Past, Present, and Future with Mark Hulmes, Jasmine Bhullar, and David Nett | Roundtable

Tonight on the Round Table. What will really change it for me is VR. Like having that headset and being able to be immersed, that would make a huge difference to me. Mark Holmes, community manager of Yogg's Cast and Game Master of High Rollers. I didn't realize the gravity of really role-playing on Twitch until I played a true neutral character that I feel like a lot of people really disliked and it made them dislike me. Jasmine Boulard, the Game Master behind the 80s-inspired RPG, the Out Crowd. The underlying fundamental realities of the same. Have fun. It's not just your story, it's everybody's story. To me, that's really beautiful. David Net is a writer, actor, and lifelong Dungeons & Dragons Game Master. Hi, you just gave me the feels over here. The Game Master Episode 3 Cheers! Cheers to the great size of the moral spectrum. Alignment. So, how did you guys get into it? Because I find that when I'm meeting new DMs and stuff like that, that's always the fun thing, of how did you get into the game and things like that. When I was 12, I was at the Science Fair in Linot, North Dakota, and I had a broken arm, and I was showing off my Science Fair exhibit and the guy next to me had just moved to town. We got talking and he invited me to come play in his Dungeons & Dragons game. I'd heard about it, but I was in rural North Dakota, a very religious area, sort of a taboo thing at that time. This is 84-ish, I think. I went and played his game, and just the moment of creating that character, I was immediately hooked before we even played. It was everything that my nerdy, sort of introverted little self had ever really wanted. That's adorable. That's kind of pretty adorable, especially the little broken arm. The little broken arm. The back. It's like such a perfect little story. The Kids on Stranger Things, that was me and my friends. You really fit into that 80s cliché. Oh gosh, yeah, so much nostalgia in that show for me watching those kids play. I lived for a really long time in India, so I did a lot of my growing up there. I had lived for the first part of my childhood in America, and then I moved to India, and it felt like I was Indian, and I was so different from the other kids, it was hard to connect, and I'd always been kind of a shut-in. So I read a lot of books, and I was trying to learn Hindi and Punjabi at the same time. Oh wow. And so my dad would buy me comics, like Hindi comics, and they were really, really bad, like Indian comics. I'm sorry, but they were. We had a super hero named Doga, who's like the punisher, but he wears a dog mask. It was bad, but it helped me pick up the languages, and that's kind of where my journey with nerdiness started. And then when I moved back here, I still felt like I didn't fit in, and I started to hang out on the internet and stuff. My first role-play experience, and this is a pen and paper, my first role-play experience, which then got me into D&D, was actually a college program called Model United Nations. Oh shit, yeah, of course. This one was like a mega game. Yeah, and you compete for stakes, you know? You need full LARP. Yeah, and I remember really getting into it, and being like, this weekend I am Ireland, and I will only speak as the Republic of Ireland, and you always speak in the third person. So I always say the Republic of Ireland does not support that generation. I love it. The Republic of Ireland would like to abstain from voting. Like, it's like, and that was my first time role-playing, and I was pretty good at it. And one of the people in that program was like, have you ever played D&D? That's awesome. And I saw you in Habit Ireland. You really took on the persona of Ireland, you made it your own. You want to play some D&D? Yeah, yeah, and I was like, and that's how it started. I started with third edition, and I was like kind of you, I was a super geeky kid, but I didn't really have a lot of friends, like geeky friends at the time. Like, I was the kid that, you know, after school I had to go and stay with my grandparents, so I would get like a garbage can lid and a stick, and I'd be in the garden like, you know, doing my own stories. And then I was quite lucky in that around high school, I had a bunch of geeky friends, and we were in the local comic store, and they had the third edition start-up box, and we all kind of pitched in our allowance money, we bought it, took it home, and like I was the designated GM, because I put the most money in them, and they were just like, you put the most money in them, you keep it, you learn the rules. And yeah, you learn the rules, so that's your reward. It's not fair, like my reward is I get to run the game for you guys, but I'm glad I did, because I kind of, I just poured into it. And I remember like, I gave them the setup for the story, and they were like, okay, well what do we do? And I said, what do you guys do? What do you want to do? And they were just like, the fundamental sort of jumping off points for the kids that I was playing with were the classics, right? So we read Tolkien, and maybe Dune, and we had watched Dragon Slayer, and Excalibur. Kroll? Well, Kroll was there too. But those were our touch points. We had a very sort of narrow set of touch points. It was the typical sword and sorcery fantasy stuff. What was the background of stuff when you guys started versus now? So for me, my preferred stuff are massively influenced by pulp adventure and action. Like my two callbacks that I love, like the games I really enjoy to either play or GM, is ones that I can kind of trace a line back to things like Indiana Jones, The Mummy, The Shadow, like these kind of pulp noir adventures, because that's the stuff I kind of grew up with, and like that was the type of books that I was reading at the time and everything. What I find now, and being a GM for a game that's on Twitch and people watch and everything else, it's so character driven. It's not quite so pop or drama, but they want that Game of Thrones, that Walking Dead, that Netflix weekly, like what's the next big character? Dramatic. They want to ship your characters. They want to have them. Oh, the ships are like sailing. There's fleets. There's our mothers of ships. The characters are really what drives it. It's no longer about the McGuffin. Like I think in older editions, it was always about like, you know, Black Racer or like... There's always a world ending kind of situation in the older movies. Yeah, and that was the driving force, whereas now I think it's so much more character. I mean, I don't know how you found the Jasmine. It's weird. So like, when I started getting into RPGs, they were really rebelling hard against the classic fantasy you were talking about. I mean, I'd go to the comic book store and you see a plethora of systems and games, more than you can count. And there's like 40 of them that are going to be steampunk every single time. One thing, and I'm not trying to throw shade at anybody, one thing that turned me off when I would like flip through these books is like, they had such intense worlds to get into, where the universe is like, wow, you really like, you know, I don't know how to describe it when you just overdo it a little bit. ITT. And so they just, I would read it and I'm like, okay, I can barely get into this. How am I supposed to get my players into this? The concept of this world is so insane. It'd take me an hour just to explain to them this setting, especially when you talk about an audience, because I stream on Twitch. How do I explain this to my audience? And oh, this is... They've got to be able to get it so quickly, because they tune in and they want to know it, and like, if it's going to take you four hours to explain, they're gone. Yeah. On Max's hit points, we have a story that goes along with, you know, the workouts, but it's 100% railroad because you can't interact with the story, right? What I'm fascinated with with you guys is that, when I've game mastered and I've done so since I was, I guess when I first started doing it, I was 14. So a very long time ago. But I never had to worry about an audience following my story. I only had to worry about my players, and were they engaged, and if I introduced an element that they didn't, you know, grok, or they didn't lock onto, that element could go away and it didn't matter. I'm interested in balancing. Like, that's a new idea, the idea of balancing your players and the audience. I mean, my honest answer is, is I don't try and balance it. Like, I always set my game out that it is a bunch of friends playing a D&D game, but there's cameras in the room. And like, I try and keep that. So it's like, if the audience doesn't follow something, or if they latch onto a character, it's like, that's fine, but it's the players around the table that is my focus. And I write the game and I create the world for them. And then my hope, which I like to think has worked, is that the audience will follow it as well as they do, and they will enjoy it as well as they do. But if you have to start really changing things for the audience, I think that that's when you're moving into a different territory, and that's not the kind of game I want to run. You know, I don't want to ever have the thing of like, and now audience, you can vote on the next monster that they will face. I don't want to do that. Like, I want it to be a D&D game that I kind of build for my friends and then hopefully other people can enjoy. Because also I think that that shows the people at home, like, this is what you can be playing, like, and you can have these adventures. The way I run my show on Hyper is probably not the way I would run it if we were just to play D&D right now, because it's like watching a Netflix show a little bit. Like, I have to tell a story in those three hours. You know, you have to have a little bit of everything. And you don't want to devote like, two and a half hours to a giant boss battle, because who wants to, in my opinion, combat some of the most boring stuff that happens in RPGs. But you also want something interesting to happen. So you have to get that formula down perfectly. Like, I think another big thing is making sure that each player is having their moment or having, like, if you feel like, oh, I feel like this person had a whole episode, like, maybe we should make sure some of these other players get their episode so that the audience has a chance to click with them. And for me, I didn't realize, like, the gravity of really role-playing on Twitch until I played, like, a true neutral character that I feel like a lot of people really disliked and it made them dislike me. Oh, wow. Yeah, because, you know. You get bleed. Yeah, you get bleed. And that is tough, too. Yeah, just people criticizing, like, the character for the decisions. And it's like, keep in mind that's not me making that decision. I'm playing my character. My character is flawed. And it's like, yeah, exactly. It's going to make bad decisions. And as a good role-player, I have to play true to that. So do you think about it when you're crafting your show, do you think about it in terms of episodes then? I never think of the entire campaign in terms of episodes, but, like, I will try to create a nice end point. Because I never want to end it, like, at a part where I feel like it's a cliffhanger or it's an awkward ending, because that just pisses off your audience. And it pisses off your players, because they're just like, really? If that's true, like, I am in such trouble because I am so bad for cliffhangers. Like, I am really bad. I'm a big cliffhanger junkie myself. Like, I'm so bad for it. Worth. Oh, the worst. It is the worst, but I kind of... There is a sick part of me, which, like, when I do it, and it's like a really good one, like, you know, they open the tomb and then I go, like, and we'll find out what's in there next week. And I think they'll be like, oh! I try and see what I do in arc, but I do it so that each player does have, like, a arc dedicated to their backstory and their character. Just because I want to make sure that everybody around that table feels like they've had their moment to be the hero. Absolutely. And the arcs, that might be two sessions. That could be six sessions. It depends on what the backstory is and everything else. But in terms of episodes, it just tends to be however much we can squeeze in. Do you guys feel like running the shows, like, sure running the shows has changed the way that you play when you're not on camera? Or do you play anymore on camera? I don't have time to... I do. Yeah. I enjoy playing off camera. I don't want to say it's more formulaic when you're doing it with a show, but I definitely change things around. And part of it is, like, situations will occur when you're just hanging out with your friends, you know, and playing a game, that, like, if people are stuck on something, you kind of just let it go. And when it's happening on camera, if my players are stuck on something, something will happen. Yeah. To move it along. Whereas if I'm off camera, I don't really care. If they're stuck and we're just hanging out, drinking beers, playing D&D, they can be stuck for a while. But when you're, you know, when people are watching, it's like, you can't be here for more than 15 minutes. After that, it's just, it's getting old. Or if they can't figure out how to beat a boss, even though they should, because you gave them all the right hints, and they should have asked the right questions to the right PCs. And part of it is, like, after looking at Twitch chat logs and stuff like that, after the episode, you see the audience like, how did they not use fire at all, cats? All the back seating, like, how did they not know? I didn't think about the case of, like, the backseat players. Are you kidding? Yeah, there's a lot of back seating, and they're just like, how does he not know? Do your players then? Well, I was going to say, do you let them? No, we do not, I do not allow my players to read chat. I think mine do, but not, like, I tell them not to. I'm like, don't read chat, like, even I, like, I struggle to go back and read stuff, because I used to do it when we started, and I was like, I missed that, or I missed that. Now I'm kind of like, you know what, if I miss stuff, it's okay, like, it's fine. Well, I feel like when you read chat, this syndrome will pop up, especially if you're working with a lot of other Twitch talent, where they want to play to the audience. And it's like, no, play. Yeah, they want to, like, there's a little showmanship, they want to be quippy, and they want to, like, curry favor with the audience. And so they don't stay as true to their characters. They'll pop out of character to do something that they know the audience will like, because you do take it really personally when you're sitting here and you're reading chat, and everyone's just like, I love this person, but I hate this true neutral character, because they're boring, or they're evil, and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I really worry about technologies like Roll20 and what they do to the game, because the joy of the game for me is the freedom of the game. And if I have to spend a bunch of time beforehand building maps and putting pogs on maps and trying to prep for the session, and then the characters go around that, which is one of my favorite things, and I'm left on my heels, it seems like that technology almost limits me. And I wonder if you guys have had, have experienced that technology in music, because I haven't out of that fear. I have. I will say that after doing both. Oh please, not that music. That music gives me nightmares from my childhood. Could we get something a little bit lighter, some lighter music here? Are you a fan of true crime TV shows? And what about Unsolved Mysteries, the show that jump-started all of our love of true crime? I'm Ellen Marsh. And I'm Joey Taranto. And we host, I think not, a true crime comedy podcast covering some of the wildest stories from your favorite true crime campy TV shows all the way to Unsolved Mysteries. Baby, you will laugh, you will cry, you'll think about true crime in a whole new way, and you'll also ask yourself, who gave these people mics? New episodes of I Think Not Are Released every Wednesday with bonus episodes out every Thursday on Patreon. And every Monday you can listen to our True Crime Run Down, where we go over the top true crime headlines of the week. So come and join us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent decoveny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now. There are pluses and minuses and one of the big pluses to doing it in person is you feed off of each other so much. And eye contact is so big in role play. So what would need to happen for a remote system to work like that for you? I feel the same way, but I'm super old. I don't know how you feel. To me it does feel really static because you're looking at a webcam. You're not looking into somebody's eyes and making that connection. Small things like even rolling the dice physically, that's a cool feeling. And clicking a button just never feels as equal. That's important. I have my... I like the 30-point. I have mine with me. Whenever anything important is happening, this is from when I was 12. This is my first each 20, but one of my oldest. Oh my goodness, that's amazing. You guys were important to me so I brought that with me. That's amazing, I feel bad now. Roll 20 is a fantastic tool for people that just cannot physically get together. What will really change it for me is VR. Having that headset and being able to go around a table and maybe the DM can do fancy stuff with miniatures and you can zoom in and all that stuff, but just being able to be immersed around a table and there are my friends and maybe they're dressed up as their characters or whatever. That's cool, I think that would be super awesome just to make it a bit more engaging. I think you're right, it's just too easy to be distracted and not feel connected to those players. There was a video floating around on the internet of that table surface where you could put a map on it and you could put your players... Are you excited about the idea of that? Oh yeah. Is there something that you're really hoping will happen then? That for me would be great. I would love to be able to... Even with the prep work you would have to do as a game astronaut to make that work? I think the immersion would be worth it, you know? Yeah, and I think for me, if I'm going to do that big epic scene anyway, I have to put that prep in now regardless. I'll print out a map on poster paper or I'll draw it out or I'll buy the miniatures and set it all up. To be able to do that on a PC much faster, like being able to just have pre-done tiles that I can snap together and then I can put a miniature down and fire it up around it if I click a spell card or something like that. That's amazing. For me, I am so hyped for the stuff that's coming because I look around and I've realized like... Board games are taking off and our pen and paper RPGs are going to be right behind them. Open Legends huge success on Kickstarter and people are playing pen and paper and tabletop RPGs and tabletop games in a way that they weren't before. There's been this like a renaissance or resurgence and these really great board games are coming out and people are buying them and that's amazing. I think 10 years ago we probably wouldn't have seen that. Now people are playing like pandemic and just like games are so much more accessible, right? And what that's done is it's brought money into the stuff that we love. And when you bring in money, great things happen because suddenly you're getting products developed for you that weren't there before and it's going to make your job as a GM. It's going to make getting creative better and easier and you're going to be able to do stuff you weren't able to do before. And that makes me so excited. And on Hyper we have a bow tech show called Death Room Above. They 3D print their mechs and so when your mech's arm gets blown off they literally like crackle. So that's one of the technologies that I have found has enhanced my game because my players and I are fairly old school but there's a... I forgot the name of the company now that does the 3D printed custom miniatures. I know it's exactly that. Hero Force, thank you. This last time that my high school group and I got together, you know, the old Fogies gaming club, I 3D printed all their characters, custom characters for all of them and brought them to the game. And that's, you know, going through a store and hoping, you know, again when I was starting, and we didn't do a lot of strategic miniatures play. We were playing 1E and 2E and it was all what they call a theater of the mind now which makes me kind of vomit. But it was all in our imaginations. You know, we didn't play a lot with minis but we had minis of our characters to show marching order and all that stuff. But you go to the game store and you hope that there's something roughly like the character you're playing. Yeah, you just settle with anything. Yeah, and if you're creative it is definitely not happening. But to be able to go there and to create your character in 3D print, not only the character but the pose that you want, the attitude that you want, the smile or a frown, that's amazing. We're getting all this like media that's talking about it and getting the conversation started and that's inspiring people to get into it as well. And I'm sure there will be some bumps along the way. Whenever something becomes mainstream it goes through its growing pains. We'll probably have some crappy stuff produced along the way. We had a couple of bad D&D movies where I was like, I was gonna say, I think actually you know what people are kind of, you know, they can appreciate it and they can see that actually you can make some good stuff. What is the tip that you give to new Dungeon Masters? Like what is the advice that you guys give coming up when you did, learning to play when you did? Yeah, for me it's that I feel like often there's like an antagonistic relationship between the GM and the players and often groups have trouble finding a GM. And for me I'm the opposite. Like and I always, I encapsulate my GM style as like the kid from Stranger Things. Like you know how when they're fighting the Demogorgon he's like, oh is the Demogorgon, he's not mad that they killed this creature he made. He is excited. That is me. I cheer with the players, I cry with the players, I am with the players and I want to see them succeed and it's my job to tell their story. It's not their job to play out my story. Yeah, I think like my general advice is kind of follows the same thing of like start small, start with a town. What makes it interesting? What makes this somewhere that your adventurers want to go, that makes the heroes want to explore? You know, what about it makes it unique? I think the other thing that I recommend to new players that has always been my advice is that they read a lot. I think as a dungeon master one of the best tools that you have is a whole bunch of story reference at your fingertips. Whether it's reading a lot or watching a lot of movies or whatever, because whatever shit that your players throw at you, whatever crazy thing they decide to do that was not what you expected, if you have a bunch of stories at your disposal, whether it's things that you've written or things that you've read or movies that you've seen or TV shows that you've watched, you just have a, that's your toolbox in a lot of ways. As a storyteller that's your toolbox. And you can throw things at them and pull things out. And it's funny because I get people that say like, I want to do something like this from this show, but I don't want to just rip it off. It's like, that's okay. Like you can change a few things here and there, but like, yeah, like at the end of the day, whether you're a GM or DM or whatever, like we're or a writer or a TV script, you know, we're world builders. That's what you're doing. And there's a reason that, you know, whether it's Dungeons and Dragons or whether it's Shadowrun or the World of Darkness games, in almost all of those game books, they give you a reference reading list in there. This is what inspired us. This is what can inspire you. There's a reason that shits there, whether it's video games or books or movies or TV, informs the way you understand story. What I love about all that is that, you know, regardless of, you know, we all started at different times playing, regardless of when you started playing, regardless of what your references were like, got you playing. The advice that you guys were just talking about is very similar to the advice that I give coming from, you know, again, 30 years of playing Dungeons and Dragons. The underlying fundamental realities are the same. Have fun. It's not just your story. It's everybody's story. You know, those things remain the same. And that's, to me, that's really beautiful. It is. It's cool. Oh, you gave me the feel of over here. Oh, the Regency Era. You might know it as the time when Bridgerton takes place, or the time when Jane Austen wrote her books. But the Regency Era was also an explosive time of social change, sex scandals, and maybe the worst king in British history. And on the Vulgar History Podcast, we're going to be looking at the balls, the gowns, and all the scandal of the Regency Era. Vulgar History is a women's history podcast, and our Regency Era series will be focusing on the most rebellious, women of this time. That includes Jane Austen herself, who is maybe more radical than you might have thought. We'll also be talking about queer icons like Anne Lister, scientists like Mary Anning and Ada Lovelace, as well as other scandalous actresses, royal mistresses, rebellious princesses, and other lesser-known figures who made history happen in England in the Regency Era. Listen to Vulgar History Wherever You Get Podcasts. The war is over, and both sides lost. Kingdoms were reduced to cinders, and armies scattered like bones in the dust. Now the survivors claw to what's left of a broken world, praying the darkness chooses someone else tonight. But in the shadow dark, the darkness always wins. This is old-school adventuring, and it's most cruel. Your torch ticks down in real time, and when that flame dies, something else rises to finish the job. This is a brutal, rules-light nightmare with a story that emerges organically based on the decisions that the characters make. This is what it felt like to play RPGs in the 80s, and man, it is so good to be back! Join the Glass Cannon podcast as we plunge into the shadow dark every Thursday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on youtube.com slash the Glass Cannon with the podcast version dropping the next day. See what everybody's talking about, and join us in the dark! It will take them across the world, fighting for every clue they can find. It's one heck of a tale, which is good, because this story might be the only thing that can save their lives. Well, if that's all I can just dispose of you. Wait, what? 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