(no subject)

[darchildre]

On the one hand, the fact that one of my players didn't show for D&D tonight and we were left with only two party members (plus a guy who was planning to join after this session but hasn't finished his character yet) and thus could not play D&D is not great. The missing player didn't even message any of us to say she couldn't come! It is very irritating.

On the other hand, I had made a plan for this eventuality. (She hadn't RSVP'd to the Meetup though she usually does, and I'd messaged her earlier and gotten no reply.) So after we waited for about 20 minutes, I said, "Okay, we can't play D&D but I have another suggestion - have you guys heard of Honey Heist?"*

They had not heard of Honey Heist, but it is an extremely easy game to explain and requires no prep and practically no supplies. We rolled on some tables for bears and hats and had an extremely enjoyable hour-long no-prep session wherein I got to play a game I've wanted to play since I first heard of it and have not gotten to before. Several people were mauled or run over by bears driving a bus, they met a giant humanoid bee-woman, I got to do a weird bee-lady voice - it was great.

Also, one of the other folks in my group has mentioned a desire to learn to DM as well, which I am encouraging, as I would love do something like alternate different campaigns. My online game has, alas, fallen apart and I play only sporadically with my sister. I like DMimg, but I'd really like to be able to play as a PC sometimes too.

She asked for advice on learning to DM but honestly, I feel like I can DM mostly because I watch/listen to a lot of actualplay stuff. Like, I'm best at D&D but there are a whole bunch of games that I've never played but feel like I know how to play because I've listened to other people play them and passively absorbed the rules. I mean, I don't think I'd have felt confident just spontaneously running that Honey Heist game if I'd only read about it, but I've heard/watched a bunch of people play and so now I can think, "Oh yeah, I know how that game works - I can just run that whenever." I haven't played, say, Monster of the Week or Blades in the Dark but I have an idea of how they work because I've listened to them and I think I could go from there, with access to a book or two to confirm stuff I already think I know.

Saying, "I don't know, maybe watch a couple days worth of Critical Role" is maybe not helpful advice, though.







*If you have also not heard of Honey Heist, it is an excellent game wherein you play a criminal planning a heist from a honey convention and also you are a goddamn bear. You can find it here. You can also watch it being played on Critical Role, or listen to it on Rusty Quill Gaming, both of which I highly recommend. (You can also listen to it on Friends at the Table, but I believe you have to be a Patreon backer.**) All Honey Heists are good Honey Heists.

**Which, like, if you already like Friends at the Table, I encourage you to back the Patreon if you can? Bluff City is fucking great, y'all.

Comments

[shadaras]

Honey Heist is so much fun! (So are a lot of the hacks; I don't think I've played Honey Heist itself, but I've played 'Bigfoot stole my car...' and a Hogwarts hack.) I'm glad you had that already in mind for what to do :)

but yeah I don't know how to learn to GM other than just... being a GM? You can learn some things by watching and listening to other GMs, but it's better if you get multiple different GMing styles (Matt Mercer's is very different from Griffin McElroy's is very different from Austin Walker's is very different from... you get the point), because then you aren't like "Oh no! CR has so much worldbuilding and pre-planned NPCs! I can't do that!", y'know? But, in a very pbta way, I'd just say that the best way to learn to do it is to do it -- probably start with some low-prep stuff like Honey Heist, if you just want to get used to the GM role, so that you have the explicit expectation that you don't need to do much and if it's ridiculous nonsense held together by the party's belief that this is fun that's okay.

(also, re fatt: the new season of Bluff is so wild so far and I have no idea what's going on and I love it)

[darchildre]

My plan is now to have other small games in my back pocket like that, in case people inexplicably don't show up to other sessions. It's better to do something, even if it's not the original plan.

Yeah - I don't think I'm particularly good at GMing but once I've absorbed the structure of a game, I feel okay about faking it, more or less. And once you fake it for a while, you realize that you actually know how to do it, at least a little.

I have not actually listened to any of the new Bluff City yet (because I have been consumed by The Magnus Archives and Rusty Quill Gaming) but I'm so excited about it!

[shadaras]

Yeah! There's a lot of them, and they're super fun. Plus they give people more of a chance to stretch themselves, I sometimes think.

I'm surprisingly confident in my GMing, but I love systems that let me offload as much prep as possible because I know that I don't like doing prep. :) And I bet you're better at GMing than you think!

Ahhhh that's understandable. I've got some friends trying to get me into The Magnus Archives, and they said they'd tell me where the metaplot starts because I'm more likely to actually listen once I can see an arc instead of a bunch of thematically connected short stories. I have no idea what Rusty Quill Gaming does, though I've heard the name before -- what system(s) do they play?

[darchildre]

The metaplot in the Magnus Archives kicks off about episode 22-ish, but refers back to stuff mentioned in the apparently-non-meta-plot earlier episodes.

Rusty Quill Gaming is mostly a Pathfinder campaign, set on a steampunk-ish alternate Earth run by a council of dragons, with occasional short one-shot games played in various other systems. Pathfinder as a game is not really to my taste - too many fiddly rules for me - but the campaign story and characters are great and it's very funny.

[shadaras]

Good to know! Now I can debate if I wanna listen through the beginning stuff or not. :) (I've told my friends that I'd probably try listening to it while flying home for Thanksgiving, so I've got time to decide.)

Oh, fun! I might check that out at some point if I decide I have time for another long-form podcast. :) If they do it well, Pathfinder can be fun; I'm in a Pathfinder campaign myself. Definitely a lot of fiddly mechanics, and definitely a game that I am only okay with because of growing up on D&D 3.5 -- so I'm always going "What if we played (other system) instead", along with my friend who got me into FatT in the first place. But the GM is running a campaign path, and transferring that into a new system would be a lot of work, no matter how much this campaign path would suit Blades in the Dark perfectly.

[darchildre]

I personally would recommend listening to the earlier episodes, mostly because there's stuff from, like, episode 2 that came back 60-some episodes later and it was so exciting for me to go, "Oh fuck, that's what that was!" but I am maybe the exact target audience for the kinds of story this podcast wants to tell, so feel free to take that recommendation with a grain of salt.

[shadaras]

That's fair! I love that kind of moment too -- it's just harder to get me to listen to ~11hrs of podcast before there's an evident plot, y'know? But also, knowing that there is a plot helps with getting me to listen to any of it, so... who knows, I might listen to it from the beginning.

[darchildre]

Yeah, if it helps, you can definitely think, "Okay, these seemingly-unrelated stories will eventually make sense as part of a larger over-arching plot, even if they don't now."

There's also slow character development from the beginning, even if it's one dude talking about people who aren't going to appear "onscreen" for a while.

[shadaras]

Yeah, honestly I think the part I find harder mentally is that there's just one voice; I'm generally way better at attending to auditory input that has more variation in voices than that. :)

[schneefink]

Great idea! I have not played Honey Heist yet but I will keep the suggestion in mind for when our group is unexpectedly small.

[darchildre]

Thank you! I was really happy it worked out. I think I'm going to try to amass a collection of small low-prep games to keep in my back pocket for similar occasions.