[SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome to Table Talk, a show where I chat with other creators in the TTRPG space about how they run their tables.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Danger'd Andrews, the host and GM of D&D Arc, and joining us at the table today is the host and GM of the actual play podcast Side Character Quest.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tie.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hello.
[SPEAKER_01]: How are you doing today?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm doing great.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks again for jumping into chat with me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I'm looking forward to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I always like the opportunity to talk about actual play stuff with other people that make actual play stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's super fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's always a great time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So to get a started and just get the ball roll and can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your show, side character quest and your history and the TTRPG community.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the first time I played any TTRPGs was I played a game of D&D with my brother when we were like I was maybe nine I tried he had me try to run it for him and it went so badly I didn't touch D&D again for I don't know a decade probably friend of mine college invited me to a game with like eight or nine people oh
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow, that's a huge group.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was too many, but it fell off and ended up being a wonderful group of people that I still play with today, but not all those eight, but like a lot of them are still around.
[SPEAKER_01]: Shout out to Ely and everybody else at that table.
[SPEAKER_01]: You guys are great.
[SPEAKER_01]: After that, I eventually started GMing for them more regularly as, you know, time went on, and I started listening to actual play podcasts.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know exactly when I started that, but it would have been before the community had decided to consistently call the genre actual play.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't remember what people called it before, but I remember there was something else, and I remember I didn't like actual play.
[SPEAKER_01]: I liked the other thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: For our show, I got stuck in the habit of calling it real play before I, that's what it was before I got in the bandwagon of actual play and we were into deep by that point to where it was just muscle memory.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we've stuck with real play, but that's not what the genre's called anymore, so.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but I listen to a bunch of other shows and at some point I just I had the thought of like I'm not getting any better as a DM Because I'm not able to like listen back to my mistakes.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not able to like hear what is going on and I kind of had the thought of like I don't know that I could make a show as good as the people that I'm listening to But I could make a show as good as their first episode
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's, that's what got me started and got me going and since then I've made over 100 episodes of Side Character Quest and I have guessed it on a few other shows, done a tiny bit of voice acting and podcasting with other genres and I don't do any video streaming just because that is not a thing that I watch so I don't think I would do a good job making it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, hey, congrats on over a hundred episodes.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're narrowing in on that front on our side.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our first season of D&D Ark was technically 81, but we ended right at 80.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're in between seasons right now, but we're not going to be very far away from a hundred official episodes in terms of side content and bonus like mini campaigns and one shots and stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've definitely passed the 100 mark, but we haven't gotten to the official 100 like episode episode market.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if you include all of the little bonus episodes that I've done Q&A's announcement episodes, which definitely don't count, things like that, my actual files uploaded is closer to 140, 150.
[SPEAKER_01]: But like I said, a lot of those are dramatically not episodes of actual foot.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah,
[SPEAKER_00]: So all of that in mind, can you give us a little bit of a groundwork of what side character quest is as your show?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, side character quest, the idea was it is so hard to get the group of players together.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I am I'm very bad at sticking to a project.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I thought if I'm going to make this, I needed to be something that like I don't need to rely on other people sticking around.
[SPEAKER_01]: SQ side character quest.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is an actual play anthology series that follows one character for a handful of episodes, and then it will jump to another character, usually played by a different player for a few more episodes, but all of these stories are taking place in a single shared setting, a single shared world.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so,
[SPEAKER_01]: You can just listen to a single one of these quests and have a great time.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can skip around if you want, but if you listen to it all together, then you will discover a interwoven mesh of narrative that is for me to keep track of everything at times overwhelming, but it's still super fun and great.
[SPEAKER_01]: And um,
[SPEAKER_01]: I occasionally hear from people who, you know, started with episode 50 and then went down to like episode one, but then jumped back ahead 60 and they'll like tell me their thoughts as they go along.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I, it's so fun hearing people do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I mentioned my friend Eli earlier, who is one of the early guests on the show.
[SPEAKER_01]: He finds that inferiority like just.
[SPEAKER_01]: Start for an episode one.
[SPEAKER_01]: What are you doing?
[SPEAKER_01]: Just start from mud and go forward.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I love that the show allows you to jump around.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, being an anthology series, there's a lot more flexibility there to be able to do that as a listener.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's such a fascinating format and I love how unique an approach that is to do just a one on one session.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a far cry away from the group of eight or nine that you started with.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what kind of unique considerations do you have to keep in mind as a GM
[SPEAKER_01]: one on one requires more energy from both people involved.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't really notice this when you're used to playing with a large group, and maybe the GM does notice.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the players don't really notice that normally if you're playing at a table every once in a while, you get to sit back and watch the other people interact.
[SPEAKER_01]: in a one on one show, you never get those breaks.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the only breaks you're going to get are the ones where somebody says, all right, we're ending this scene and now we're going to take a breather for a moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that's the number one thing that you need to think about that you'll have to get used to versus the normal group team.
[SPEAKER_01]: Other things that you, you can think about are it's so much easier to reschedule things.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that allows for so much flexibility.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had a player recently who we hadn't played in like, you know, three weeks.
[SPEAKER_01]: And like the day before they're like my internet's out.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, that's fine.
[SPEAKER_01]: We can reschedule for two days later.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's fine.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it's, it's not a big deal.
[SPEAKER_01]: You gave me a bunch of dates.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we aren't having to work with four or five other people, blah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you get into those moving past the sort of logistical things, we get into things that are more specific for different game systems.
[SPEAKER_01]: So D&D is where we've played most of our our stuff until recently and D&D is a game that assumes that you're working in a party.
[SPEAKER_01]: And combat is, I think, more fun with fewer people because it is easier to keep the pacing energetic and lively because you're just bouncing back and forth, one person to the next.
[SPEAKER_01]: However, it's also so much more potentially deadly if a person gets knocked down than like, what are you going to do?
[SPEAKER_01]: So you have to be either okay with that or you have to plan it into
[SPEAKER_01]: come back up without it feeling cheap to the listener, you know, and I had more I wanted to add on that, but now it has fled my mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's fine.
[SPEAKER_00]: You, you laid out a lot of really good points.
[SPEAKER_00]: The,
[SPEAKER_00]: scheduling is such a huge one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: The core team for D&D arc is a party of five and then we will very regularly bring in a guest.
[SPEAKER_00]: We did experiment very briefly within the span of the show.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are two episodes back to back where we did solo adventures and it was partially our way of logistically getting around a scheduling problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mm-hmm.
[SPEAKER_00]: but it was also a good point in the story for me to be able to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had a narrative excuse to split the party, have everybody do a self-contained solo adventure.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a very interesting experience and Jordan who plays the Wolfman in our show.
[SPEAKER_00]: She brings up that solo session all the time on her shortlist of favorite things that she's ever done for the show.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, so it's, it is really interesting how much more depth you can mine out of a single character from a solo encounter.
[SPEAKER_01]: Totally.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm curious, was there anything about it that really just took you by surprise that shocked you about it?
[SPEAKER_01]: Either in the perspective of like something so, so great or so hard, something a difficulty that you were struck with.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were a couple of things, like there were a couple of different things going on there because it was also a small section where we jumped to pretty much purely theater of the mind as opposed to working with maps and figures as references.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, that change also impacted a lot.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, it sits a little more vividly in my head and I know in some of the other players' heads.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: It varied a little bit player to player.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was I was a lot more free to take bigger swings and do more interesting stuff other thing that caught me by surprise and this was less to do with the one on one format and more to do with how I ran it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I basically had a similar starting scenario for everyone that then branched off into their own character specific thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: By the time I got to like number four or five, the starting scenario that was shared with everybody had gotten so old for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had to repeat it so many times and I was so completely done with the setup for that split by the time that we had gotten into the actual character centric bits of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I also learned a lot about my individual players.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: that was a bit of a surprise.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were some that really took to that format and others that didn't take to it as naturally.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I learned a lot about what each player specifically needs and how I can best support them in the show.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there were some where like, if I give you a really structured experience, I know that you will be able to follow the breadcrumbs pretty well.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I give you more of a sandbox in the freedom to do your own thing, you will thrive a little bit more, etc.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I learned bits and pieces about what each player specifically needed for me to tailor to their personal player strengths.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have noticed that as well, playing with us that there are people I've had on the show who are very, very used to being the support at the table and I don't mean the support like the healer or the control class or whatever.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean the support in the sense of I'm sitting in the background, I'm not making a lot of the decisions and then I'm going to
[SPEAKER_01]: come up when there is a relevant moment, whether that be like I'm going to come in with the joke or I'm going to come in with the cool strategic idea at the last second or whatever they prefer to sit in the background and wait for the opportunity.
[SPEAKER_01]: in a big collage of people, ensemble of people, that's what I wanted, rather than being the star of the show all the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's very interesting realizing that with somebody because they often don't realize it about themselves, I think.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I won't recognize it even if I've played with them a million times.
[SPEAKER_01]: until we're in that moment, and then you have other people who I've played with, you know, many times in our used to, again, being more supportive background to table people, and then when it's just them, bang, like they just come out and they shine and they're such like a star of the moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm like, this is amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm so happy to see you here.
[SPEAKER_00]: it's fascinating and you really quickly learn who the more proactive players are in that kind of a setting in situation.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that it gives the opportunity for those different sides of the characters to shine.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a special consideration of when it's just two people, you are the entire audience for the other person.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that I have learned from making the show to be a motive and to react to the things that people are doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: When someone does a cool thing, I need to make it clear to them that, yes, that was cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because nobody, there's someone else here that is going to react to that cool thing that they did.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's all on me to make sure that they know that they are awesome.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is such a good point.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is so insanely valuable, bring that to a bigger table to keeping that same level of enthusiasm is such a gift to the overall energy of the table.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a couple of people on our team and guests too.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a couple of people that we've brought on as guests who
[SPEAKER_00]: are very emotive and very reactive and who have been self-conscious about that of themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm really trying to emphasize like, no, you don't understand what a gift you are giving me as a GM and as an editor, your reactivity really helps with the energy carries the momentum forward and does wonders for the overall group morale.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is such an important aspect that I think
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like as an editor, you have probably run into the same thing that I have as editor and GM, where someone makes a joke and somebody at the table laughs, but holds it back because they know they're talking to a microphone, so they just kind of make a silent.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm like, no, laugh out loud.
[SPEAKER_01]: People think to know that you think this is funny.
[SPEAKER_01]: Otherwise, it's gonna sound like an awkward silence and that this joke did not land in the room.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's okay, laugh, please.
[SPEAKER_00]: I imagine it's a little bit harder for you to get around since you're running with a smaller group of people and since you're constantly rotating people around.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you're with the same group for a while, you can kind of encourage that behavior and coax it out of them a bit more.
[SPEAKER_00]: I also have the benefit of, since I have thousands of hours of recordings of everybody, I've made a little bank of stock last of everybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, that's really good.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's really good.
[SPEAKER_00]: My very rarely need to use them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's usually only if there's a thing where like, oh, the noise suppression cut off the laugh or there's, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a thing here where the timing wasn't right or this person, there's one or two times in the show where I've edited in a person who was not there live.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mmm.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's kind of where I would bring in a lot of the manufactured laughs and reactions to things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gotcha.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is insanely helpful as an editing tool to have really good laughter.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a great way to cover up editing seams.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it sucks the energy out of the room when there's a good joke that no one reacts to.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: And even if, you know, in the room, everybody is like, ha ha ha.
[SPEAKER_01]: Making these silent laughs.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you can see it in their face.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you just know, this is not gonna work in the audio.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's gonna feel terrible, gosh.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have one of my players specifically started off being more of a silent laughter and reactor, who has now gotten to the point where he intentionally blows out his microphone with laughter constantly, and I'm much prefer that problem to the other one.
[SPEAKER_01]: I agree, I always help people like, you know, if you're reacting too much, I can always cut it out, deleting it is so much easier.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know about you, but like I am, it's a symptom of the fact that it's a two person show.
[SPEAKER_01]: I am meticulous with editing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I'm going to go over this and I'm going to make sure that there is no cross talk or the right amount of cross talk.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I, it deleting a little bit is totally fine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: I described myself as a fairly merciless editor.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our final product is usually almost half of what the raw recording is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yep.
[SPEAKER_01]: We rarely get quite that bad.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not bad.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's not a problem.
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, I think that a lot of that comes from the fact that there's fewer people.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's less chance of tangents, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's definitely a lot of it is logistical things, and it mostly comes down to cutting out silences, cutting out repeats, arms, us, stutters, things like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's more than one late game boss fight where I've cut multiple rounds of combat out of the finish fight.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh man, I don't know if I've ever cut rounds of combat, but I've definitely cut out so much dead air, just people looking up their moves and stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have a ton of combat on the show.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that across 100 episodes, I countered up maybe like eight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: That makes a lot of sense, given that it's a one on one.
[SPEAKER_00]: So earlier you mentioned that you primarily play with D&D, but that you've brought in a few other systems.
[SPEAKER_00]: What are some of the other systems you've explored and how have those systems factor into your decision making and how to set things up?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: So first of all, if anybody ever decides to go down this path of doing
[SPEAKER_01]: experiment with more systems earlier than I did.
[SPEAKER_01]: It will make your life so much easier.
[SPEAKER_01]: If for no other reason, then it sets the expectation for the audience and they won't be like surprise and upset when you're switched to anything else.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I haven't gotten bad feedback from trying other things, but it is a thing that I worry about that I think about.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I started with D&D 5E and a few episodes in, I tried doing monster of the week and it was the first time I had ever run a powered by the apocalypse game like monster of the week and I did not understand what they were supposed to be and
[SPEAKER_01]: I have heard from many people that that is one of their favorite quests, but I've heard from people that know how those systems are supposed to run, that are like, I'm enjoying this, you are like, not getting it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now that I know more about powered by the apocalypse and how it's really built to lean into tropes in this way, taking monster of the week,
[SPEAKER_01]: And not really changing the mechanics at all and then just plopping it into a fantasy world originally built for Dungeons and Dragons doesn't really work it feels wrong and off in ways that I did not have the experience or knowledge to know how to deal with.
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, people love that quest, so whatever, but other systems that I eventually got around to try.
[SPEAKER_01]: The whole reason I went into that was to say that that scared me off of trying other systems for a long time.
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought I need to be experienced with a game before I bring it on to the show, and since I couldn't ever get anyone to try anything besides D&D, I never really got any more experience since I didn't try another thing for ages and ages and ages.
[SPEAKER_01]: um, I eventually did get to do other things.
[SPEAKER_01]: I did a Halloween special where we played don't play this game by the company of a parable games who specialize in horror, and that one was like this found footage
[SPEAKER_01]: audio drama almost, but it still included the actual play elements.
[SPEAKER_01]: Super fun, hour-long horror movie, basically.
[SPEAKER_01]: Very, very cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: But then returning to like the world that the rest of the show is set in, I've recently gone a chance to play a lot of blades in the dark, and as that led to me making a custom forged in the dark game for SQ.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to experiment more with not using D&D for everything because I didn't particularly like how the combat worked.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't like how D&D handles magic for this setting and several other reasons that I wanted to move away from D&D.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like,
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me try making a game that is designed from the ground up so that it fits the setting and fits the tone and fits the one person format and so on and so forth.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I took blades in the dark and modified it.
[SPEAKER_01]: heavily to work so that if when people do the character creation in the system that I make, the character they end up making, and I've had people test this multiple times, the characters people end up making just fit in the setting.
[SPEAKER_01]: They fit.
[SPEAKER_01]: They work right out the bat.
[SPEAKER_01]: I look at him like, ah, that's somebody that could be in this world.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the problems I would run into with D&D is that people have such strong expectations for D&D.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have such strong expectations for Tolkien's fantasy that has this sort of like superhero action hero flavor to it, that people would often like make characters, pitch characters to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm like, that works, but we're going to have to do a lot of tweaking to make it so that it doesn't feel incredibly out of place.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I hate telling people no at the very beginning, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: It sucks.
[SPEAKER_01]: It sets things off with bad at person pressure.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's really interesting, and I think it is a good point about how these different systems are built for different tones and settings with all of that in mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: D&D, blessing and curse about the system is how modular and versatile it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And because it can be so open-ended in the character creation and people do have so many preconceived notions, it is really important to make sure that the characters are cohesive to the world that you build.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd say that note, just a very, very short anecdote.
[SPEAKER_01]: I, one time, had somebody present to me a character concept, and I was looking over at the different things they had written in this backstory, and I looked over it, and I started writing up, like,
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, we're gonna have to change this.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're gonna have to change this, because that doesn't fit the canon.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's already been pre-established by this other person's episode, which you haven't gotten to listen to, because it's not even released yet.
[SPEAKER_01]: So how would you even know about this?
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's unfair of me to expect you to know about this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was writing up this long, anxiety-producing email.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I just thought, this part of their backstory, it is never gonna come up in the episode.
[SPEAKER_01]: Adalt, there's no chance that will ever come up.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't need to write this.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't need to like, I don't need to shoot this person down for something that will never never come up.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the thing is the tone of what they wanted to do still fit and still worked.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just that some of the literal actual facts that they were presenting don't work, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a fun point.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of similar things that I've bumped into.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm in kind of a unique situation with Archo because we are kind of sort of going with a pre-established world that we're stepping into, like universal monsters situation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, universal monsters.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our main party is the Wolfman, the Frankenstein monster, the invisible man, the mummy, and the Phantom of the Opera.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, when I bring guests in, they're stepping into the shoes of pre-established characters like, okay, I need a guest to come into play, Dr. Jacqueline Mr. Hyde, so they build a version of the character that fits within the mechanics of D&D, but with that pre-established backstory, or like, I need a Victor Frankenstein, so I work with them to what does your version and your take on this character look like?
[SPEAKER_00]: You still have to fit within the bounds of
[SPEAKER_00]: The book that we're pulling from or the movie can and that we're emulating and it has to fit in This weird hodgepodge world that we've set up, but with freedom to decide what does your take on this character look like?
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a few points where I bumped into exactly that situation of like well the lore that you're establishing Contradix with some stuff we've set up, but it's never gonna come up, so yeah
[SPEAKER_01]: And if it does, you know, then it's the sort of thing that you can say during the episode, and it'll get deleted, where you just say, oh, by the way, I need to just redo that line it because you referenced this location and in our canon, Transylvania was nuked in like a war of, you know, whatever.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you can't say that you were there last week.
[SPEAKER_00]: The exact situation that comes to mind is we had one of our guest characters,
[SPEAKER_00]: and she wanted to bring up a thing involving a bit of a history with the brides of Dracula, which had a couple sessions previously all died.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a similar situation of like, okay, well, this isn't out yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you wouldn't have the context to know that, but I have to retcon this because we just killed them off.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you bring them up and giving them different names
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, this is never going to come up and then it did, but yeah, but I mean, all also that like it's one of those things where there's so many of those little bits of information that there's no way you would be able to think of all of them and if you did, what are you going to write all of these down and have somebody do like you want to have this guest on, are you going to have them do 10 hours of homework reading all of your Lord memorizing it just so they can come on for a, you know, two hour guest spot that's ridiculous.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's way too much.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a thing that I frequently bump into whenever I bring guests on, which now that we're in between seasons, I've got somewhat of a fresh slate for our second season.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that was always a huge consideration of how much information do you strictly need to know?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't overwhelm you with lore or require you to listen to 80 episodes of backstory.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the fun things that I end up doing, because as you use an anthology series, I'm having to bring in a new guest every three to six episodes is usually the length of a quest.
[SPEAKER_01]: One thing I'll do is just say, this quest is set in a different location.
[SPEAKER_01]: Remember, when I mentioned
[SPEAKER_01]: This place, this city, a few episodes ago, that's where this next quest is gonna be set.
[SPEAKER_01]: And since we've mentioned that city and listeners have like sort of a sense of, oh, there is this thing there, or there's this little bit of culture there, this little tidbit, but we've never actually met anybody from there.
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't know anything like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: The new listener, or the new players, sorry, the guest player, doesn't have to have like a glossary of all of the pre-established NPCs.
[SPEAKER_01]: everybody.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love getting to jump around the world and like highlight whatever area feels new and exciting and different and that doesn't require the guest player to do a bunch of homework.
[SPEAKER_00]: a thing that I'm looking forward to for our second season.
[SPEAKER_00]: So our second season is going to be set in America in the 1930s and it's going to focus on cryptids.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the big benefits of that it's a challenge and a benefit is
[SPEAKER_00]: how much bigger the map is of doing the continental United States, which gives me a little bit more flexibility, a little bit more freedom for guests to not have to know anything about any of the other guests because everything's going to be so spread out.
[SPEAKER_00]: The amount of information that each guest needs to enter with is significantly smaller than what we did in the first
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going with much more open-ended, folklore and characterization, so there's a lot less pre-established information about the character suite that we're working with.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a lot more freedom for guests and players to interpret the characters in their own unique way.
[SPEAKER_01]: Ah, that's that's fun.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's exciting.
[SPEAKER_01]: Are they are that your player is going to be playing the cryptids?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, so that's a party for season two is going to be Bigfoot, Mothman, the Jersey Devil, the Roswell Alien and the Loch Ness Monster.
[SPEAKER_01]: monster.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is a great button to that because, because how?
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure you can't say at this point, but like, wow, that's amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's some fun challenges that come with having an actual dinosaur on the party.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I love that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that's so great.
[SPEAKER_00]: but yeah, it's been a ton of fun to plan and prep for part of the thing about the setting being so much bigger and so much more spread out is I can be a lot more insular with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in doing side character quests, what kinds of things have you learned from doing so many one-on-one interactions with players?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's affected how you've approached being a player or a GM with a bigger group.
[SPEAKER_00]: have you been able to take things like that extra level of energy or reactivity like we brought up earlier and are there any unique things that strengths in one setting might be a liability in the other or like a unique aspect of the gameplay that you've learned from doing a one-on-one that wouldn't have come up in a larger group.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is now an added benefit.
[SPEAKER_01]: All name a liability first, one thing that I think anybody who is a GM who then pivot to being a player is probably accustomed to what I'm about to say, this is not new to them, but always it hard going from a one on one game to a group game and not feeling like you are stepping over everybody else.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not only is it difficult to avoid stepping on other people, but it's difficult to not feel like you are stepping over people, even when nobody else feels like that at the table.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was in a three-person game last weekend, and the GM asked the two of us a question to establish the scene, and I started to talk, and then I was like, oh, well, I don't want to take the lead from you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if you want to step over here.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know I'm getting in your way because I'm just used to being at a two-person group,
[SPEAKER_01]: It's so, so easy to feel like you're just stepping on everybody when you're, when you get into that situation again.
[SPEAKER_01]: As for good things, let's think about the good things that come from this.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the good things we mentioned earlier at the idea of being a good audience member.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I might have always been a thing that I liked to do, but I don't think that it was a thing that I consciously did until after running SQ.
[SPEAKER_01]: comment on and thank me for in group games saying like hey the reason I want you I'm going to invite you to this other table this other group to do this thing is because I liked how much you were like a good audience member when you weren't playing when you weren't the person doing the thing some of that I think comes from the experience of just running a podcast as opposed to
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, I think that doing one on one games might have helped me work on pacing, I think that one of the skills that are the hardest to learn in any TGRPG is learning how to pace scenes to make it so that it's not dragging so that everyone is entertained and moving and like thinking and is not just kind of like sitting in the background, not doing anything.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that better now at figuring out no correction, not better at figuring out, I'm better at asking players what they want from a quest.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have learned over the years that I am terrible at knowing what other people want.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm so, so bad at it, so I really, really absolutely make a point to ask people for feedback and to ask people before we start playing, like doing a session zero, whether that be, you know, a one-on-one in-person happening all at once or asynchronously through a series of DMs, direct messages, not Dungeon Masters.
[SPEAKER_01]: asking people what they are expecting from a game, what they are excited about with their character, all those things are so important to making a satisfying game experience and making it so that like you, the person running the game are not frustrated, splitting your wheels, like I presented you with this plot hook.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why are you taking this plot hook at a
[SPEAKER_01]: but you ask somebody ahead of time, like, what is it that you will find interesting?
[SPEAKER_01]: What is it that your character will find interesting?
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me know so that we can get moving.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that doing a one on one game, it felt safer and more obvious to ask these direct questions, whereas when you're in a group, even if it's a group of people you love, people that you're very comfortable with, it can feel weird to like,
[SPEAKER_01]: ask for feedback from all of them all at once about what is it that you want and it's like oh well what person A wants isn't what person D wants and is kind of related to what person C wants but not really when it's just one person it's such a great practice for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is a phenomenal skill.
[SPEAKER_00]: very important, but a little bit of a cheat code that the player that I brought earlier Jordan to play as the Wolfman, she GMs some of our home games off-mic, and a thing that she's clocked with a different group that we play with.
[SPEAKER_00]: figure out the types of video games and entertainment that a particular person likes and you can usually figure out the kinds of gameplay that will appeal to them in a TTRPG setting.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not bulletproof but more often than not that's been a really helpful way to look at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it saves so much time
[SPEAKER_00]: a lot of that does come down to knowing what to ask and how to ask it and a lot of the times that players also have to learn a little bit too how to vocalize what they want.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know for my players a lot of them were kind of figuring out in real time what it is they wanted out of the game and so that was something that was a little bit difficult for some of them to be able to vocalize of like I'll know it when I see it but I don't know how to explain what I'm looking for from this
[SPEAKER_01]: And also on the topic of getting this feedback from people, something I've been experimenting with on the most recent quest of SQ, the quest following a character named Sierra after every play session.
[SPEAKER_01]: We recorded a stars and wishes session.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, so for anybody listening that doesn't know what that is, uh, star, um, basically something that you enjoyed about the session, a wish, something you'd like to see in a future play session, and the process of doing it, and then the process of maybe able to go back and listen to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: has been very, very helpful for me to see the value of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And to see, I think the limitations at times, because I think it's very easy for that to become overly focused on positive stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I would rather have that than have no feedback.
[SPEAKER_01]: So...
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that is perfectly fair.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have just recently started going through and doing debriefs of all of our bonus content and just because of the realities of the production schedule, we've had to move too fast to really be able to like, stop and debrief after them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's very easy for it to become just everyone patting each other on the back.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it is better than the alternative of having nothing at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's still a lot to be able to learn from those debriefs.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know that that's part of the appeal of stars and wishes as opposed to something like roses and thorns is being more positively focused.
[SPEAKER_00]: People are likely going to be less hesitant than they might otherwise be to Yes critique you to your face.
[SPEAKER_01]: It also helps create a positive atmosphere so that if you're somebody that's a very anxious person or you weren't sure how other people were feeling, it gives you a little bit of like reassurance that lets you hit the ground running next time you play, which, you know, some people, I've talked to some people who are like, I don't need this, I don't need this at all and I'm like, okay, go ahead, have confidence.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have the lead for you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's definitely like as a framing device for a specific type of person.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a lot easier to say, Oh, I liked this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would like to see this other thing in the future, or I would like more of this thing that we touched on briefly, than I want less of this, or I did not like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, definitely.
[SPEAKER_00]: So as we are coming to the end of my list of questions, I want to throw it back to a thing that you brought up earlier of having some friends and some guests who really insist on listening to your show chronologically, others who jump around, what would your personal recommendation be for somebody blindly coming in to side character quest on where they should start or what some
[SPEAKER_01]: to a P's Eli, I will tell you, just start with episode one, what's wrong with you?
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you want to come in, getting to see where the show is currently at, I would highly suggest
[SPEAKER_01]: I had on a person that I knew from other actual players.
[SPEAKER_01]: I knew was in like a larger show than SQ.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I figured there would be people that would come on starting there just to hear him play.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I wanted to make sure that they had a good experience, even if they had never listened to the show before.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I designed that quest to be a perfect entry point.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't need to know anything else about the show,
[SPEAKER_01]: Those few episodes, and that will tell you a complete story.
[SPEAKER_01]: However, if you like it and have a good time, there's all these little juicy nuggets, these little like, ooh, I'm interested in learning more about that NPC.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me go to this quest, or I'm interested in learning about that NPC.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me go to that quest.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a great rewarding quest for people that either got there naturally by listening in order or who are starting there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, episode 101, Fairhons the Abbey.
[SPEAKER_01]: uh, starring um, Joshua or uh, the podcast sneak attack and Titans of Altaira.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, awesome.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for dropping that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting with the different guests that I've interviewed on this show, how people's opinions differ about where the best entry point for their shows.
[SPEAKER_00]: I even for the serialized ones, it's easy to say, start at the beginning for bigger and longer running shows.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those opinions can vary somewhat.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know for our show, I usually say for us for people to start with our side content and do our one shots and bonus campaigns.
[SPEAKER_00]: As a way to see if like, does our sense of humor and our storytelling sensibilities appeal to you?
[SPEAKER_00]: If you don't enjoy our side content, you are not going to like our main show.
[SPEAKER_00]: so that is usually my go to for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even for people jumping into the main show, I am hyper critical of our early content because of how much we've grown and developed.
[SPEAKER_00]: The quality is significantly higher later in the show than it is earlier on.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I have my own opinions about
[SPEAKER_00]: where to start.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I tried to make it as easy as possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: We did right before the finale.
[SPEAKER_00]: We did a couple of recap episodes that are just clip shows of all of the plot important things you need to know to catch up and recap before the finale.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I did one up to the mid season and then one up to the finale finale.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would probably recommend for new listeners to start with a recap and then jump into the middle.
[SPEAKER_00]: But for something that is more flexible like your anthology, it's great that you've got a good entry point like episode 101 FairHarts.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm curious if anybody else, fitting when listening, you listener, do you do this when I come across a podcast that is new to me?
[SPEAKER_01]: If I'm considering starting from beginning and moving forward, let's say that's an 80 episode of podcast.
[SPEAKER_01]: I will hop over to episode 60, move over to like 20 minutes into the episode, and listen to like five minutes of it, just to kind of get a sense of like, okay, is the audio quality bearable and is the vibe between the people good.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if those things are good, then cool, I'll hop into either their intro episode that they've recommended or I'll hop into the first episode.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I don't mind listening to something with that audio.
[SPEAKER_01]: I really enjoy the experience of watching something improve and quality over time.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's so fun, but I do like to know that it will eventually become a more pleasant listening experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was one of the issues I ran into with critical role is that critical role is designed from the ground up assuming that you're watching, and I knew I was never going to watch it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was only ever going to listen to it, and it is hard to listen to that because of the sheer number of people.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not sure it got to critical role because
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a reality of the format.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a really cool show made by great people, and I watched the cartoon recently, and I had a lot of fun with it, but yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Clearly, they had some critical role.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I have really struggled to get into them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are a tempo of the community for a reason, and we as a format owe a lot to them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: doing a live stream format is very different from doing an audio only podcast format.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like you said, the sheer size of their cast, the duration of the shows and just how much of a backlog they have.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've heard people occasionally say, like, oh, I just want to listen to a
[SPEAKER_00]: I really like agonize over trying to cut down our show as much as possible to try to keep.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bar has shifted with time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I used to like really stress over, keep them to an hour or under, keep them like shit maybe just over an hour and then that slowly crapped up to.
[SPEAKER_00]: As long as we're under two hours, we're okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I tend to record episodes between an hour and an hour 45 and then they'll get cut down to like 50 minutes to an hour 20 and it really, that length really just depends on what the feel is for the episode.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of them, some along, some of them short.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're all good.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that basically comes to the end of my questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are there any other miscellaneous things, any topics that we didn't cover that you want to make sure we touch on or anything that you
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like we could continue this conversation for a super long time, and I'm trying not to open up a can of worms, but I'm just going to throw out, I do a lot of sound design for SQ, and I think that typically when people say sound design for actual plays, they're referring to adding lots of musical ambiance and certain down-effects of cues.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't do music in the show or various reasons, but what I do instead is I try to do audio, so it sounds kind of like a documentary sound crew is there.
[SPEAKER_01]: So like it's like there's the diagetic movements of people and I think it sounds really cool and relatively unique in the world of actual play.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I just, that's just a thing that I would love to talk about for an hour if I could.
[SPEAKER_00]: I could go on for a very long time about my sound design philosophies and how they've changed with time too, because as the show's been going on, I've learned a lot of lessons about where the line is for how much is too much.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, really on.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would try to be really restrained in the music and sound effects stuff that I would do mostly just from lack of resources because I try to commission a bunch of original music.
[SPEAKER_00]: I try as little as possible to rely on pre existing stuff and try to get unique music for our show.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that gets expensive.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I also knew early on anything that I add a sound effect to now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am anchored for the rest of the campaign to consistently using that sound effect for that thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, a certain spells, I never gave a sound effect for Eldrich Blast, for example, because I knew this is going to come up constantly.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I do this now, I will always have to do this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, so I had to be very selective over what I was using when then I started to go overboard once we had longer time in between episode releases and my reach hasn't quite exceeded my grasp, but it's getting close.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's one of the reasons I never started doing music for the show is because I knew I would really, really obsessive over it, but another thing that I have been very strict on myself about is no footsteps, because once you open up that can of worms, oh fucking footsteps, they are the most
[SPEAKER_01]: difficult thing to make natural and they could be in every scene.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yep.
[SPEAKER_01]: They could be with every movement and how do you decide, oh man, it's so it's it's it's overwhelming.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are currently putting out a one shot that we did in the kids on bike system that was a Agatha Christie style who done it, Mystery.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's kind of more where I've opened the can of worms for footsteps, mostly just because it's a very dialogue heavy thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's not much actual action going on, but that's also where I've bumped into the most the question
[SPEAKER_00]: And I, in my first pass on editing that, had to pull back substantially because my initial instincts for how to sound design it was way too much for what it was.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's very easy to have a million things.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was about to fall down another tangent but I'm gonna, I'm reminding myself that I do need to wrap up.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, we'll go ahead and wrap this up here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Before we go, though, can you remind us one more time where we can find your shows and projects?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, side character quest, you will find those three words on all of your podcast apps.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are also on YouTube, but just remember that the show is audio only.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're not going to get any special video from that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do have the show broken down into playlists on there.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you want to follow one story that way,
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know that anybody's ever done that, but it's there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you can also go to sidecharacterquest.com, which has links to everything that I've mentioned.
[SPEAKER_01]: Plus, it has a audio trailer.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's beautiful artwork by my sister, who's an amazing professional artist.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a lore library, which has a bunch of different things about the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's cast bios, all kinds of stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: So
[SPEAKER_01]: Sidecharacterquest.com or just look up Sidecharacterquest wherever you listen to podcasts.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of those links will be in the description.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just want to one more time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for coming on to chat with me.
[SPEAKER_00]: This has been awesome.
[SPEAKER_01]: This has been super fun.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for having me on.
[SPEAKER_01]: I really appreciate it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, it's been great.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
[SPEAKER_00]: And thank all of you for listening.
[SPEAKER_00]: One more time, everybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm danger dangers.
[SPEAKER_00]: The host and GM of D&D.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been chatting with Thai.
[SPEAKER_00]: The host and GM of side character quest.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this has been Tatl talk.
[SPEAKER_00]: and I hope you enjoy what we brought to the table.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Table Talk, created hosted and edited by myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Danger Dan Jers, with artwork by Jordan Nelson.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our guest this episode was Ty from Side Character Quest.
[SPEAKER_00]: Links to his work can be found in the episode description.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're interested in being a guest on the show, reach out to us at dndarkpodcast at gmail.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our theme song in Outro was created by Jeremy Volucci.
[SPEAKER_00]: Check out more of his works on Instagram at Jeremy Volucci underscore wreck of time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time we have a guest take a seat at the table.