In this episode, we have two guests, Cody and Aaron, to help us dispense advice for newbie game masters and share stories of our novice attempts at running a game. Plus the usual letter from Tom, an anecdote and an explanation of the phrase “There’s monsters in the school, Tom.”
Promos
- Fear The Con: We’ll be there!
- Nerdbound: They run a campaign based in the New World.
Shout Outs
- Team Conan! Show your support
- Sequart. Deep writing about comix.
- Rad Anthem: Incredibly awesome music video and the song is available as a free download.
- Fawlty Towers: A BBC sitcom starring John Cleese.
- Daybreakers: Vampiric cinematic gore and fun.
- Gomorra: A recent Italian gangster epic worth watching.
- Horribleville Volume 1: A collection of comics from KC Green. Highly recommended!
- The Burma Chronicles: A cartoonist spends a year in the worst dictatorship in the world.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04:06 — 52.6MB)
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Great show. I love the party shows where you have alot of people joinning into the coversation and giving information. And any show with Cody is fun. I mean that in that I am a fan of his but I would like to add that, honestly, Cody conveys information very well and has a good method of storytelling.
I’d like to see more shows like thos one with a technical set up that supports it. Ross, you take well to the discussion leader, helping to walk people along and fill empty space or jump to another voice when one trails off so that there isn’t any dead space. With a panel of three or more I think you’d be able to stage a very productive and informative talk.
My first GMing came after playing D&D 3.0 four times. I played premades, lead into my own creations, made the players way overpowered, and eventually ended with a mass battle where the players destoryed an entire kingdom country side. My brother still remembers it as “the best game ever”.
My first time GMing was in BESMd20 (yeah, yeah, I know) with people just as new to roleplaying as I was. I was guest-GMing in someone else’s campaign, so I came up with a one-shot mission involving a man whose mansion was haunted by ghosts who had been killed in a fire fifteen years earlier. The players seemed to enjoy it, and I had a ton of fun messing with one paranoid player:
“You find a a bear trap sitting in the middle of the hall.”
“…I activate it with my gun.”
“It explodes like a landmine! You take ten damage!”
My first GM’ing experience was back in good ole’ 1987, I was 13 and my friend, Jonah, and I used to play Advanced D&D at the local bowling alley because it was located near our school and strangely enough, it was the only place where he and I weren’t harassed for playing D&D.
I remember spending long hours making maps of cave complexes on graph paper and carefully labeling the different points of interest with a basic outline of the monsters that might be encountered there.
I was especially fond of playing Oriental Adventures and mixing that particular world setting into more “standard” D&D adventures.
Ironically enough, the bowling alley where I spent many a long afternoon playing D&D is still there. Every time I pass by I can’t help but think about the numerous monsters (mostly Orcs and Goblins) that were slain in that sprawling noisy edifice!
Hey I love the episode
My first time GMing was for an enormous group of 8 we were playing 3.5 D&D and had just added 3 more people to the group coming off of our first campaign ever. We had decided to play evil characters after a 7 months of playing the heroes.
This was a hell of an undertaking I was berated from all sides with ridiculous requests and I found out one of the new players was one of “those” players, a power gaming mad man, who through my inexperience with the rules and the fact that I trusted him to be fair with character creation…ended up Effective Character Level 27 A Centaur with the Monster of Legend template added(more than once) in an ECL 8 campaign. I slowly put everything together over the next 4 months slowly realizing his characters overblown Level Adjustment.
Other than that the campaign went great I was even able to spin his “Super” character we decided to take him out of the campaign by having his brother return and redeem him from his evil, turning the two of them into the final encounter. The group was thinned down to 6 players and ended with a 6 on 2 massacre. I could look back over my notes to see exactly who survived but they are in my garage and I don’t have the energy.
The movie you were talking about, Gladiator, the lead actor was Russell Crowe. I’m not sure I’d call him an up and coming actor, he has bigger list of awards then most actors get in their lifetimes. Given, most of them were from Gladiator, but still.