Taking 20 Podcast

Why would GMs play unholy antagonists and Big Bad Evil Guys like morons?  In too many prepublished adventures, intelligent undead like liches, vampires, and ghasts are played as rash, unthinking, bumbling buffoons.  Jeremy presents alternate ways of thinking.  He gets into the mind of an ageless creature and hopefully gets your thoughts going on how to role play these rare, intelligent, monsters.

We'd all love to DM/GM for a 4-person party but it is rare.  More often we'll have 6 players or even 8-9 who want to play in a campaign even if we only start off with 4.  How do you handle these huge parties or small parties of less than 4?  If you have a small party, how do you add capabilities to the party with NPCs?  

What is the difference between roll and role playing?  How should players and GMs approach the balance between the two?  Thank you Trevor in San Antonio for the topic idea!

The ability to improvise, adapt, and overcome obstacles is a critical skill needed for GMs and players alike.  In this episode Jeremy discusses techniques of improvisation utilizing the basic tenets he learned performing improv comedy, allowing GMs to keep the story on track and players to support their game partners.

Players using their knowledge to make decisions for their characters is always bad, right?  In this episode, Jeremy talks about the good and bad of metagaming and even cites examples when the DM inadvertently or purposefully provides metagame knowledge to the players.  Come visit us at www.taking20podcast.com

Tired of shopkeepers with no name?  Ready to make your character stand out from the ocean of numbers on the character sheet?  In this episode we discuss how to make your characters or NPCs feel like real, fleshed-out people by giving them goals, motivations, foibles and flaws.

In what will hopefully help role players, we explore positive and negative character arcs.  How do you give a character an arc to follow?  Using examples from popular media, we look at how arcs can progress.  Finally, we talk briefly about how to support arcs for your fellow players' characters.  Come see us at Taking 20 Podcast.com

With the safe alignments out of the way, Jeremy now addresses how to roleplay the evil alignments and Chaotic Neutral.  Thanks for listening and come see us at www.taking20podcast.com to listen to provide feedback and suggestions for future episodes!

Alignment - the much-maligned aspect of many modern RPG systems.  In Part 1, Jeremy discusses his theory on alignment, when it matters, and tips for roleplaying Lawful Good, Neutral Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral and True Neutral characters.  Part 2 will release on Wednesday this week.

Agree or disagree with any of these points?  Email me at feedback@taking20podcast.com.  I'd love to hear from you!

Resources:

https://mykindofmeeple.com/role-playing-games/dungeons-and-dragons/

In depth alignment discussion:  http://easydamus.com/alignment.html

Matthew Colville Alignment video in the Running the Game series:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPhiLBW7jo

With a mishmash of homebrew topics remaining, none of which warranted a full episode, Jeremy throws them all into the cooking pot and makes an episode out of it.  Topics covered include getting player help for worldbuilding, the 3 Hex method, and lessons learned about adding new rules to existing systems.

For more info about the 3 Hex method, see this great article.