Thank you, everyone at Fear the Boot, for a helping me stay in touch with the favorite party of the hobby.

P.S. If you guys ever want to talk non-store specifics about the retail side of the industry (on or off the mics) let me know. For what it’s worth I’m fishing for a plug.

Why didn’t you just turn it inside out?

I also have a question or possible topic for you guys, since you have a lot more gaming experience than I do: Is there a tactful way to convince my group to settle on a game? I don’t particularly care which system or setting, but it seems like once a month we’re writing up new characters for a different game. Just in 2013, we’ve played: a few sessions of Shadowrun 4e, Pathfinder, D&D 3.5, D&D 2e, Fantasy HERO, Cyberpunk HERO, the Star Wars d20 RPG, and a few others. It means we don’t ever get attached to a character, and for me, that cheapens the experience.

Anyway, awesome episode, as always. You guys have me itching to find people who want to play the Dresden RPG. Thank you.

Just sayin’

OohRah Sgt Dan

Sgt Babcock
USMC

Even Dan, who’s normally not guilty of this sort of thing, was jumping to conclusions about it quite a bit.

Also, to Dan, I say… if employing the Monomyth to a game would make it formulaic, do you think the stories of The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Mass Effect, Dragon Age: Origins, Star Wars (original trilogy), and Batman Begins are formulaic? Those are all classic Heroes Journey’s.

I think what Tex failed to get across was that each of the steps are symbolic. The Mentor, for instance, might not even be a character. It might be a Rosetta Stone, so to speak. Some object that symbolizes something important, or points the way forward… the revaluation of the answer to some mystery. The crossing of the threshold might be a literal passing through a portal, it might be the characters making a decision.

Furthermore, the steps are rarely in precise order. In some stories, the mentor comes before the crossing, in others, after. The idea is that this particular grouping of ideas come into play.

I think to understand the monomyth, or Heroes Journey as it’s also called, one needs to realize that Joseph Campbell was analyzing stories that had come before, not outlining how stories should be written.

Understanding the Monomyth can only help a GM, unless he insists on railroading his characters into something VERY specific. How I employ it is to keep it on hand, looking for opportunities to employ the steps as the PCs progress. For instance, if the campaign presents an opportunity to use an NPC as a mentor, I’ll take that opportunity.

It’s best used as a checklist, knowing that hitting these points will trigger subconscious recognition in the players that will help them to feel they are part of something important. The players don’t *know* they’re on a Heroes Journey, but they do recognize the elements in an indistinct way.

I know it’s old, I just felt so angry for Tex. I feel like he was thoroughly disrespected here despite bringing forth an exceedingly interesting topic.

In my circle, we use the term “Shovel Buddy”

A shovel buddy, is something that every man should have. It’s two friends, with a mutual-pact, that should something happen to you, and you die, your shovel buddy knows EXACTLY where your stash is, and immediately goes to get it, and keep it safe to pass along to the person of your choosing.

For GMs who want to give their players the prison/capture experience, but have a group who is super-wary of such things due to the reasons stated in the episode (“it’s like death” “I’ll lose my stuff!”), I’d highly suggest setting up a game where the entire premise is to be in prison. Have the players figure out why their characters are there, and make sure that they know that while it’s okay to have a character who wants nothing more than to break out (if they really can’t see past that), the option is also very much on the table to create a character that has been in jail for a while and probably not going anywhere soon… and may not actually care, for whatever reason… for instance, they have established their own place in the pecking order, or have become truly “institutionalized.”

As is said in the episode regarding prison-related stories having the potential to be fascinating, it’s definitely not about playing “sit around and read magazines for the next 10-20 years.” With a prison-focused game, just as any other game, you get out of it what you put into it.

Not sure if the comparison is exact, but maybe envisioning that will help someone who reads this to understand.

When setting up the show notes, I tend to copy-and-paste from previous episodes just so I can keep the format consistent. Usually I correct that sort of stuff, but it looks like I missed one this time. Thanks for letting me know!

That aside, keep up the great work.

Alex H.

I have to be add to the peanut gallery comments in that 1 hour East of DC will get you past Annapolis and the Bay Bridge, but won’t quite get you to Delaware.

Almost every RPG I’ve encountered has some sort of mechanic that can take away control of your character. D&D has spells, Battletech has pilot hits, and so forth. Sure, some players may find any such mechanic annoying, but I think we’re ready to accept that as part of the game. We certainly do it to the enemies, after all!

But in all of the games I’ve played, I’ve never spent so much time struggling to regain control of my character as I do fighting off Shaken in Savage Worlds. You literally cannot be wounded without also being Shaken (page 74 – 75 of EE). Imagine if every single hit point loss in D&D also cast Sleep.

As you noted, you can throw a benny to remove Shaken. Jacking up your Spirit stat also helps.* And there are some Edges you can take, such as Combat Reflexes or Inspire. But therein lies our concern: I don’t want to have to design my character simply to avoid a condition that is not only irritating but also happens with greater frequency than such thing happens in other games.

I’m not dismissing SW as a bad system. There’s a reason I own the book and we’ve played so many campaigns. I love a lot of what’s there. I’m just not a big fan of staring at a field with X combatants, and at any given moment, probably about half of them are Shaken or losing their turn to recovering from Shaken.

* In the edition that we use (EE), the roll is made against Spirit, not Vigor. I don’t have a copy of Deluxe, so I’m presuming they changed it between the books.

Regarding Star Wars, if I were to operate from just the movies, I’d have to invent so much on my own that I might as well write a homebrew. But as you noted, the expanded universe offers a lot of established setting material that still leaves room to tell your own stories. I’ve both run and played in several Star Wars games that have little to do with material from the movies.

But keep in mind that the context of our answers was a game that’s supposed to present you with false dilemmas and then reveal the factors that made you tip one way or the other. Can I use my imagination (or the expanded universe) and tell a story in Star Wars? Absolutely! But I felt the Star Trek setting more readily invites that kind of intrusion, since at least TOS didn’t focus on a single track of universe-guiding events, enacted by a handful of protagonists/antagonists.

To put it another way, the reasons given were never meant to be entirely true or defensible, but simply the passing impressions that led us to pick another option. It’s sort of like ordering in a restaurant and then being asked why you chose the items you did. It probably says more about your current mood or passing fancies than any objective reality about the items on the menu.

And ultimately, that’s the point of the game: to reveal something deeper about the people playing.

The basic premise of Bruce Banner is: when he gets angry, he turns into the Hulk. So if he’s angry all the time, then why isn’t he the Hulk all the time?

I’m not saying my take is right or wrong, just that it’s what crossed my mind when he said it.

And the lightning line would have been so much better in X-men if it had been delivered in a bored off the cuff way as it was supposed to be :(

I don’t really expect you to remember the titles of all 294+bonus+interview episodes you’ve made. I had just happened to relisten to the original Zero to Published a week before and thought it was a funny coincidence that it was not just the same title (though obviously very different content) but a two parter as well. When it turned up in my feed my first thought was, ‘Why has it downloaded this again?’

Its a shame John wasn’t on it really. It only came out a month before Bloodmoon Goblins was announced. I would imagine he was at least thinking about publishing it then, it could’ve all come nicely full circle.