Taking 20 Podcast

Fair warning:  I'm doing weird episodes again.  This week, I advocate taking lessons from video games and movies and introducing new class abilities and gameplay mechanics in a safe, non-lethal environment...except for the one case where it doesn't make sense.

Building worlds, countries, and even towns can be tough.  There are a lot of moving parts to try to tame and it's easy to miss preparing some important information.  Luckily, the GRAPES worldbuilding system is here to help provide a framework on which you can build your world.  In this episode we talk about how we can use this great tool.

Goblins are classic low level one-note baddies that eat anything they can, kill everything else, except for the few things that they try to mate with.  There's no nuance there, right?  Not so fast my friends.  Goblins can be just as nuanced as the other ancestries and make for great player characters and big bads for your campaigns.

Clerics and Druids are more diverse than most people realize.  Playing them as Healy McHealface and Joe Ent-Lover may come second nature (ba-dum-tss) but they can be played a lot of different ways to satisfy a lot of different players.  In this week's episode we look at the fun and choices of playing these two classes.

At the beginning of the D&D 5th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide there is a paragraph that was likely only included as a joke and it reinforced my belief that inspiration for good DMing really can come from anywhere.  During this episode, we go over the paragraph and Jeremy gives some advice that all of us can take from this unusual source.

Skill challenges were one of the best things to come out of the much maligned 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons.  What are they?  How can you use them in your campaign?  Will Jeremy ever be able to limit himself to a 20 minute episode again?

Like most people who have done something for a while, I look back at my early days of playing D&D and cringe at some of the mistakes I made as a new player.  In this episode we talk about 15 of those mistakes and the lessons I've learned since then.

Adding aerial or swimming combatants to your battlefield can make things very complicated very quickly.  It doesn't help matters when the different game systems are so different in the way they handle these situations.  In this episode, Jeremy talks about the challenges, reasons to persevere through those challenges, and tips he's learned running these complicated combats.

Tune in next week when I'll talk about what I wish I'd known when I started playing Dungeons and Dragons

I received a listener suggestion to talk about some of the classes available in 5e and Pathfinder.  This episode starts that series, beginning with the Barbarian and the Bard.  Jeremy talks about tropes, playing with them and against them, and his wife helps him with a beep button when things get a little...suggestive.

"Part of the journey is the end," as it was so wisely said.  As tough as it can be guiding the adventure to an end, handling the end properly can be surprisingly tougher.  In this episode Jeremy talks about his favorite method to put a bow on a campaign and prime the next one for success.