, your character might die the first time you play a D&D, mine did. And we fucking pick it up and keep it truckin, man. Well, you just got to, you just got to keep on truckin. It's such a funny sensibility that I think it is, like you're saying, I don't, it actually is so anomalous within TTRPG that I can't really pin down where it comes from because even people that would say like, well, it's a game. It can't be that serious. Look at the world of games that have even more pronounced delineations of types of play, levels of competitiveness, levels of how much it absorbs people's life. My uncle's like an ultimate frisbee, like there are people that there's a guy who has lost a hacky sack game in front of thousands of people screamed fuck and punched his hand into a wall. You know what I mean? Like this idea, I don't know where the attitude within the hobby of like, and I just think by the way, it's probably a pretty vocal minority of people. But it's that idea of like, whoa man, this is not something that's supposed to have this element to it. When that element exists so ubiquitously across not only most human endeavors, but specifically ones as close as possible to this is really, it'll make it loopy if you think about it. I don't know where it comes from. Well, and it's also worth, I'm going to throw in a little data point from the survey data about actual play creators. And after 2020, so now Dear God, half a decade of creators generally report that their home games are online, which is to say they press a button and actual play comes out, right? So there's no differentiation. And I think that's part of the challenge is like you can, you know, if you bomb at home or bomb, you know, in front of the two people who watch you on Twitch, then it's probably no harm, no foul. But you have the chance of like, you know, malicious actors or whatever. But there's that sense of the possibilities of professionalization are common, a touch of a button, or at least that that was true. That was a mindset that was true for at least a significant part of the recent history of the form. That is a horrible stat and I simply, I refuse to believe it not, not logistically, but just emotionally that just rather it wouldn't be true. I'd rather, I'd rather to a degree that I'm in denial, that some larger fraction than I dare believe of role playing games played now are played and streamed online. Well, no, no, no, that's not, that's, that is not the data point. The data point is among people who are actual play creators, they don't play privately anymore. They don't play privately anymore. They're only home games and in some cases their only experience of play is in stream. For many of the same reasons that worlds beyond number exists, right? Worlds beyond number has the kind of, this is our, this is in part, this is not the only reason why worlds beyond number exists, but it's in part an accountability measure that we can play and be intentional and have this thing because we have made it a, a financial commitment, a commitment of our time. And I had somebody, a very wonderful actual play creator messaged me and said, I tried to go to friendly local game stores. I tried to go to conventions. I tried to have offline play. The kinds of play I wanted to do, the only people I could find to play them, play it was remote and the only way we could ensure that we were going to have a calendibility was to record it. We don't have a big audience, but this is what we do. Which struck me. Yeah. It's just a minor point on that. I think that that statistic doesn't shock me that much because what are the odds that you have two games running concurrently? Yep. You know what I'm saying? Just like, it couldn't be me. It's really hard to guys, it's really hard. But like that's what I'm saying is in other words, when I hear, when I hear majority of actual play creators, first of all, I would assume that the majority of actual play creators have a show that they are doing. No. Was that not true? No. Among those, I mean, we can parse the data. I'll bring the spreadsheet when I see you next, but yeah, no, it's, you've got a lot of people who are doing this as a portfolio. They're kind of floating from lots of different games. So you've got DMs running, bunch of different games, one shot's limited series, that kind of thing. And yeah, I mean, I think it would probably be fair to say that the majority in the sense that there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of actual plays happening are just like one game, one person. But there is that, that ambitious middle, that term that I've coined, that is substantial. It's thousands, if not more, of participants. Those folks are playing as much as they can in as many different ways as they can, but not at home. Well, I just want to say that for the first six years of dimension 20, I was running my long-term home game. So I was doing my part to keep the average, I was trying to bend that curve as much as I got DM could. You know, I really was. To Brennan's point that this is, it's peculiar that people don't consider like skill within like the world of role-playing games, that this isn't something you might have to work to get better at. I wonder if that has something to do with the history of this hobby, being considered something like a refuge. Like, you know, it's the idea that this is a secret, safe space for geeks to go, and you know, it's a closed, secret, private thing that you enjoy. But by contrast, when I was doing the people on my game's documentary about Juventure and how role-playing is now the biggest hobby for Gen Z in China in a way that, like, I'll bang on about this forever because our role-playing scene over here does not talk about this enough. But one of the things I learned that didn't make it into the documentary is that the way Juventure games are structures, it's always six players and often you are playing with strangers. So you say, "Oh, I've got me and my two friends. We want to go meet two people." Also, Juventure tend to be written for exactly three men and three women, so it's a really good way for people of the opposite sex to meet each other. But one of the things I was told about by a guy who ran a Juventure shop is there is such a thing as a Juventure bro. This is not a direct translation, but handsome men like who will choose to play romantic games and role-play very intensely because they then become desirable players who other people are like, "Oh my God, can we role-play a different story with you next weekend?" I also heard about players who are desirable because during emotional moments they will cry. And if you can do that, if you can get like for GM's of Juventure, the people running the shops who put the six players into the games, if you can sell six people as whenever I run this game, everybody ends up crying, that's desirable. And if you're a player who can start crying and get other people to cry because your emotionality is so intense in this tiny room that you're playing in, that's also desirable. It's a completely different culture, but one that has way more commonality with actual play, that the idea that some players, Brennan Cockton, Ibrow, made me think you were going to say something. No, no, no. I love the, first of all, Juventure bro is just just a great concert, and I love the point that I think you're drilling down into, who I fundamentally agree with is, "I think, unless maybe this is me being defensive, and if so, so be it, okay, I choose to defend actual play in this moment." I think actual play gets scapegoated for something that is way older and more human. In terms of people using it as a, as, here's, being like, here's the reason I'm not taking a risk, it's what the strangers are doing, not my innate fear of risk, like that, that concept of you're talking about skill in this moment, Quinn's, and I think that like, what's so funny is we're talking about the presence or absence of skill in this hobby. And I just want to say vociferously, as loudly as I can, I believed in skill existing in this game before actual play was even a distant ship on the horizon. I believed in it when I had played with a grand total of less than 10 people. I believed in it for years when I was not even a teenager yet, going, "Man, I want to do a better job tomorrow than I did today. I want to run a combat a little better." I did that and I watched my players check out. I watched the look on their face as they stopped having as much fun as we were having an hour ago. How do I stop that from happening in the future? It's really funny because it becomes a reference on parasociality. But the relationship of skill and passion and craft and hobby and game and joy already exists in the mind of a single individual who cares about this, and it's mapable to every other human pursuit. And I just really strongly believe that. We talk so much about parasociality and don't talk about the fact that this is a social game, it is a social activity. You can be, everyone has a friend that is a lot of fun to go to a bar with. It's like, "Oh, that person's coming. I will now leave the house and go to the bar because that person's coming." And when I'm hanging out with her, it's just always a wild night. And yet that is, again, part of the narrative that we sort of, I don't know, it's frightening to admit that. Yeah, I just wrote my first, like, pretty negative review of a defunct actual play. I'm part of the thing that I'm kind of really working through is, and this is a conversation for a different day. It will happen in November here at Auburn, but the challenge of, you know, step one is, do you like and can you bear to listen to the people in front of you? And if they are talking for 10 minutes about how they all met on herald teams in Chicago, I'm out. But no, but we don't talk about the, we don't talk, we don't want to talk about skill, but least skill is something that we could, we can talk about. One of the things that we find even harder to talk about is the ways in which, can you, is Riz a skill? Yes, yeah, obviously it is. Yes, a million percent, one, one trillion percent, correct. Oh, right. I forgot. I was on the call with the, the shy boys who, who made people like them through games. I was hard to be around. I made people like me less because of the games that I was into. Thank you very much. I spent hundreds of hours learning card tricks, okay? That's really good, man. But that is the, that is the, that is the thing that makes critique hard, I think, because how skill is woven into the skill of being charming and engaging and personable and being the person that will, that you will come to their party or that you will go to the bar with them or, you know, when, when the question is asked, who's all coming that you're on that list? I, I mean, Brian, I think you've said that to me. You've said like reviewing actual play feels like it might, like, it's so hard because like there is a part of me that does really want to see like more critical review of actual play because then there is just a world where that helps us refine and get better kind of brought like from the, the thousand foot view, but I think the problem with reviewing actual play and the problem with like talking about skill in this is that there is no other art form where the skill of it is so closely tied to like you as a person. Like when you're playing chess, you recognize like, hey, this, I might not be good at this, but it doesn't reflect on me as a person. And even acting, you are, it is a skill of embodying a character. There is a portion of actual play that is the like off mic bits that is kind of inherent to the system of how you talk not in character that is closer to you as a person than it is to performance. Like there are people who say, I love Galear from fantasy high and there are some people who say, I love Brennan. And it's, there is always that duality, that like parasociality that to review it, to criticize it gets closer than I think most other art forms to criticizing a person or at least it, that may not be true, but it'll feel closer to that, which is why it's just tougher to do. Rate my professor, Motherfucker. I was going to say. Yeah. Oh, well, actually, no. 100%. That is a great analogy. I have to kind of disagree. Oh, sorry. No, no, disagree. I have to kind of disagree with this. I like, I, I just think that like, there are so many art forms that when you get reviewed, it is going after you as a person, like I feel like like musicians probably feel exactly that way. I was thinking about that. Oh, that's fair. That's fair. A musician that has written their heartbreak into a song and then someone says, that song's a piece of shit. Like, fuck, that sucks. That's got to feel like you're having your person attacked. Can I also think that a thing that is difficult about actual playing, maybe why it is tougher to talk about skill and craft is because the, the highest end product, like the dimension 20s, the critical role, look remarkably close to what, right? I guess like more in a critical role since I'm just like what you are seeing, looks remarkably close to what you can achieve at your own table, like it is, the classic branding was friends at a table. You say, hey, I've got friends at a table that it, there is a wide gap between those things. Those are professional voice actors. They've been doing this for a very long time, but on the surface level, it feels very close, whereas if I see someone play guitar, I inherently know that if I pick up a guitar, I won't know where to put my fingers. It feels like I know the steps for what critical role is doing even though I don't. I think that that is, first of all, I hear what you're saying, Brian, and I think I agree with Elliot here too, in that I'll go even one further, like rate my professor, musicians. We can say that this is more personal, but I don't know if we'd be right in saying, like, if you're, if you're an electrical engineer who's devoted your entire life to doing that, you get a chance at your dream job, you make a project, and the, the reviewer for it looks at it and says, this is fucking garbage. Do you even, how, where did you study? I don't think you would be like, well, he doesn't know that I'm delighted to hang out with. I'm not like, okay, okay, I think you'd be a personal apocalypse. I think that you absolutely sink your identity into whatever you give your short human life to, whatever pursuit that is. I think that, for better or for worse, it's hard to, I do that myself of being like, I think everyone has to do some work about, like, remember that who you are is as much about your community, your family, your friends, what you're doing for your neighborhood, what you're doing for the world around you, rather than just this, like, whatever, maybe your profession or your hobby is. But like, I think that there's a, to the, to the latter point, I think you were making about the, sorry, I've completely lost, that was the first one I wanted to make and I will surrender. I forgot the second one was going to say, but that's okay because I want to call M up on something. We'll see, this is a multifaceted point and we'll see if I can, okay, so but if we, talking about the idea of actual play as teaching tool, if one of the things we're talking about here is that an element of running a game or even obviously being a player that is not really discussed is the fact that it's social is the, is the charisma and, but there's so much tucked up into that word that includes like, when I'm GMing, one of the things that I watch out for that I don't know if I've seen talked about anywhere that I'm sure people have. Of course, they have is the hyper vigilance I have to display as a GM to check when one player steps on another player's idea or when one player takes the partner direction that someone else isn't with and you're looking at for those like micro facial expressions that show someone's annoyed or frustrated, the will like fill an evening and really balloon out. And for that to become like an aspect of actual play that people talk about, I think what has to lead the charge here is criticism that talks about those moments in action. Criticism that really drills down on, hey, these two players had a really uncomfortable moment and we're pissing each other off or, you know, I think that the energy in this room changed at this point. I mean, maybe, maybe I haven't read enough criticism and this is part of it, but it makes me wonder if for actual play to become a better teaching tool, when we're discussing it, we need to spearhead a kind of criticism that engages with what is happening socially in the room. And this is about, this is the moment very fittingly about an hour into the record where we are going to, uh, behind the paywall, yeah, so, uh, it's just going to release a string of explosives to what's made as soon as, as soon as the mother fucker. And that is the end of this Patreon preview. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you want to hear the remaining just under an hour of this conversation, head to patreon.com/manycited media. Just 5 bucks to join and get access to this episode. If you've been getting something out of this show, we would really appreciate your support. Thanks so much for listening, bye. You can make minis in a variety of materials, including premium, unpainted plastic and color standees and they even offer downloadable model files so you can 3D print your unique designs at home. Visit Hero Forge.com to send your players a digital gift card and let them build the heroes of their dreams.