Transcript
WEBVTT
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I would love to stop the bloodshed in the world, but I can't, and I'm going to do anything I can to lessen it.
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It's why I play TTRPGs, really.
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As much as I wish I could change the past, all I can do is kind of do what I can to work towards a better future.
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Reaffirming that journey again.
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By going through that trauma again, and learning to get past it.
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again.
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Let's look at actual history! I'd
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like to give a content warning this episode for brief mentions of forced sterilization and the death of a child.
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If you'd like to avoid these topics, look at the timestamps in the show notes.
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Hello friends, welcome to Characters Without Stories, a TTRPG podcast about the roads not yet traveled.
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I'm Star.
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This episode I'm joined by DJ BeeZee.
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DJ is co host of One Shots Tavern, a TTRPG podcast exploring different tools and systems, as well as a game master for hire.
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DJ, thank you so much for coming on the show.
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I'm super glad to be here.
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DJ, how did you get into TTRPGs?
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My co host and I, he got me into it around 2009, 2010, when we met.
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We just kind of were playing ever since, so we started with Dungeons and Dragons 3.5.
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From there, we ended up transitioning over into Pathfinder, which a lot of people did at that time.
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Basically, it was just a lot of Dungeons and Dragons for a really long time for us.
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He went away for a while, which meant that I had to learn how to game master, so he, like, went off to Colorado, left the friend group, you know, behind here in Michigan.
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And so, in order to keep playing, I had to, like, dive deeper in.
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Back then it was hard.
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Uh, it really was.
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There wasn't a whole lot of tools to use and learn.
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So I've always, I have ADHD, uh, and autism.
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So for me, it's like, I was taking like, oh crap, I don't know how to like interpret these rules.
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I need to learn how to do this and trying to like get games going and keep games going without any digital tools Which is what I wanted because back then, you know, the iPhone came out and I was like, oh there should be an app for that They told me that there's an app for everything There was not at the time and then eventually there was for Pathfinder It wasn't good, but I mean it was a character sheet which helped From there, I just, I fell off for a couple of years, uh, while I went to college, and then I did like a band life thing for a while, did a bunch of shows and stuff, and then ended up just coming back to tabletop games, and then Andrew came back, uh, from his time away, and we, we started doing weekly games again, as, as a friend group.
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That lasted up until the panorama, the good ol pandemic, uh, COVID 19 in 2020, and into about 2021 when they sold their house and started traveling the country in a RV.
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But! It was kind of perfect because around that time was uh, that transition to everybody playing online.
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Which was, for me, it worked a lot better because I didn't have to travel and it meant that I was going to be there always without having to, you know, have the anxiety of going up and meeting in person.
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As much as I love meeting up in person, uh, I do find that I am far more free when it comes to being online and in front of a camera.
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That's surprising, actually.
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Yeah.
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I don't know what it is.
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Like, I like being around people, uh, but like three people, maybe.
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Whereas online, it's, it's a lot easier for me.
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I think it was like last year Andrew was like, hey, I'm sick of fifth edition.
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Let's try Cypher System.
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It's a game that I've had for a while and I want to learn to play and so we started a campaign and we all fell in love with it.
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And so now I just kind of main two systems.
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It's mostly Dungeons & Dragons and Cypher System now.
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It's been great.
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I became a Game Master for hire after I got fired last year from my job due to the mental health stuff mentioned before.
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Uh, and it's been great.
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I make my own schedule, right?
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I, um, run about six, seven, sometimes eight games a week.
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Varying from Dungeons & Dragons to Cypher System to one shots of various other systems, uh, if I can get them together.
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It's, it's been great.
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Tabletop games truly changed my life for me.
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I'm mentally healthier, right?
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Because I don't have the expectations of sitting in an office or a testing laboratory or wherever any of the other jobs that I've worked in the past where there were these, uh, very rigid, strict deadlines and micromanagements and all the things that my brain couldn't handle.
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And instead I get to play Dungeons and Dragons and Cypher and all these games for a living.
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So that's been my journey.
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Uh, we started the podcast for One Shot's Tavern in January officially.
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And so that's been fun too.
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But yeah, I love tabletop games.
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I have a question because I know some other pro DMs.
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I know that it's pretty dominated by D&D.
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Do you have any trouble getting together a Cypher system on -are you playing on Start Playing?
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I am on Start Playing games, yes.
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It is, uh, moderately difficult sometimes, depending on the system that you are trying to open up, right?
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Uh, there are going to be mainstays in like, super popular games.
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Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, really any of the major publisher games are going to have a lot of an easier time to fill a game.
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I definitely struggled filling Cypher because most of the time when I am running a Cypher game, I'm teaching the players how to play Cypher.
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And because I'm teaching them how to play Cypher, people are a little hesitant to spend money, right, especially 25 a session on a game they don't know how to play yet.
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And I just, I do my best to try and reassure people like, hey, I am going to walk you through this step by step.
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We're going to get you to where you are going to be, you know, really good at this, but it's a process.
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And so I, one of the things that I do is tell people, hey, this is going to be a shorter campaign.
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It's going to be kind of more of an introductory to the system.
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We're going to get you as proficient as I can get you, and that way if you want to keep playing in a campaign with me, or if we want to continue this campaign as a group, we can.
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For the easy money, I post Dungeons & Dragons games.
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Those are the ones that fill up within a couple weeks of posting it.
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You're good to go.
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Ready, ready to run.
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I haven't tried like Call of Cthulhu or anything like that, but I have heard that those games do well.
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But the other thing is building up a reputation first.
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And that's, that's kind of one of the things that a lot of the other game masters for hire suggest is you want to build a rapport with your players in order to get them comfortable and going I will follow this game master into any system They want to run and it's been nice because lately I've been having that a lot of players basically I've been like hey, what do you guys want to play next?
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We're halfway through this campaign, what is it that you want to play?
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Do you want to run another, you know, Dungeons & Dragons module?
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Do you want to try another game?
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And a few of them were, were like, hey, whatever it is, as long as you're running it, I'll be there.
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And I was like, that's gonna make me cry.
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Uh, that, that is the most flattering thing you could tell a game master, especially one that you're paying to run these games for you.
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But it's hard at first.
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Uh, I was definitely really nervous.
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My unemployment had ended.
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And so what I had done was while I was on unemployment and I was doing my job searches, I basically just kind of built up everything I could first, all of my campaigns, all of my assets, anything I could in order to hit the ground running because I had a advantage that other game master hires don't have.
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And that was, I had no job.
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And so it was all or nothing for me.
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What made you decide to make the leap into podcasting?
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You talk about hitting the ground running, and to me, seeing your podcast start up, like, right from the beginning, I was like, oh my god, they were so much better prepared than I was when I started my podcast.
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There's just the amount of stuff that I've had to change since I've started, and you came in with your branding, you had multiple episodes ready to go.
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Andrew is the star on that, because Andrew is a stay at home dad.
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He takes on contract work as a marketing professional.
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So, he's a graphic designer, him and his wife both do marketing campaigns, uh, she's, you know, does like the full time marketing position, whereas he picks up the, the contract work.
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So, having him involved, and basically having, uh, everything ready to go, was a godsend, right?
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Originally, One Shot's Tavern just started off as the branding for my Game Master for Hire.
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Uh, it was going to be the name of my Discord, It was going to be essentially just me doing my thing.
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Andrew started talking about it and he's like, hey, you know, you and I out of all of our friends have the most free time and by most free time, I mean, we had, you know, maybe like 10 hours a week where we could, you know, sit down and do stuff because he's taking care of the kids full time.
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I'm running games, you know, four days a week, five days a week.
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And I still have to hang out with my wife.
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That's very important to me.
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And, uh, he was like, what if, you know, we started this journey last year where we tried out Cypher system.
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What if we continue that journey and we dive in to trying other systems?
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What if there's so many out there and, you know, I was doing the TikTok thing and like, I had already started meeting amazing people like you and Penny, uh, and Adam and just all of these, uh, amazing voices in the TTRPG space that we just really started to get super interested in, well, we could just try as many games as possible.
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And, you know, because of TikTok, we have as many people as we need to, you know, ask and say, hey, does anybody know how to run X system?
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Uh, and I was like, yeah, sure.
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I've got, I've got the time.
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His brain and my brain work completely different.
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My brain is a junk drawer and his is a filing system.
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So we definitely run things different when we're doing interviews.
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He's, he's more prepared with, you know, questions.
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I'm more like, what's your favorite color?
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You know, like, what's your, what's your favorite mechanic?
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You know?
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Ooh, I really like that too.
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I'm the guy who, who just kind of like falls in line and is just like, Oh, I want to relate and I want to get to know you and I want to be friends.
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He also is that way, but for him, it is very much like he's very informational.
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For example, he tried to get me to use Trello, which, for those of you who don't know, Trello is like a, this is, needs to be done, this is what's in process, this is almost done, and this is the deadline.
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And I'm just like, buddy, I'm gonna tell you this right now, I'm not going to use this.
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So you're not, you're not using the Gantt chart that he made for your podcast?
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No, I, I found it better that I can throw things that I need done up there.
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Okay.
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But, personally, uh, I'm just, I'm a very off the cuff person.
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Even my campaigns, for the most part, I run along modules, but most of the time it's bullet points.
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And it's, it's very free flowing improv.
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Anything can happen, depending on where my brain is at in that moment.
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And so, it's, it's just funny because like, we compliment each other very well in that way, we butt heads very well in that way, because it's, it's, uh, it's just two completely different ways of thinking, and that's okay.
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Really what you saw as us jumping in prepared was us being like, oh no, we set a deadline for ourselves and we need to hop on this right now.
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Luckily we found like, Squadcast and Descript really early, so that kind of like cut down on the amount of work that it was going to take for us.
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We did make the dumb decision to jump out the gate with podcast video, which slows things down a lot.
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I still like video.
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It's funny.
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Cause in the beginning I was like, let's just do audio now, Andrew and I have switched positions on that.
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He's like, I think 90 percent of the stuff we do is not going to have video and we're going to switch over to that format.
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I'm like, all right, fine.
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Makes clips easier.
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I can just put a logo up.
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I haven't done it yet, but I could.
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Yeah, I, so I started like completely audio and then lately I've, I've been, you know, I watch, I watch podcasts on YouTube and I'm like, you know, maybe people want that experience, but then I just have a backlog of video at some point.
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Maybe I'll get to editing this one.
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Because it takes so much longer.
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Yeah.
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Especially with the new RSS feed on YouTube.
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So you throw your RSS feed up there and it's like, cool.
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Here's all of my podcast episodes.
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And it's like, you throw your, your YouTube edited versions up there.
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And it's like, oh man, this is just clutter.
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There's so much stuff going on.
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Do I really need this?
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Yeah, definitely.
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But people like it.
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And so it's, it's, it's, yeah.
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Let's get to your character.
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You talked a lot about switching to cypher system and how much you love cypher system.
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What is it that you love about the system?
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It's funny because you look at the state of TTRPGs and you see like there is the very crunchy everything is defined side of things like Dungeons and Dragons.
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There's not as much creative freedom for the players.
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And then you have something on the other end of that, say, a Powered by the Apocalypse game, where the character sheets are much more simplistic, and the things that you do are more implied.
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You, you kind of flavor them how you want to flavor them, depending on which game you're running.
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Then you have Cypher System, which I like to imagine as being very firmly in the middle of those two things.
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It has very nicely laid out rules, of course, but at the same time, every aspect of your character sheet, from your special abilities to the weapons that you're using, skills, All of those can be flavored how you want them to be flavored.
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I really like that.
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I believe that it gives a lot of agency to the players to kind of craft their narrative.
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Uh, so that's like part one of why I like it.
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The next part is, as a game master, often players can run in directions where they shouldn't be.
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Or more so you haven't planned for.
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Cypher encourages that.
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It is a much more like, theater of the mind oriented system.
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Uh, you might have some like, battle board stuff, but that's gonna be about it.
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Whereas with Dungeons and Dragons, it's like, if you are hanging out in Waterdeep and you wanna go to Baldur's Gate, like, that requires a whole lot of reading.
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And like, jumping around and be like, oh no, this is, you know, like, what do I do?
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They decided they wanted to, you know, teleport and go visit somewhere else, or not continue on with the module yet and go do other things.
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Cypher's system very much allows the players to do that, and it doesn't require a ton of extra prep on the Game Master's behalf, because everything is rolled the same way in Cypher.
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You have a difficulty from 0 to 10, and you multiply that difficulty by 3, and that is going to be the difficulty, the DC, so to say, of the task that you're rolling.
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So if it's a difficulty 5, you have to roll a 15 or higher.
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If it's a difficulty 10, that's 30 or higher, and it's like, oh no, you can't do that.
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That's where the agency comes in, because you have something called effort, you have training.
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All of these will reduce the difficulty by a whole step, which means 3 points on the die.
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And so if it was difficulty 10, and you've If you decide to spend 3 effort and you have training in it, that drops it down from a rolling a 30 or higher down to a difficulty 6, which would be an 18 or higher.
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Still hard, but it's not impossible.
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And I really love when my players get excited.
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I love when I get excited because I'm a player.
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And it's like, cool, alright, we have this insurmountable task ahead of us.
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How are we going to do it?
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For example, say the difficulty of a creature is like, this is a difficulty 8.
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Uh, it's not terrible.
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You only have to use a little bit of training and effort to reduce it down.
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But this is a boss.
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And like, they're scary, and all of these special abilities and stuff.
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And you know that if you hit them, and you spend as much effort as you can on the damage, which increases your damage, it's like multipliers on your damage, you might be able to take them down in one shot.
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Or, you might incapacitate yourself and totally derail the entire thing.
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I love that.
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The other thing is Game Master intrusions are super fun.
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For those who are listening, a Game Master intrusion is an unexpected complication that just happens.
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Uh, and so it's the main way in which players gain experience points.
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For example, a gun could jam.
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Or, maybe the hallway collapses.
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Or, maybe all of a sudden a bunch of new soldiers show up and you have to fight them too.
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Or, You kind of get pushed in the correct direction because you've been going the wrong way.
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All of these things are Game Master intrusions.
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The players can deny them.
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They just spend experience instead of receiving experience.
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Or, there's player intrusions.
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Player intrusions are very similar.
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They're usually, uh, Tied to the type of the player.
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So for example, uh, a warrior might know a guy who just randomly shows up and helps and then, you know, talks for a minute and then leaves.
00:18:54.019 --> 00:19:09.369
Uh, we used that in a campaign that we were, uh, in because we were getting annoyed by the ship combat and we happened to be on the home planet of one of the player characters and we're like, uh, he's like, I know a guy and that guy showed up and all of a sudden it was a two on one battle.
00:19:09.595 --> 00:19:13.214
We finished the battle, had that chat, and then we continued on.
00:19:13.244 --> 00:19:29.325
Cypher gives you all of these tools and all of these ways of genuinely impacting the story, and that is my absolute favorite thing, while also giving me rails and rules to adhere to.
00:19:29.394 --> 00:19:35.434
I don't have to be overly imaginative, but I can be imaginative in the game.
00:19:35.494 --> 00:19:41.744
And so it feels like there are rules and laws of physics on the world while allowing me, you know, agency.
00:19:42.484 --> 00:19:48.294
So you're bringing a character for a specific Cypher system game called Old Gods of Appalachia.
00:19:48.325 --> 00:19:48.605
Yeah.
00:19:48.809 --> 00:19:52.410
Can you tell my listeners a little bit about this particular game?
00:19:52.460 --> 00:19:53.309
Absolutely.
00:19:53.329 --> 00:19:58.720
So it is a partnered IP game for those of you who haven't.
00:19:58.799 --> 00:20:10.669
If you really like horror podcasts, Old Gods of Appalachia is a really well produced horror anthology, light anthology, because there is an overarching story to it.
00:20:11.079 --> 00:20:14.970
About late 1800s, early 1900s, Appalachia.
00:20:15.029 --> 00:20:25.549
It's cryptids, it's, you know, folklore, it's, you know, a little bit of Irish folklore mixed with a little bit of Native American folklore mixed with a little bit of black folklore, right?
00:20:25.549 --> 00:20:27.349
Because that is Appalachia.
00:20:27.950 --> 00:20:35.359
Appalachia is, uh, you know, you talk about melting pots in, you know, the world, uh, and, you know, the United States is a melting pot.
00:20:35.740 --> 00:20:38.150
Appalachia, in my opinion.
00:20:38.519 --> 00:21:09.984
is one of the more very well mixed together melting pots as far as like the folklore and stuff goes basically you have uh the idea that these primordial spirits or these primordial beings these godlike entities uh of magic and And all of that existing in Appalachia, because, I don't know if you know this, but the Appalachian mountains are older than trees.
00:21:10.054 --> 00:21:14.483
Trees did not exist when the Appalachian mountains were formed.
00:21:14.534 --> 00:21:24.970
It is essentially, uh, a mountain range that is so old that it existed in this primordial time where instead of trees, we had giant mushrooms.
00:21:25.069 --> 00:21:35.569
And so the idea is that all of these haints and spirits and good things and bad things are rooted in this mountain range.
00:21:35.619 --> 00:21:41.134
And it's, uh, a really kind of fun fun setting for a horror podcast.
00:21:41.134 --> 00:21:51.233
And so, uh, I don't know if Monte Cook Games approached them or if they approached Monte Cook Games, but, uh, the Old Gods of Appalachia role playing game was born out of it.
00:21:51.284 --> 00:21:54.345
And so in it, you get to kind of explore it.
00:21:54.345 --> 00:22:05.400
And so it's kind of like Call of Cthulhu esque in a way, where it's mostly normal people, or lightly magical people, going through these horrific events.
00:22:05.730 --> 00:22:07.650
Because they are, they're horrific events.
00:22:07.660 --> 00:22:18.305
Things like towns burning down, and coal fires, and, you know, mine collapses, and, you know, hauntings, and All sorts of dark things.
00:22:18.355 --> 00:22:24.884
And so, I really enjoy this setting, because it's like this slight anxiety.
00:22:25.233 --> 00:22:27.314
You know, you don't know what's happening.
00:22:27.314 --> 00:22:28.464
It's all a mystery.
00:22:28.464 --> 00:22:29.943
And it's, it's just fun for me.
