The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
D&D 2024 Secret Subclass Compatibility Rules – Lazy RPG Talk Show
Mon, 30 Sep 2024
D&D and RPG news and commentary by Mike Shea of https://slyflourish.com Contents 00:00 Show Start 01:30 Kickstarter Spotlight: Enter the Labyrinth by Kobold Press 05:15 Kickstarter Spotlight: Dragontown and the Darkness Below 11:03 D&D & RPG News: Horizons Magazine by Wildmage Press 12:16 D&D & RPG News: Beadle and Grimm 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide Map Pack 14:04 D&D & RPG News: 2024 Player's Handbook is D&D's Fastest Selling Book Ever 18:22 Commentary: You Don't Own Your D&D Beyond Books 21:24 D&D & RPG News: Hidden Subclass Compatibility in D&D 2024 27:32 Commentary: The Current State of Generative AI and TTRPGs 46:23 Patreon Question: Industry Standards for Releasing RPG Material Under Open Licenses 52:03 Patreon Question: Coming Up with Villains or Fronts in Strange Campaign Settings 54:36 Patreon Question: Excluding a Player from a Game Links Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books: Kobold Press’s Labyrinth Kickstarter Dragontown and the Darkness Below Kickstarter Wildmage Press Horizons Magazine Beadle and a Grymm Greyhawk map pack D&D 2024 Player’s Handbook Fastest Selling D&D Book of All Time New California law means digital stores can’t imply you’re buying a game when you’re merely licensing it Where do your Steam games go when you die? The Best LLM for Generating RPG Stuff – Your Brain
Today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show, we're going to talk about the Kobold Press' Labyrinth Kickstarter, which is just coming out. We're going to look at Dragontown and the Darkness Below by J.P. Covert, another Kickstarter happening right now. We're going to look at Wild Mage Press' Horizons Magazine that just got started up. A quick look at the Beetle and Grim Greyhawk map pack that is available.
Is D&D 2024 Player's Handbook the fastest-selling D&D book of all time? Answer is yes, but we'll dive into that topic. In the lecture of You Don't Own Your Own Books, there's a couple of new interesting news bits about not necessarily owning your own books when you buy them at digital platforms. We're going to dig into that.
We're going to talk about the hidden 2024 D&D Players Handbook subclass rules for how to handle older subclasses than this book that I completely missed but are actually in the book. Today's big topic is going to be the current state of generative AI in role-playing games. And we're going to cover more questions from the September 2024 Patreon Q&A all today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show.
I'm Mike Shea, your pal from Sly Flourish, here to talk about all things in tabletop role-playing games. This show is brought to you by the fine patrons of sly flourish. Patrons get access to all kinds of tools, tips, tricks, accessories, source books, adventures, and things to help them run their fantasy role-playing games.
They get access to the awesome lazy DM community over on discord, and they help me put on shows like this to the patrons of sly flourish. Thank you so much for your outstanding support. Our friends over at Kobold Press have just launched the new Labyrinth Kickstarter. Labyrinth is a new setting and adventure series available by Kobold Press set in the multiverse.
So imagine a manual of the planes written by Kobold Press. There was a short guide that they had put out recently that I thought was actually really, really good. So I'm very excited to see it. And I'm eager for this one as well. Of course, immediately when I looked at it, I was like, oh my God, is this City of Arches and am I in trouble?
And the answer is no, actually, this works very well side by side with City of Arches because the City of Arches actually doesn't have an incredible array of all of the other worlds that are out there. It has definitely a worlds beyond the arches section that has a bunch of different worlds that you can connect to.
It has a random world generator in there so you can make more, but it's more about the city. However, you could use a book like this to give you all kinds of worlds and all kinds of adventures in all these worlds that could connect right up against City of Arches. So it's very cool in that regard. There is a free preview PDF that you can get directly from DriveThruRPG.
I, of course, like the single click, just get it immediately. Having it connected to DriveThruRPG is not so bad, though, because a lot of people have a DriveThru account and you can pick it up. And I went and downloaded it. And it is a big, meaty preview, 18-page preview that gives you an idea of the kind of stuff you're going to see.
Fantastic artwork, the entire table of contents of what the book is going to contain, the heroes, spells, all the different kinds of things. Look at that. That's a cool dwarf-looking dude. Look at this floating earth moat with a void dragon on the back. And it talks about the void, the factions that are going to be there. The artwork is really, really outstanding for this one.
And one of the things about this Kickstarter, it is two separate books. So there is the Labyrinth book itself, which is a world book, and there's an entire book of adventures. So that's going to be cool. The other interesting thing is they have partnered with Beetle and Grimm. We're going to talk about another Beetle and Grimm pack later.
to build a whole thing with maps and map packs and accessories and other things. So a beetle and grim GM vault is one of the things you can get. So for 125 bucks, you can get the beetle and grim vault, which includes six battle maps, 10 GM maps, 15 in-world handouts, VTT tools, 30 encounter cards, all the kinds of stuff that you'd expect from a good beetle and grim set.
So lots of different add-ons for this one. If you're super excited about running this, I always look at it and say, do I know I'm going to run it? If I know I'm going to run it, I think it's worth really putting into getting a lot of the accessories for it because I know that it's going to be worth it over the time.
If I'm not sure when I'm going to run it, I usually pick up the book because I like to be inspired by the material. I don't necessarily need to pick up everything that they've got. But man, Kobo Press is nailing out of the park. I just got the Game Master's Guide from Kobo Press as the third book of the Tales of the Valiant series. It is awesome.
So there's lots of really cool stuff that they've got. And I would definitely go and check out. There's no reason whatsoever not to download the free preview. Take a look at what you can find in there. See if you dig it. And if you do back their Kickstarter, I backed it. I think I ended up going for the collector edition cover because I was like, oh, that looks cool.
And now I have a problem, which is now my that's this guy over here on the left of the limited edition covers for the adventure in the workbook. The problem is I now got them for tales of the Valiant and I like those limited edition covers so much that now I'm stuck in this sort of like, I got to get all the limited edition versions of the book.
So that's going to be costly, but it looks really cool. Lots of cool accessories, very cool setting. I think really a really neat thing that you could probably tie into a lot of different worlds, a lot of different campaign settings. So I am, I am very excited for it. I went and picked up both the adventures and the world book. I think, I think there's a lot to be had there. Yeah.
So that is the Tales of the Valiant Labyrinth Kickstarter, which is going on right now. Very cool stuff. Dragontown and the Darkness Below. JP Covert is a fantastic creator of tabletop role-playing games and a fantastic YouTuber. He is both an artist and a designer and uses these talents together to create really awesome products.
JP Covert did send me a preview release of Dragontown in the Darkness Below. He has a kind of a preview version of the book. It's like a print on demand version of the book that's going to come out after the Kickstarter. So this is more of a preview version of the book than the actual book itself. But I had some time to sit down and go through it and look at it. And it is just awesome.
So the way I was thinking about it, I didn't get a chance to dive into this really until last night. I have the PDF version of this, which is set up as page spreads. I really look at Dragontown, trying to figure out exactly how to define Dragontown, but it is the almost exact polar opposite of a game like Morkborg. you know, where Morkborg is built on. It's like greedy.
Like you, you, when you read the text, the sharpness of the fonts pierces into your eyes, leaving trails of bloody tears down your cheek. This is the opposite. You just feel good having read this. It is a super optimistic, bright, you know, I would definitely say kid friendly.
I don't think it's built for kids specifically, but I think it is definitely a, a kid friendly game where the art is kind of, you know, cute and, and optimistic and fun. And just, you know, it's a whole different feeling than what we get from a lot of the grim dark. Like I played a ton of shadow dark recently.
And actually one of the inspirations for dragon town was actually Elden ring, which is super grim, you know, super grim from software, but you know, definitely, even though you can see where the Elden ring influences are here, the optimism of this setting is, is really interesting.
For example, one of the key features here is that a dragon flew into town and then decided to protect the farmers and stuff like that in order to eat apples. So, you know, you have this like dragon patron who sits there and eats apples and protects the village around the area. The whole setting of the thing is told in a comic book style. So you get to kind of understand who J.P.
Covert is and who Flick Silverpin is. He's numb to plume. And the region and the history is all told as a small comic strip, which is...
awesome right like it's so good and you get a feeling right away for the kind of art and the kind of view that this this book has and it had just how different it is but it still has this kind of old Greyhawk feel of you know big pit that goes down and all sorts of different adventure locations that go on deeper and deeper and deeper into the ground
You know, a whole thing about how to use the guide. One important consideration for this is this is a system agnostic adventure, a system agnostic book of adventures and setting that has some really crafty ways of saying like, hey, here's how you can tell the danger of different creatures by this like danger meter, right? Like, you know, some stuff has, you know, no statistics at all.
Some of it is very lightweight. Some of it is very difficult. So you can then use that to then decide, based on my system that I'm bringing to it, how difficult or how easy are these various challenges that you find in the game. I think that's really smart.
The whole region, the town itself is filled out, so you know all the different kinds of locations in the town, but then there's also the regions around it, the regions of adventures that are going on there. Here's a whole section of friendly faces. And all throughout is this kind of art. Here's a farmer riding on a giant bug, right? The farmer bug who's collecting the magical apples.
So, you know, there's these two page spreads, like the design of it, the design kind of fits this kind of old school design of like everything fitting on just, they call it an old school design, but old school books are never this nice, where they have sort of a two page spread that has everything you need on just that two pages. Really excellent design that makes it very, very table usable.
You know, just really outstanding stuff. If you can't tell, so granted, I did get a free copy, but I got a free copy of the preview version. I backed it myself, so then I'm going to get a full copy of the whole thing. But I've seen a lot of the work of JP Covert, who has sent me samples of his material in the past. Really excellent stuff. By the way, if you have not checked out JP Covert's
youtube videos you definitely want to go over there and subscribe he makes excellent videos talks about map making talks about illustration talks about all kinds of stuff very positive channel if you're kind of tired of all the sort of rpg business clickbait sort of stuff which i sometimes have a tendency to fall into myself you can relax by going and watching some of jp covert's videos they are excellent please in the show notes you can find a link to his video series
This looks like just an outstanding project, an outstanding Kickstarter. I cannot, I give it all of the support that I can give, right? I don't, I don't have anything bad to say about it. And I've seen the products that he has produced. They are excellent. So I am, I am very excited. You can see like, as you go deeper and deeper into the ground here, you can get it.
So that is a dragon town, the darkness below a Kickstarter by flick silver pen by JP covert. Is there a sample? Let's look for the sample. Everybody download a 50 page preview PDF. One click to Google drive. Look at that JP. You, you, you following it. So 50 page preview that shows you the kind of stuff you want to see the stuff that I was showing off.
You can see it all in this preview, which looks like it's got stuff that you could use at your table today. So again, no reason not to go check out the preview. And if you dig it, definitely want to pick it up.
All kinds of different sets of material, including the book itself, the book plus accessories, maps, dice, cards, other sorts of things that you can pick up a GM screen, all the sorts of things that you would want. Really, really looks cool. I endorse it fully. Please check it out in the show notes below. That's Dragon Town and the Darkness Below by J.P. Covert.
Wild Mage Press is a company put together by Hannah Rose and Clara DeLay or Daly. I'm sorry. I don't know how to pronounce the name. Wild Mage Press is putting out Horizons Magazine. If you think about like a dungeon or dragon magazine, this is kind of of that style. It is a quarterly RPG related magazine. Looks beautiful.
Like some of the artwork that they're showing off looks absolutely outstanding. And so Hannah was the editor of Arcadia for MCDM. So we already know that she can put together an awesome magazine. And Clara, I believe, was an artist who worked on that magazine. So the two of them together have created this independent venture for Horizons Magazine. You can subscribe to it on Patreon.
You can also subscribe to it directly from their website. The first issue is coming out. I think it believes it's coming out in 10 days, but you can subscribe right now. So you subscribe monthly and you get monthly rewards. but you will get four issues of Horizons Magazine for the subscription. So looks really cool. I supported it myself.
I went ahead and subscribed through Patreon and I am eager to see the magazine that they have. So that is Horizons Magazine by Wild Mage Press coming out in 10 days. Once one of the issues is out, I am sure that I will give it a look and we'll talk about it here on the show.
beetle and grim beetle and grim put out a or has now available i guess it's not available you would get it later this year it looks like december 2024 is when you would get access to this but the pre-order is out now for a dungeon a 2024 dnd dungeon master's guide premium map collection no i don't want to be added to the wish list This is a box set, $144 on sale right now, $160 normal price.
That includes a Greyhawk GM screen. It includes cloth maps for the region of Greyhawk and the city of Greyhawk and a whole bunch of remastered battle maps.
uh for many of the what they say are the black and white maps that are included inside the dungeon master's guide so what's interesting is they're telling us a little bit about the kind of stuff that we expect to see in the dnd 2024 dungeon master's guide i think we're going to learn a lot more about it this next week they have a big series of videos that they're going to be releasing over the next few weeks talking about the dungeon master's guide so we're going to learn a lot but a whole bunch of different dungeon maps barrows and dragon's lairs and hideouts and mines and underdark warrens and volcanic caves and
above ground maps and things like that so it looks like it's got some really cool stuff in here if you are a fan of greyhawk or you plan on running campaigns in greyhawk if you typically use battle maps for your combat and you're looking for a bunch of general purpose general use battle maps it would cost you a lot more than 144 dollars to make all of the material that you can get in this box set so in that sense i think it's actually a pretty good deal
I tend to run a lot of theater of the mind and I don't know if I'm going to be running anything in Greyhawk anytime soon. So I probably not going to pick it up, but I think if I was doing either or both of those things, I would certainly pick up this pack because it looks, it looks really good. So, so check that out.
That is the beetle and grim dungeons and dragons dungeon masters guide premium map collection. So a press release went out from Wizards of the Coast saying the 2024 players handbook is the fastest selling Dungeons and Dragons product of all time. This came out on September 25th. So since the release, they have not had any book.
The previous most quickly sold book was Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. But now the D&D players handbook, the D&D 2024 players handbook is the fastest selling book of the fastest selling Dungeons and Dragons book of all time. This makes perfect sense to me. And if we think about it mathematically, we would really hope that that would be the case.
And the reason why is that the growth of D&D has occurred over the past 10 years gradually, right? I mean, it's been heavy growth. But now there are more people playing D&D now than there ever have been before. And this is the first core book release for D&D that's happened in 10 years. 10 years ago, there were far fewer players of Dungeons & Dragons overall.
So you would hope that if you're putting out a new core book, that it would outsell every other previous book, particularly that you have more players now than you've ever had before. So all of this is really good news.
This means that more people are coming into the hobby, that the hobby itself... I mean, there's questions like, were all of those purchases from people already playing D&D, or are they purchases from people that are learning to get D&D the first time? We cannot ask that question. We won't know the answer to that question for a while. So how much does the D&D 2024 books...
improve the hobby does it grow the hobby are more people playing we're not going to we may never really know that we're still arguing about whether or not fourth edition was popular or not so it could be hard to figure out but i think we'll have a decent gauge but it might take a year or two we're not going to learn it in a week and i think wizards of the coast they know this too so this is absolutely true right i think this makes perfect sense but i think that we won't really know about whether or not the hobby has continued to grow or not
And then does it really matter to us, right? If you've got your friends and you're happy with the games you're playing, it kind of doesn't matter. You could be playing Flick Silverpin's Dragontown instead of D&D. And if you and your group are happy with it, you and your group are happy with it. So it's good news, right? I think it'd be bad news if they didn't say anything at all.
They're like, oh man, nobody likes this. I do want to address one thing, which is there are videos going around that are saying things like, they've only sold 3,700 or 3,800 copies of the Player's Handbook. And we're going to talk about some data science. We're going to get one of Mike Shea's data science rules for this thing.
But that is a ridiculous idea, because that would mean that I have sold more copies of City of Arches than Wizards of the Coast has sold copies of the Player's Handbook to. Or the new player's handbook, the 2024 player's handbook. So we know that that's not true, right? We know that that is a flawed number. You might as well have picked any number out of a hat. Yes, it came from book scan data.
Guess what? It turns out that book scan data probably isn't accurate. And this gets into the data science rule. You ready?
if you are digging into numbers and data and you find something really exciting and interesting and new it means you're probably wrong right data science is about confirming boring stuff far more often than it's about finding new stuff if you look at it and say wow wizards of the coast only sold 30 3 700 copies of the player's handbook if that seems outrageous to you it probably means you're wrong they've sold clearly have sold more copies than that
So I'm not going to get into why, although what you can look at is whatever, if ever you're looking at an amount of data and it's way off from something else, there's probably another reason. In this case, I think it's likely that Wizards of the Coast shifted distributors about a year ago.
Now, shifting distributors means that the books are going out on different platforms, which may not be registered on whatever system or tool that you were looking at. Now, if you're really excited about watching the 2024 players handbook bomb, you can grab onto whatever numbers you want if it makes you happy, but that doesn't mean it's actually accurate.
So what, for those of us who actually want to watch the hobby grow, we'll have to see how this all goes. But anyway, so I don't think they'd be putting out a press release saying it's the best selling product of all time. I mean, it should be the fastest selling product of all time, right?
That makes that again is kind of a boring statement because when you think about it, that means that there's more people playing D and D now than ever. And this is the core handbook of,
for that so yes it should outsell them they should always outsell them you know we'll have to see so take a look at that anyway kind of interesting stuff but we're really not going to know how well this whole thing comes out and maybe we maybe ever but probably not for a couple years
In the topic of if you bought it, so one of the things about the 2024 sales, probably they were including sales of the digital version of the book on D&D Beyond. In the category of you don't own your books if you bought them on D&D Beyond, there's a couple of new interesting news stories about this.
California looks at putting a new law in place that says that you cannot imply you're buying a game or selling a game when you're merely licensing the game. which would mean that if you buy a book on D&D Beyond, we all know, right? Anybody that's been listening to the show, you don't own the book. You can't download it. You can't move it to another platform. You can't stick it on your phone.
There's all these different considerations that you are basically leasing the book And that lease can be plucked back or changed or anything like that. But Mike, you can download your book. You're saying I've heard people say this. You can download your book. Just get the D&D Beyond app for your phone and then you can download the book and then you have the book on your phone. Well, guess what?
Both my wife and I went to a convention where we didn't have Internet access. And when we sat down and we pulled up our characters on our phones, D&D Beyond app said you need to reconnect to D&D Beyond to confirm your subscription before we're going to give you access to the books that you bought online. that are on this phone. That is an example of the phone home problem. Can you download it?
Sure. But if I can't get access to it until I have an internet connection, it doesn't matter if I downloaded it or not. I don't know how often it requires that connection, but often enough that I hadn't used the D&D Beyond app in a while. And then when I was stuck without an internet connection and I was like, oh, I can at least fall back to my local copy, it failed. That was a practical example.
This isn't just Mike Shea waxing philosophy about tech stuff. This actually happened. I had to take both of our phones and run into the lobby and try to connect and try to get a signal so that I could get both of our phones to connect and authorize the content we already had on the phones. You don't own it if you need to do that.
If it needs to phone home regularly to see if you still subscribe to a thing, you don't actually own the product. And it'll be interesting because this California law means that they wouldn't be able to count those as book sales when they sell a book that you're actually not selling.
Another part of this I thought was interesting was a link on that same one, which says, where do your Steam games go when you die? So this is a question. Can someone inherit your D&D Beyond account? Probably not, right? They'd probably have to buy them again. You can't switch people. You can't put it in your will. You can't give these books.
I can give all my D&D books to my heirs, but I can't give my D&D beyond subscription and all of the books that I subscribe to, to my heirs. So that's another example of where you don't really own the stuff. So what should we do? Buy the physical book. The books are beautiful, by the way. They're really, really good looking books. So buy the book. Buy a physical book.
When you have that physical book, you have it forever. You care for it. It could last 100 years. It could last 500 years. It could last 1,000 years. If it's well taken care of, it can last. Computers could be going. All sorts of things shifting around. Doesn't matter. If you have the physical book, that's something that you actually own.
And this is one of the few hobbies where we can go buy a physical book and own it and keep it. You can't do that with video games. You can't do that with your Steam library. So another interesting thing about the D&D 2024 Players Handbook. I did my flip throughs. We're not going to get into the drama of the flip throughs, but I did a big flip through of the D&D 2024 Players Handbook.
I've talked about it here. And one of the things that I saw that was missing, I thought was missing, was any kind of description about how to handle compatibility with previous subclasses. I saw that they had in the D&D 2024 Players Handbook We're going to go to the free rules here.
So in the early sections of the D&D 2024 Players Handbook, it includes a little breakout box that talks about converting backgrounds and species from older books. And it gives you very simple guidelines for how to do so. In fact, these guidelines are better than choosing a background from the 2024 Players Handbook.
Something I learned when I was remaking some of my Adventurers League characters yesterday. I was like, man... I hate having to go through backgrounds and figuring out which is the perfect background that gives me a feat that I actually care about, plus the ability scores that I need for this character.
But when you use a background from a previous one, you get to move, you choose any one of the origin feats and choose any of the ability scores that you want to move. I kind of wish they just did that for everything.
I myself am probably going to house rule, if and when I run D&D 2024, I'm going to house rule that you can pick your ability scores and you can pick your feat separate from your background. That way you can pick a background that actually makes sense for the character you have instead of trying to min-max everything.
exactly which one gives you the right ability scores plus the talent but i noticed that like this was pretty much it when it came to any kind of discussion about backward compatibility in particular my big question was well what about subclasses like how do you manage subclass background compatibility so i was on en world hanging out one of the forums and i saw that mike murrells had mentioned that oh no they have rules for that in there and i was like where i don't think there's anything about managing subclasses and he said take a look at the descriptions of the subclasses in the classes and i was like huh
And I took a look and sure enough, it describes whenever you go to like a class and you look at the subclass feature that you get at third level, it says like the cleric subclass, you gain a cleric subclass of your choice. The life domain subclass is detailed here after the class's description. That's because I'm using the free rules.
A subclass is a specialization that grants you features at certain cleric levels. Here is the key term. For the rest of your career, you gain each of your subclasses features that are of your cleric level or lower. That one line makes all of the previous subclasses that have been available since 2014 compatible with the D&D 2024 rules. It says this on every subclass for every one of the classes.
And you're like, well, how is that the case? And the reason why is because it says for the rest of your career, you gain each of your subclasses features that are of your cleric level or lower. And that's because older subclasses sometimes gave you class features at different levels than the ones that you would get when you have a subclass here. So for example, when you get a new subclass feature,
As you grow in character level, whatever subclass features would be available to you. Let's see. Subclass features. You gain cleric subclasses that are of your cleric's level or lower. So at sixth level and at 17th level, for example, are when you gain new subclass features.
And the key is when you hit those levels or you grant those new subclass features, and if you're looking at a subclass where those features came at different levels, all of the ones that are of that level and below you gain. So in some cases, you might actually gain two subclass features because of the way something worked out. And here's an example.
If you look at previous cleric subclasses, you actually got stuff beginning at level one. So in this case, you're not going to get those level one features until you hit level three. But once you hit level three, then they will all catch up. So this was a very slick way
to make subclasses directly compatible, all of the previous 2014 and above subclasses compatible with the 2024 rules without even really having to have a breakout box. I actually think it was a little too subtle. Like I really think that they could have taken a breakout box and explain this a little bit more because it makes sense.
And they, they certainly like trimmed it down to the fewest words needed in order to make that clear. But like, I'm a pretty experienced person.
dnd guy right and i completely missed it now i've heard about it so i already knew how that was going to work out but they could have had just a little breakout box in either the first one or again in that character one and said hey by the way here's how we handle subclasses now
just a little bit of something to give me a guide of like that's how that works because i completely missed it and it took the lead designer of 2014 dnd to show it to me before i recognized it now i had heard about it previously because they did talk about it on videos they had some compatibility videos on youtube where they described how that works and i knew that it worked there and i also had seen the new adventures league rules work the same way
So it's actually pretty slick because it also gives you a good idea about like how is 2024 directly compatible with all the previous stuff. And the answer is if you can fit the entire rule into like 12 words, that means it's pretty compatible, right? There's not a lot of conversion that really has to go on.
I am sure there are circumstances where certain subclasses are just not going to mesh perfectly, particularly like third party subclasses and stuff like that. are going to take a little bit more work than just saying you get whatever the abilities are whenever you get a new subclass feature. You get those levels and below, that level and below.
For the rest of your career, you gain each of your subclasses features that are of your cleric level or below for the rest of your career. So I think you're right. Yeah, I think you're right. I think that if there's a subclass feature, let's say you got one that, I don't know how often that happens. I'm not sure what subclass features showed up at different levels.
The only ones I know about were the ones that happened below third level. I don't know that there are subclass features that show up at levels that are different from the ones that are in here. So I thought that was an interesting little tidbit about what the compatibility of D&D 2024 looks like with all of their previous 2014 stuff. And I actually think it's pretty cool.
Today's big topic is going to be the current state of generative AI in tabletop role-playing games. This is obviously a big topic. It comes up in the Sly Flourish Patreon quite a bit. We talk about it on the Discord server quite a bit. A lot of different people have talked about it in a lot of different ways. There's a lot of different opinions about this.
My main point up front, the main thing that I would like you to get an idea from is I really feel like the best large language model you can use to help you run your game is your own brain.
I think that your own brain fueled with excellent source material, source books and other kinds of fiction and everything else fueled by that, along with tools, simple tools like random generators, random tools, other other ways to sort of brainstorm your work can work better for you than working with a large language model to try to build out a campaign or a adventure or things like that.
However, there are people that I talk to, there are friends of mine who use it, and they say that it's working really well for them and that they're able to get a lot out of it. So who the hell am I to tell them that they're not getting a lot out of it? If you think that you're getting a lot of value out of it, it's not up to me to convince you that you're not. You get to decide if that's there.
But I will ask you two questions, two questions that I think are worth asking. One is, are you really getting out of it more than you could get by reading books, cross-referencing your books, taking notes, jotting things down, using random tables in order to shake up your brain and come up with really cool ideas on your own?
And two, is it worth the cost of the world to use those large language models for that? So what are those big costs? There's a few things we need to consider about large language models and generative AI overall that the whole world is figuring out. Like, you know, like every major government in the world is trying to figure this out. So we're not going to all figure it out here on this show.
But I do think that there are things that we should really consider when we're looking at generative AI models, because these are just plain truths about this. One, Large language models and generative AI are generally built on people's intellectual property, and they didn't get permission from those people, and they're not compensating those people.
Whether or not it's within fair use or not, again, that's all kind of getting figured out. Claims, oh, yeah, you need to be able to do that. But the reality is a lot of people had their stuff harvested by these things, didn't want that to be the case, and are not receiving compensation, even though the companies that are building these things are making billions and billions of dollars.
ChatGPT, I think I read this yesterday, ChatGPT OpenAI is being evaluated at $160 billion. They're seeking investors to pour money into ChatGPT. Well, guess what? They indexed my stuff and nobody came by and dropped $20 on me. Your company would be useless if you didn't have it. So obviously there's value in my stuff to you, but you're not compensating me for that value. Right.
Also, by the way, I give all of my stuff away under a Creative Commons attribution license. So I make it available. All you have to do is reference me. But they can't do that because large language models can't reference stuff directly. They can't say, by the way, this came from Mike Shea at Slight Flourish at this article. They can't do that. So I'm really giving stuff away for commercial use.
So you can do it and build a billion dollar company, but you have to mention my work and they can't do that. So it's built on people's intellectual property without their permission. It uses tons of power. Microsoft has just talked about firing up Three Mile Island again because they need nuclear level power in order to fuel generative AI.
A recent Washington Post article says that it uses up a bottle of water per hundred words generated from a large language model. So tons of water, tons of power getting used by generative AI, far more than the Sly Flourish random generator that is available to patrons at Sly Flourish, which uses far less energy in order to hit a random thing and get an NPC.
It's giving an excuse to bosses to replace workers with crappy versions of AI to try to do the same job. There's lots of talk about this.
And again, you can find links in the show notes where it talks about the fact that like companies are trying to get their employees to use AI more so that they can have less employees, but the employees are not finding any actual value from the use that they're getting with this stuff. And fourth, it's filling the internet with slop.
I've heard lots of people who are now going online to try to find images for their games and they have to set the date back from 2020 and below because everything else that's coming out is just crappy generative AI art and other stuff.
There is an article recently from the guy who run a program called Word Freak, which is a word frequency application that was used for Linux that was based on human language. And he said, I'm not going to update it anymore because the internet has been filled with such...
generative AI crap that we can no longer trust that it's actually being generated by humans, which makes this tool not work anymore. So he's shutting down the use of the tool because the internet is so filled with generative AI stuff that you can't trust that you're actually getting anything from a human being. These are all real problems that it has that go beyond tabletop role-playing games.
But I think they are all problems that we should be keeping in mind when we're looking at using generative AI for any of the stuff that we're doing. And maybe you can say, yeah, Mike, I know all four of those things are true, but I'm still going to go ahead and use it because it's useful in my game. That's fine. That's your choice.
I'm not here to give you a moral lesson that, oh, you shouldn't and you're a terrible person because you generated a picture for your game on Wednesdays. But I think it's worth knowing that those things are true. And I think it's also worth asking, am I really getting value out of it considering those four things are true? That's something that I think is important.
Now, the hobby itself is on different side. Chris Cox, the CEO of Hasbro, is super excited about
about ai when he was at a recent goldman sachs thing because that's where he hangs out is at goldman sachs he said i play with probably 30 to 40 people regularly by the way that's seven regular games do you have seven regular games i don't have i play this game all the time and i only have three but i guess when you're a ceo you can have 30 to 40 different people you play with they're probably not imaginary friends i play with probably 30 to 40 people regularly there's not a single person who doesn't use ai somehow for either campaign development or character development or story ideas
That's a clear signal that we need to be embracing it. The themes around using AI to enable user-generated content, using AI to streamline new player introduction, using AI for emergent storytelling, I think you're going to see that not just in our hardcore brands, hardcore brands like D&D, but also multiple of our brands. He loves AI. He's all about the AI.
Now, some people are like, well, that's just a poor CEO who's stuck in a position where he has to say the things that he's saying because he has to make his shareholders happy and he has to make the board of directors happy. And I'm sure that he doesn't even know what he's really saying. Guess what? If he's saying it, why don't we believe him, right?
If he's saying that he plays with 40 people who all use AI...
that's pretty wild right he plays with 40 regular people and every one of them is using generative ai so i i had a question about that and we'll come we'll come back to that in a second so interestingly enough cobalt press wolfgang bauer from cobalt press came out and came out with the no ai pledge where he said we don't use generative ai art we don't use ai to generate text for our game design and we don't believe that ai is a magical pixie dust that makes your tabletop games better
I like that quote. I thought that was a good, strong quote. So obviously, even in the RPG industry, we have one person who's like, I have 40 friends and they use AI all the time. And then we have another guy who's like, I think AI is totally not as an antithesis of the RPG hobby. At the high levels, we can't even agree. I was curious about Chris Cox's 30 to 40 imaginary friends that all use AI.
And I said, I wonder how many people are using AI in general. And I can't survey the whole world, so I don't know. But I can put out a YouTube poll that reaches a lot of people. I reached about 3,700 people who answered back. So I can tell from the 3,700 surveyed GMs and players how many of them regularly use generative AI to either prep their game or as part of their gameplay.
And the answer was about 3 in 10. About three out of 10 people were using generative AI as some part of their game. And boy, I saw a lot of divisiveness among the comments. I saw some people that said, it's really helpful to me. It helps me brainstorm. I got lots of really good ideas from this and it really kind of pushes my brain out.
And I got other people that said, I don't want to have anything to do with any technology that is stealing from creators. So obviously there's a lot of difference of opinion in there. But it sure was a different story than the idea that, oh, everyone does, because I don't think everyone does. That is kind of the current state of what generative AI is as far as I can, as far as I can see it.
So what are my, what are my views on this? And my views are that I definitely, I find for myself, I got, and yes, I've experimented with it. I tried it, you know, and I didn't inhale, but I did spend some time trying to use generative AI to see what I could get. And the answer for me was not a whole lot that it tended to drive towards the median so much that,
That everything that came out was kind of boring. I was always fighting rats, bats and spiders. It was always like goblins in the cave. It was kind of boring stuff. So I could push it and I could get it into areas where I want it. But, you know, I could also do is just do that myself. So what I find is that actually reading books.
And cross-connecting information from books, using basic tools like search, reading websites, reading material, and building my own notes out helped me more than trying to get like AI to summarize stuff for me and then it misses half of the stuff that was there. I also find that using random lists is a huge way to shake up our brains and give us ideas about things we can do.
And the output from that doesn't need to be this super clean human readable text. We can get four words out of a random generator and mix our random tables together and come up with wild ideas that actually really helps us build games that are fun for our friends. So to me, the idea of...
Rolling on a random list multiple times or rolling on two different random lists and combining the results offers really tremendous value. And guess what? It doesn't use a bottle of water. Sometimes when I get really heated and I'm really excited, Michelle needs to come and dump a bottle of water on my head every time when I'm sitting there like quickly writing things up.
But that's actually pretty rare. It's actually fun to do the kind of Gandalf style, you know, going to Minas Tirith into the old libraries and blowing great piles of dust off of your books and connecting the dots. I liked doing that research. I liked when I was researching the Dragon Empire for my upcoming Kobold Press Tales of the Valiant game.
It was really interesting for me to do that kind of research and more interesting than it would be for me to feed all those PDFs into a retrieval augmented generation style large language model where it would then summarize all the information and give me that data back. Sometimes that can work, but really, yeah, I got to think. Michelle needs to be pouring water when Mike rants like this.
Maybe I'm getting hot. That's why I have my bottle of water. But it takes me one ball of water for like this whole, you know, this whole show. So it's a lot less water for me to do all this talking than it is for a large language model to generate 100 words of text. I think it's really fun to do that research.
And I don't think we necessarily need all those tools to try to give us like half-baked answers. You know, what I heard was that like a good large language model filtered with the right information is about as good as a hungover intern. Do you really want a hungover intern giving you the kind of material you want?
Or do you want to use your own expertise, your own knowledge, your own passion to build the kind of stuff that you want to build for your game? I argue the others. I do find generative AI and large language models useful in certain circumstances. The big one for me is I do find it useful for doing small coding projects. And I've used large language models to do small coding projects.
The thing is like sometimes it really, that those kind of generative AI gives us the feeling that it's offering better results than it really is. And I'm not just talking about like hallucinations. Like we all know that like large language models in particular have hallucination problems where they will often make up things or give you results with a high confidence that are clearly false.
But it also like, because it's reads like a human being, it makes us trust it more because than if it was like coming back with just four words coming out of a random generator. That I think there's more to it than just hallucinations being a reason why it's selling us on this. And there's more, there's something about it. It truly is magic.
And when I say it's truly magic, what I mean is it's magic in the sense of magic in our real world now. It's a trick. They didn't really pull a quarter out of your ear. They were hiding it behind their fingers. They didn't really, you know, David Blaine didn't really levitate off the ground. He was just hiding one of his feet, which he stood up on.
So it's magic in the sense of misdirection and false attention and deception. Than it is actual magic. And I think that's something I've discovered. I've been, you know, playing with it a lot. I've been researching and studying and reading a lot about it. And I don't, there's, you know, that idea that it's going to keep growing and it's going to change the world.
I'm not so sure, but boy, they're pouring money into it. That's the other part of it that I'm not really talking about. And I didn't mention in that kind of the big problems. But one of the big problems is it's a huge bubble. People are pouring money into this. I saw something yesterday where it said that ChatGPT wants to increase their prices by like 10% a year.
It is at the perfect time for inshitification where it's giving us a service that costs them way more than we're actually paying for it so that we all get used to it and we all want to use it. And then the rug is going to get pulled out and either we're going to pay a lot more or we're going to be inundated with ads or some of the material we're going to get back is advertisement-based
or who knows what's gonna, or the whole thing could collapse, right? We don't really know. But what I can tell you right now is we're at stage zero, which is trying to give us a service that we love.
One thing that I heard that made me pause was the question of the reason we like it so much is because it's one of the few areas of the internet that isn't completely inundated with ads and other stuff yet. And because it's a clean interface where you can type a question and get an answer.
And that's so much better than Google with how in shit if I Google is so much better than most of the commercial search engines and certainly better than a lot of the websites where you're constantly getting pestered to sign up for newsletters or you're getting like a ad blocker warning that says, oh, we see you're using an ad blocker. You're sure you want to do it.
The rest of the Internet kind of sucks so bad that when we go there, it's the one island in the sea of crap. And we like it because it actually gives us an answer. For now, they are paying. I mean, again, money is pouring into it. The thing I read said that ChatGPT had a huge revenue. OpenAI had a huge revenue, but they lost $6 billion because of the cost to run this stuff.
So what can you do instead? So on Monday, I have an article coming out the same week called The Best LLM for Generating Your Stuff is Your Brain. This article talks about all the things that I've been saying. In fact, I'm going to link to this article rather than linking to all the sources of stuff that I've got.
But in this article, you'll find things that you can do, things that you can do instead of working with an LLM that can actually make your game better. And some examples are read the source books, highlight them, reference things, take notes, connect the dots, enjoy the experience of diving in. Think about your characters. Think about your villains. Write down secrets and clues.
Write down flash fiction that you can give to your players. Actually write your own flash fiction. Don't have ChadGPT whip up flash fiction. Make your own and send it out to them. It's a fun creative exercise to come up with a hundred word bit of flash fiction to show them how the world is moving around them. Think of lists of 10 things. This is my big brainstorming thing. I do this all the time.
I love it. I think that it's way better than coming up with one good solution or thinking real hard to come up with one good solution is to think up lists of 10 solutions and then pick some of the best ones. And that can be NPCs, locations, monsters, quests, factions, secrets, and clues. Anything else you need for your game, come up with a list of 10.
If you can't come up with a list of 20 and make it a 1D20 role list. And now you've built your own random list that you can use for things. Use Dyson Maps. You don't need ADI things to come up with maps. You can use Dyson Maps. He has like 1,300 maps on his website that are available for free, written by a guy who knows how to make maps. Awesome, awesome maps.
And many of them are available for commercial use. Mash together random tables. Roll on multiple tables. Roll multiple times on the same table. Mash up those results and come up with really interesting, meaningful, random encounters and random ideas for your games. Build your own faction table list for your campaign. Your campaign is unique.
There's unique players that are going on, unique factions at work. Make a random list of those factions and then combine that random list of factions with things like items, NPCs, quests, and locations. So you can generate really unique stuff for your campaign without having to go back to a large language model and do it.
As examples, I have a Forgotten Realms faction list and an Eberron faction list available on Scythe Flares. You can see those linked up there too.
And then I have a whole bunch of articles, again, linked in this one article about LLMs, on other brain tricks that you can use in order to really think creatively around your game, like creative mind exercises for D&D, breaking conventional thought with random tables, how to play D&D anywhere, developing your DM brain attic, great ideas for your RPGs, good books of random tables, and random creativity in D&D.
There's also other tools that you can use. The Lazy GM's resource document, a free Creative Commons released document that comes from the Lazy DM's Companion workbook and Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master includes lots of random tables you can use. Of course, those tables are available in the Lazy DM's workbook and the Lazy DM's Companion. You can mix them all to all you want. I love Perchance.
Perchance is an online tool that lets you generate your own online random generators. You can even download those generators so that you have them even if Perchance goes down. The random generator that I have as a Patreon feature, Lazy GM's random generator, is built on Perchance. Fantastic tool, fantastic resource where you can build your own random tables and mix together your own random tables.
It's great.
donjon.bin.sh is a fantastic and venerable random generator for all sorts of fantasy rpgs and specifically usable with dnd and 5e it's fantastic there's a lot the art the big question is well what about art mike i need to generate art there's lots of different kinds of art that you can get from actual artists on places like the stock art on drive-thru rpg which has great art by real artists with licensing that reasonable licensing costs that you can use if you want to use it in a professional work
If you're looking for like characters or NPC portraits for your game, check out Inkwell Ideas Portrait Decks. Again, available in that article. You can find a link to it. Those portrait decks give you hundreds and hundreds of different character portraits that you can use for all kinds of things. It works really great.
And of course, for big books of random tables, The Dread Thing in Omicron is probably my favorite giant book of random tables that you can use to build all kinds of different fantasy situations. So those are all different ways. I didn't want to just sit here and rail on generative AI and talk about how much it sucks and that you should do other things. I wanted to give you ideas. that you can use.
No, I just rattled off a ton of stuff. There's no way you remembered all that. So please check out the article. I will link to it in the show notes. You can find that link and you can find a whole bunch of different resources for how to really bend your brain about this RPG, just like we've done for the past 50 years running games for our friends.
And that is where I think we really get value out of this. And that's why I think the best large language model is the one between your ears, your own brain. Every month on the Sly Flourish Patreon, we have the Patreon Q&A. Any member of the Patreon can ask an RPG-related question. I answer all of the questions every Friday.
Some of those questions I bring here to the show where we can dive into them a little more and a little deeper. Skyler L. says, I think it's great that D&D has free rules. Paizo puts every single ancestry, race, class, subclass, etc. out for free on the Archives of Netheris, which is their system reference document.
The books are more so for lore and the extra meaty details, whereas AON is the raw rules and numbers. What should be the standard in the industry? Paizo is doing a lot and putting a lot of revenue on the line, but makes their games more accessible. I understand why WotC doesn't make everything free, but was curious what your thought is. Oh, I've got so many thoughts on this.
This is why the question is here. First of all, no company owes you anything for free. Companies owe you a product. You give them money and you buy that product or not. So I don't think that there needs to be an industry standard. Like when you say what should be the industry standard, I don't think there is an industry standard. I don't think we should expect to receive an industry standard.
And I think every company has to decide what the benefits are, how they feel about the industry, and what the benefits are for releasing what kind of material into any kind of open license agreement or making it available for free. Paizo puts out all of their material on the archives of Nethers. I didn't actually know this.
I haven't been to the archives of Nethers, but I did know that it was there. And they release it all under the Ork license. But the Ork license also has limitations. The Ork license is a share-alike license, which means any material that if you use their material in your product, everything you create also has to be available under that same license, which means they can use it too.
So there is this top of the line value where whoever the top of the food chain is for a viral license gains all of the benefits of everybody's license down below it. And that's a little questionable. So I'm not against it. And I think it's certainly better than not having a license at all. But the ORC license is a different kind of license than like a Creative Commons attribution license.
This is my favorite license. It's the one I use for my own material. where I use a Creative Commons attribution license, which does not mean that downstream players have to release their stuff under the same kind of license. I don't want to limit them in their ability on how they want to create their material.
Now, we have seen how that plays out, though, where I can think of two different popular role-playing games right now that both used the open license from Wizards of the Coast, the 5.1 system reference document, was all of the D&D 2014 rules without subclasses and some other stuff. That was released under a Creative Commons attribution license last year.
What that means is companies like Arcane Library and the product Shadow Dark and Kobol Press with Tales of the Valiant were able to use all of the material from that book, but then restrict their own licenses so that they weren't quite so open. That wouldn't have been true if they had released that under ORC. Now, you could decide whether or not that's good or bad.
You could say, well, I think that Kobo Press should have released all of their stuff under the same license that they used when they did it. But Kobo Press had that choice. And for example, Kobo Press said, we are not going to release our subclasses. They also released their material under ORC, but they do not release their own subclasses under it, which means they can limit the material.
That you're allowed to use, but you are not allowed to limit the material that they can use from you. So that's where the tricky bit of all the licensing comes from. But the end result is I think each company needs to decide what's right for them. I don't think that we should expect every company to put something out. I don't think we are owed anything from anybody when it comes to this.
I also think that at the very top of the food chain, though, when we look at the 5.1 SRD and the Creative Commons license, that alone has opened up so many different products that are able to use that license and know that Wizards of the Coast is not going to come after them for using the material that they have in their book. I think we each have to decide.
And for me, for example, I release a lot of the material from my books under a Creative Commons attribution license. It's mostly the stuff that I think can really benefit the whole rest of the community, stuff that other publishers can get some value out of. And the big question is like, am I locking something away that other people really want to use? The example of like Secrets and Clues.
I've had lots of people say, Hey, am I allowed to mention or talk about secrets and clues? And I'm like, I don't know why you wouldn't. It's two words. I don't own secrets and clues. I don't own the phrase, but you know what? I'll go ahead and put it in a system reference document. So you know that I think it's fine. I made this document that says you can use it and here you can use it, right?
So there's lots of areas where we did that. Like Scott and Teos and I worked really hard to come up with a chart of the baseline statistics for monsters from CR zero to CR 30 for fifth edition games. We put a lot of work into that, but we didn't want people to kind of say like, I don't know, am I allowed to use that for something? We said, no, you know what?
We're going to put on a Creative Commons released product. And now you have that and you can use that table in any product that you want. So there's, you know, every group kind of has to decide like, what is the stuff you really feel like you need to keep to yourself that you don't want to release?
What is the stuff that you feel like really enriches and makes the world better when it's out there and available and where that difference is? Everybody's kind of got to decide. But I don't think... we can point at any one company and say, oh, well, they're doing better than they are, or they're doing better than they are.
Yes, Paizo put out more material, but they put it out under a share-alike license, which limits it more.
Wizards of the Coast kept back some of their material and doesn't release pretty much anything other than the system reference document, but it's available under an open-use license where you do not have to share-alike, and that has been a benefit to companies who wanted to create stuff but not be forced to share all of their material, like Arcane Library with Shadow Dark and like Kobold Press with Tales of the Valiant.
big topic i hope you enjoyed that jason k says when changing genres and systems to something you might know not know very well such as the first time you played numenera after playing dnd how did you come up with ideas for your three fronts without knowing the background well or having the best understanding of power levels etc i'm starting my very first savage riffs campaign and i know it's a very distinctive setting with different power level i'm curious how you handled such a transition
So the answer is, I think when I was thinking up the idea for Numenera, I had a good enough understanding of Numenera to consider the whole, the fourth emperor. I forget what we call it. I think it was the rise of the fourth emperor, which was like this super powerful moon-sized entity that could destroy entire worlds that lived in another dimension. Yeah.
And but the real answer is you won't you might not know and you might have to play the game for a while before you would know what those fronts are. And this is where I would suggest really like focusing the aperture of your of your of your campaign down to just what you're going to need to next to run the next few games. You don't have to have all of your fronts laid out.
You don't have to have all their plots and all their motivations and everything all ready to go before you run your first session. You could just run your first session. You can let your fronts evolve.
And as you get a better understanding for the system, as you spend more time reading it, as you spend more time kind of understanding who and what matters to the characters and the players, that's when you can let your fronts sort of come out. So I don't think you need to build all of your fronts ahead of time. And I would suggest maybe not building those fronts ahead of time.
Or having fronts that are more local fronts. Because remember, fronts evolve. You don't just have the same three fronts for your entire game. By fronts, we're talking about like villains or forces that are at work. I've started to use the term villain more, even though it could be like a sentient moon or it could be a big tidal wave that's coming.
I'm still going to call it a villain because it's better than the jargon of fronts. And you don't have to have the same villains for your entire campaign. You might have one villain that might be there for the whole campaign, but you might have like a couple of other villains, some of which are very local that the characters defeat and then they're gone and then another villain shows up.
So you could actually think of villains like at tier levels, like who's your tier one villain that the characters are going to deal with right now? Here's a tier two that might be further away and a tier three or four that might be further along the game. But don't beat yourself up if you're not really understanding who a villain should be yet. That's fine. Understand the system.
Let it grow on you. See how things go as you're playing your games. And then start to put these villains in place that have their own plots going on with their own things happening. So I think that's the one thing. As always, be nice. Be kind to yourself. And don't beat yourself up when you're dealing with stuff like that.
Aaron W. says, I'm hoping for some advice on how to politely not include a player in my next campaign. This is a tough one. We're wrapping up our current one in two months, and I'm hoping to not have them at the table with our next one next year.
I wouldn't call them a problem player, but they haven't learned any of the rules, their characters, abilities, or spells, and we spend so much of the session retelling them how the basic things work. They just don't seem to care about the game, and I'd rather have players who are excited to be there.
Would you recommend talking to them or just quietly not including them when I start up the next one? So this is really tough. And this is kind of goes beyond the realm of, you know, advice for tabletop role playing games. It gets more into human nature. We are pack creatures. And when somebody is expelled from the pack, it's one of the worst things that you can do to somebody. Right.
That when people get pushed out and we've seen it with children and playgrounds, we see it with corporate offices and being outside of the know when all the big decisions of the company are happening like that. The whole idea of the fear of missing out.
So much of that comes from feeling like we are being excluded from the pack because in fact, you know, Mike Shea, sociologist and, you know, animal expert, all of a sudden, you know, that idea of like when you're expelled from the pack, you don't have resources that the pack is going to have and that it means that you're going to die. Right. Right.
So we have to be really, really careful with how we treat people in situations like this, because, you know, and I think a problem player is a problem player.
If somebody is really causing a problem and they're being disruptive for it or and particularly being willfully disruptive, if they're violating people's lines that they're drawing in a game, if they are, you know, making other people like, yeah, then you just get to kick them out. Right. You get to just boot them. If things are really disruptive, you know, it's time for them to go.
That's one thing. But if somebody's like there and they seem to be having a good time, but they're just they're not picking up the game. They're not really interested. There's some people who just want to hang out. Right. There's just some people like they're not really into the game, but they just like being with people. How can you still have somebody like that at the table and have it be OK?
And you might have a conversation with them about it. Maybe you have a different game that you can recommend them to. Maybe you say like, hey, how would you like to play in one shot games more often than our main game? Maybe you kind of switch things around, but you need to be real careful with somebody because it could be, you know, this could be their big time to socialize.
And when they lose that, that could be a problem. So I think we need to be kind to people too, even if that like, yeah, they're not putting in the effort. And so I think the answer to this one is, yeah, you definitely want to have a conversation with them. And you want to keep in mind that they might be using this as a big time to socialize. And I've definitely had players like that.
And, you know, what happens is sometimes I just run those games less and then I run other games more. But I never really like kick them out because I don't want people to, you know, have that have that feeling of being rejected. I felt that many times in my life and I don't want to cause that for other people. So I think that that's just something to keep in mind.
But I think that I think that, you know, it's always always best to have one on one face to face if you can, if you can't voice voice and video to voice and video if you can. to talk it through and try to help understand. And before you go into that conversation, have an idea of like, well, what outcome would you like to have from this? And what are the things that you can do to have that outcome?
Not being accusatory with somebody, not, you know, talk about the situation, don't talk about the people and see what you come to. And I've had it where people have left a group after I've had a conversation like that anyway, but it was far more understanding than it was like, oh, wait a minute. You said your game was canceled, but then everybody went to your game except me.
Like that's, you know, somebody is going to find out through a friend and it's going to suck. We're like, I guess I got kicked out. Nobody ever told me. So that's what I would, that's what I would, that's what I keep in mind. On that note, we are going to end today's show. I want to thank everybody for hanging out with me today while we talked about all things in tabletop role-playing games.
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