Published using Google Docs
Episode 10: Giving Yourself Permission to Feel (with Marisha Ray)
Updated automatically every 5 minutes

Dimension 20

Adventuring Academy

Giving Yourself Permission to Feel

(with Marisha Ray)

Season 1 Episode 10

< [Previous Episode] | [Next Episode] >

Brennan: Hello and welcome back to Adventuring Academy. My name is Brennan Lee Mulligan. With me today, we have the incredible Marisha Ray!

Marisha: Huzzah!

Brennan: Huzzah!

Marisha: Huzzah!

Brennan: Marisha is the creative director and a cast member of Critical Role.

Marisha: [looks down] Never heard of it.

Brennan: [looks down] Never heard of it.

(both laugh)

Brennan: Marisha, oh my god, we're so excited to have you on the show today.

Marisha: I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Brennan: Of course.

Marisha: Yeah.

Brennan: Well, Marisha, we've already been talking before the show, jumped in and got started, but I wanna talk a little bit, this is our all things TTRPG podcast we do here at College Humor.

Marisha: Hell yeah.

Brennan: And I wanted to talk because, Matt Mercer, you may have heard of him, was just in a sort of one-shot adventure we're doing and you ran some wildly popular, extremely fun, insane one-shots for the Critical Role channel, which were the Honey Heist adventures.

Marisha: Yeah. (laughing)

Brennan: So fun and insane and I love them.

Marisha: Thank you. Thank you.

Brennan: Talk to me a little bit about the impetus of running that game, running a non-DnD thing on this channel that was devoted to this long-running DnD game and kind of what drew you to that, and also the creative choices that you made embarking on this fun gamemaster journey.

Marisha: Yeah, oh man. The great thing about Honey Heist and the way that I tried to approach it is that it's a cartoon. Like, it's just a cartoon, you can, it's bears in hats trying to pull heists. So you have to be aware (laughing) of that. And then, I love puns. So I, so much, so much of those games were simply based on puns.

(both laugh)

Marisha: Yeah, it's, yeah. I'd say it's definitely different than building out a DnD campaign where you're trying to get that drama or the suspense and, I mean, you want that in Honey Heist too, just like would be in a, in any other cartoon or game, but yeah, it's definitely, you have to resign to the more wacky approach, for sure.

Brennan: What I love about something you just said on there in terms of like, this is a cartoon, is there's still actually a definitiveness and a concreteness, and when you watch those one-shots, you see the internal logic of the world. Living in a cartoon world doesn't mean no logic.

Marisha: Correct, correct.

Brennan: I think about it a lot with how people talk about grammar, when they talk about correct grammar versus incorrect grammar, and what's interesting is that people will actually, like, linguists often say, when you're talking about dialectical English, like if you take a Cockney thing like, if you say the correct is, we haven't had a meal in a long time, and then you have someone that's like, we ain't had a meal in a long time--

Marisha: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brennan: That's correct grammar for a different dialect.

Marisha: Yes, 100%.

Brennan: And when you're running Honey Heist, you see like, oh, are the laws of physics or the laws of consequence somewhat changed? Maybe they're different from normal Critical Role or a normal DnD game, but they are internally consistent.

Marisha: Yes, absolutely. Context is everything, right? So yeah, you still have those rules that kind of establish things, but the rules are that you're a talking bear, so you kinda, you set certain boundaries, but especially in something with that game, I mean, they're there to be broken. But yeah, yeah, 100%, I agree with what you said, there's still logic.

Brennan: There's still logic, right? Road Runner can fly across the cliffs because he believes in himself. Wile E. Coyote will look down and doubt himself and that's what makes him--

Marisha: And that's what makes him fall.

Brennan: Right. And that might not be our real world physics, but it is a cogent physics nonetheless. We can follow it, we can track it.

Marisha: 100%.

Brennan: I may have brought this up on the podcast before, but there's a great thing, I think about this a lot when I look at both the original Honey Heist stuff and then the all-lady Honey Heist as well--

Marisha: Yeah, yeah!

Brennan: Which is so fun. But there's a scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit where he's, Roger Rabbit is handcuffed to Bob Hoskins' character, and they're handcuffed and they can't get apart, can't get apart, and they finally get to this closet with this metal saw, and the table is wobbly and Roger Rabbit slips out of it--

Marisha: Yeah.

Brennan: To help hold the table, and the detective's like, you coulda gotten out of these handcuffs at any time?" And Roger Rabbit goes, "Only when it was funny!"

(both laughing)

Marisha: Yeah, I know exactly the scene you're talking about. It's true.

Brennan: Yeah! It's really true. And I would argue that even in the most intense form of DnD games, often that is true as well, where fantasy has its own physics-bending things, you know what I mean? Where like, oh, I will be much more likely to set a lower DC for a skill check if a scene is momentous and part of a character's arc, rather than them dicking around doing some bullshit where those DCs will suddenly just skyrocket.

Marisha: Right, right, right, yeah. The roleplaying into everything, and Matt will do the same thing with us on Critical Role. You know, if you… He does take into account if you're trying to talk to an NPC and you're trying to persuade them or you're trying to do something, and if you're just like, yeah, yeah, I persuade 'em, then, like, how? What, what are you doing? How do you do that? But if you do some good wordsmithing and you have a good little pitch, he'll bring that DC lower. And, I mean, the same thing kinda happens with Honey Heist, you know, in the all ladies, in the all honeys Honey Heist, and I gave them that GPS tracker, if you remember that weird fakey Glo-Bear Positioning System.

(Brennan laughing)

Marisha: Puns, see, everything's a pun. And it was just supposed to be a, just a silly prop that helps them track things. Next thing you know they're like, I use this to disarm the car and I use it to do this and I wanna, can I use this to hack the thing? And I'm like... (sighs)

(Brennan laughing)

Marisha: This is not what any of that was intended for, but--

Brennan: Big DM mood.

Marisha: But, yeah, yeah.

Brennan: Big DM mood, yeah.

Marisha: But I, I liked the creativity of the ideas, of how they were trying to use it. Krystina, who was the hacker, she's a hacker, so like if, you know, okay, if you wanna use a GPS and hack in to see if you can hack coordinates or hack a code, like, yeah, I'll allow it. It's the I'll Allow It rule.

Brennan: It is so much better for someone running a game to have that I'll Allow It mentality, because I often feel the relationship between a dungeon master and the dice is the good cop, bad cop relationship.

Marisha: Oh, for sure, yeah.

Brennan: And it's always so much better and easier as a DM, let's say for whatever reason you're looking at a proposed course of action from a PC, if for whatever reason in your head you're like, you suspect either that might be unsatisfying for the overall story, even if it would be very empowering in this one moment for this PC, or you're just like, this'll fuck my shit up, if they catch the bad guy right now, I'm toast, this whole story crumbles or whatever.

Marisha: Right, right.

Brennan: In those instances, rather than giving a hard no, I would almost always rather be like, well let's see what the dice have to say, and then you just hit that, because I've almost never had a, I have often had a PC get grumpy about not getting, not being given a chance. I have never seen a PC grumble about a high difficult--

Marisha: A dice roll, right, exactly.

Brennan: Even if, I've even looked at someone and been like, hit a nat 20 and I'll let it happen, and there's almost never a fuss. Partially because they appreciate being given a chance, and also partially because PCs always think they're gonna hit that nat 20.

Marisha: Yeah, yeah!

(both laughing)

Marisha: It's so true, you're like, this is brilliance. This is gonna, watch this shit.

Brennan: Watch this!

Marisha: This is amazing. But yeah, it's such an excellent point that you're making there, 'cause at the end of the day, you still have to be cognizant that it's a game and that we're all here to have fun, and part of the reason that we, that people play tabletop games is because you can be creative with these rules, you can kind of bend things a little bit within the reality. You know, if you wanted to be told no, you can't do something, then just, you can go play a video game and have no, no, as you're trying to climb walls and your player character doesn't want you to. So there are plenty of situations to be told no, and I mean, it's so much too why we tell people who often ask how or what should I do to try and improve some of my DMing skills, take an improv class. That 'yes, and...'

Brennan: It's huge.

Marisha: It's huge, it works. And, you know, it's not to say like, to your point, that there's not gonna be times where you're like, yeah, this is, there's no feasible way that what you're talking about can work, but yeah, I think people would be surprised.

Brennan: You can say yes to so much, and there's also an aikido element to things. Let's say that somebody wants to do something where you're like, for whatever reason, either I think this is ill-advised or there's, or allowing them to do this would so fundamentally alter the nature of the stakes and consequences that I've had, there's always a way to reorient energy, right? So let's say someone does make that climb check or whatever, and they get out of one situation, well maybe you narrate that they climb out of this one puzzle or trap or whatever, poke their head out, and there's a whole army of bad guys waiting for them. So they got what they wanted, they rolled their high roll, and you're like, and here's what you find now.

Marisha: And here's your consequences, yeah.

Brennan: As a DM, I think as a dungeon master, the biggest thing you have to do is take as many losses as possible, because you're like the house in Vegas, where it's like--

Marisha: Oh yeah.

Brennan: Okay, if you beat me now, watch what happens next.

Marisha: Yeah, yeah.

Brennan: Why are you pushing back against what your PCs want in the moment? You control the next moment. Let them win right now, and then do your Xanatos thing of like, all's going according to plan.

Marisha: (laughing) Yeah.

Brennan: Right, why not? That's so fun.

Marisha: Yeah.

Brennan: When you made the, when you started doing the Honey Heist things, one of the things we often get a lot is trepidation from people in our Discord who ask questions like, am I ready to DM? You've been playing for years and years and years and years and years, did you feel ready to go 'cause of all the DnD that you'd played on the other side of the screen, or was there trepidation?

Marisha: Oh yeah. I mean, absolutely trepidation. It's a whole new, it's a, you know, similar skill set, different brand, you know? You're kind of just being on the other side of that. Yeah, and it's nerve-wracking, especially considering a lot of us are cutting our teeth DMing live on camera

(Brennan laughing)

Marisha: In front of thousands, which, wouldn't recommend to anybody to be totally honest.

(Brennan laughing)

Marisha: So yeah, you have a little bit of that, that anxiety of oh, oh no, am I gonna, am I going to royally mess this up and is this gonna be fun for my players? Is this gonna be enough, is this, what is this gonna be? But it really was, once you get through that first 10 minutes and you get rolling, it's like a steam train.

Brennan: Yeah.

Marisha: Takes a little bit and it's a lot of energy to get it moving--

Brennan: Little awkward, you're sinking into character.

Marisha: Little awkward.

Brennan: You're figuring out how to narrate stuff, and then--

Marisha: Right, right.

Brennan: I've been DMing since I was 10 years old, and every time I start a new campaign, it's a familiar awkwardness.

Marisha: Yeah.

Brennan: No matter how much practice you get as a DM, there's that first couple minutes of like, a new world, we don't know how these characters feel--

Marisha: New world, who dis? Yeah.

(Brennan laughing)

Marisha: For sure. And I mean, I feel like that's it with almost everything. I would say, listen to your trepidations, acknowledge them, it's okay to have them, but it's very much in the same breed of trepidation that you would have getting started in anything. I mean, it's first date awkward, you know? It doesn't mean that after the first 10 minutes, you know, or when you, nothing's worse that trying to figure out how you're gonna start an improv show or like a stand-up routine, you're like, okay, how, now, and it starts!

(Brennan laughing)

Marisha: So there's always that moment of, and it's a thing now!

Brennan: You just gotta keep pushing through.

Marisha: You gotta push through it.

Brennan: You just gotta keep pushing through, I absolutely agree. Was there any part of being a GM that was something like, that either, whether you anticipated it or not, what struck you, moving from player to GM, as being the most different in terms of your mind state? Your emotional state when you're doing one versus the other? 'Cause I certainly feel like, even though we're all playing the same game, one side or the other of that screen is so different in terms of what it feels like to play.

Marisha: Yeah, absolutely. I think my, the thing that they always, that DMs will always tell you is, you'll plan, you'll plan, you'll plan, and you think you have an idea on how it's gonna go down, and then your players will throw something out of left field immediately and it all goes out the window. And I'd heard that and I'd heard that, and you know, I was talking with Matt and I was having him kind of give me pointers as I was getting set up. Couldn't really show him my story though, 'cause he was a part of that first one. And he was just like, just be prepared for them to do something that you are not anticipating. get to the outside and I was like, okay, I'm really planning on this being like an infiltration stealth type mission of the bears breaking in and doing this pelting the town guards with their poo, they start throwing feces at the guards.

(Brennan laughing)

Marisha: And then you start, and then I, very quickly I had to be like, this entire game that I more or less planned out to be a stealth infiltration mission is completely out the window, because I knew there's no way that you're gonna have a pack of bears roll up to a town, start attacking the guards and throwing them with shit and not have the entire town on high alert.

(Brennan laughing)

Marisha: So once again, you're still kind of going, what we were talking about before, like yes, it's a cartoon, but there's still, there's still logic.

Brennan: Yeah.

Marisha: I still had to justify that, that okay, and then you just kind of adjust from there.

Brennan: And to me what's so interesting is, I honestly feel that a dungeon master and a player are almost playing, you could almost say they're playing two different games. And the reason for that is, and I say this as someone who is much the reverse of, I've mostly DMed and rarely played, and relish the opportunities when I get to play, and sometimes people will say like, when you're being a player character, it's like imagination, and I always go like, no! Don't make me imagine anything. I do that enough! Please let me just immerse.

Marisha: Just, yeah, be, 100%.

Brennan: Be, I just wanna be. And to me I think actually the words I would use are imagination and immersion. Being a DM is imagination, because I don't have a stake in anything as the DM other than my friends having a good time, so I'm like, I'm the weather, I'm this castle, I'm a villain, I'm an ally, just moving around, moving the story forward, and that feels like imagination 'cause it's all, whoosh, I'm just wherever I need to be. When I'm a player character, sometimes I will have people that'll be like, oh, as a player character, I think being a player character requires tremendous creativity, but it's similar to being an actor, where the creativity is internal. I'm not really imagining, I'm deeply immersing and getting lost in this character.

Marisha: Absolutely.

Brennan: And then at a certain point just making the decisions they would make.

Marisha: Right.

Brennan: And you, so you've had this amazing experience of, first of all the holy grail of a regular weekly game.

Marisha: Yes.

Brennan: Which is honestly just, forget about the livestreaming aspect, just a regular game is a dream come true.

Marisha: I mean, part of the reason we ended, sorry, part of the reason we even ended up doing the show is because, we didn't anticipate anybody watching four hours of people playing DnD every week. We were like, it's gonna fail. This is gonna be a failure. But part of the excuse of doing it was but we'll get to meet weekly and we have to call it work.

(Brennan laughing)

Marisha: Okay. So that was such a huge boon for even doing the show.

Brennan: Yeah, it's really incredible. And I think what's been amazing is not only, you know, we get as many questions about playing as we do about running these games. And I wanted to talk to you, just throw out to you in a more general way about the idea of, you as a player have tackled some of the biggest challenges that players have to face, which is number one, starting and taking a character to 20th level.

Marisha: Yeah.

Brennan: Dealing with player character death, and sometimes perma-death.

Marisha: Yeah.

Brennan: And dealing with in-character romance.

(Marisha chuckles)

Brennan: All of these are things that are like the pinnacle achievements I would consider of being a PC in a game of Dungeons & Dragons. What were the things that like, were the most exhilarating, what were the most exciting, and what would you throw out as advice to people that want to unlock those milestones for themselves as players?

Marisha: Man, that's an excellent question.

(Brennan laughing)

Marisha: That was layered, Brennan.

Brennan: Lots of layers.

Marisha: So many layers. The immersion aspect is pretty much on point. For people who want to try and get to that level, I think a lot of it has to deal with permission from yourself first. Especially being an adult and in today's day and age and I think so much, I think an unfortunate part of adulthood is that society and people around you eventually start telling you that imagination is juvenile. Or doing a voice like this might seem immature. And I think people will start immediately, will often get embarrassed and feel like they can't allow themselves to do that for fear of making themselves look a fool. That's where you have to start, you know. You can't jump into something like exploring romance or, you know, even allowing yourself to feel, you know, we cry around the table all the time because we feel it so hard, and if you allow yourself to do that, you will enrich your DnD experience tenfold. Just give yourself permission, and you're, you're at a table with people who will go with you on that and allow you that because they wouldn't have showed up otherwise.

Brennan: Yes!

Marisha: You know? You already have permission just by sitting down and agreeing with these people, yeah, let's play DnD, you know? And things like, if you wanna start getting into something like a more serious roleplaying experience, I recommend talking to your dungeon master and your fellow PCs on it. Some people might just want a dungeon crawl type of game that's a little bit more hack and slash, collect loot and level up, and that's great, you know, it can be a lot more low impact, but if you really want to get into that type of enriched RP experience, I don't think there's anything wrong with talking with your players and being like, are we down to do this?

Brennan: Hell yeah.

Marisha: And just being on the same page. I mean, and it's incredible. All the memories that I have as Keyleth, they feel just as real as my real life memories. I mean, at the end of the day, when we're all lying on our deathbeds and all we have are our memories, you can't tell me that the experience that I have fighting K'Varn with my comrades in the Underdark and remembering those killing blows and transforming into an earth elemental and jumping off a flying carpet, I remember that stuff just as vividly and I can see it, if not more vividly, than some of my real life experiences.

Brennan: Not to get all science dork about it, but the center of your brain that processes ocular visual input is the same center of your brain that is where your imagination conjures images. It's not two different areas, like what you see from the world is being processed in the exact same center that processes the things that you imagine.

Marisha: Yeah, yeah.

Brennan: Your mind's eye and your eye are the same damn place.

Marisha: Yeah. Similar sciency thing, you store memories, they've done tests to see if you remember fiction in a different way, like movies or something, than your real life ones, but they're also still stored in the same place.

Brennan: All the same.

Marisha: So it's all the same.

Brennan: It's all the same. It's so fucking cool. This is, we're gonna go way into the past now to talk about, because we're talking about there's that element of overcoming awkwardness, but then at a certain point like, if you arrive at that consensus with your DM and your players, like hey, we're interested in a story-based RP-heavy thing where we really allow ourselves to feel what these characters are feeling, do you remember what it was, what the process was like, breaking into that level of attachment to Keyleth and did you have to revisit that at all with Beau in the second campaign?

Marisha: Oh sure. Well, you know, our home game, when we were playing just kinda casually, it was, it was casual, just like every other Dungeons & Dragons game that you probably have at home. We would laugh, we would make inappropriate jokes, and it was all kind of a little bit more slapstick-y. And then we had a moment in our home game when Ashley Johnson's character Pike died from a glabrezu, was bisected in half, and it felt like everything changed, our perception and our reality of what our game was, because we all were in tears. Laura was on the, I'll never forget her being on the fetal position on the floor, and she was just lying like this, and Matt looks over the table and he goes, Laura, you're next, Vex is up next, and she looks up from the ground and she goes, "I don't know what to do!"

(Brennan clapping)

Marisha: And we're all like crying. And then I think that was when we realized, oh, we feel something for these characters.

Brennan: Yeah.

Marisha: And I don't think we had fully had the realization yet.

Brennan: That's awesome. So it snuck up on you.

Marisha: Until that moment. It kinda snuck up on us. Like when you all stop and you all look around and you're like, we're crying over imaginary people that do not exist. And yeah, I think that's when we started realizing how important it was. And then when we switched to the stream and made it weekly, and then being, doing on the show, honestly one of the best things that the show gave us was, it forced us to have to focus.

Brennan: Yeah.

Marisha: Because when we would do our games normally, they would be maybe bimonthly and we would block out a Sunday or Saturday and play for eight hours, and those days were incredible, don't get me wrong, but that allowed a lot of room to, oh this person's going, I'm gonna go veer off in the kitchen, get some snacks, and then side conversations might happen and you know, it happens and that's fine, we were also socializing, so you would lose stuff from time to time.

Brennan: Yeah.

Marisha: But forcing us to put the phones away, allowing us to fully be immersed, that really started cementing who these people were even more, and we weren't waiting two months to visit them again. So that was really when Keyleth started becoming this person in my head, and it felt like, it felt like my imaginary best friend that I knew just as deeply in some ways, but I was also still learning who she was, so that was kind of a journey. And yeah, when we switched to Beau, when we switched to the new campaign, we did a few session zeroes at home to kind of start learning who these characters were, 'cause you can have an idea in your head but then you sit at the table and as I always like to say, let's see what comes out.

Brennan: Yeah.

Marisha: 'Cause sometimes you might think a character's gonna be one thing, and then you get in there and you start playing them and you're like, oh, they're this. So, you know, once again, there's still a little bit of that learning curve. What was actually interesting when I switched with Beau, I had a few weeks where I started getting reticent about her and who she was and if I wanted to continue on with a character like that, because I always talk all the time about how much I learned from Keyleth, Keyleth taught me a lot. Keyleth taught me how to be a better person, 100%. 'Cause like, she's, Keyleth is far more compassionate than I am towards people and she has empathy, you know? And truly cares, and like I think there were several instances where Keyleth was trying to understand and empathize with someone where I think Marisha might not have had the same amount of patience. So I actually, and then I kind of got to understand people like Keyleth a little bit better in real life, she has a ton of insecurities and self-doubts and anxieties, and it kind of made me relate and understand people that I think I would get frustrated with in real life.

Brennan: That's awesome.

Marisha: And so she made me a better person, she was genuinely kind and good. For as much shit people, that was always the irony, is that for as much shit people gave Keyleth, she was just trying to do the right thing. She was always trying to figure out if what she was doing was the best thing that she could do. Then I switched to Beau, who has deep-seated anger issues.

Brennan: Yeah.

Marisha: And she has these walls that she throws up, and she will, she will be the asshole first, and wants you to know that she's an asshole because she's assuming that if you get to know her, you're gonna think she's an asshole anyway, so she might as well control that situation.

Brennan: Right.

Marisha: Was kinda is where Beau is coming from. And there were a few games that I would leave from and I would kinda have a little bit of this anger and frustration, and it was like pissing me off, like, inhabiting her. So I started getting oddly nervous, and I was like, do I want this person in my head for potentially the next three years?

Brennan: Yeah.

Marisha: And I think I, I don't know, so much was defined by Keyleth that I did get nervous and then I, so Beau ended up teaching me a whole new set of lessons of, I'm not defined by this character that I'm playing, I can separate it, and eventually, with more time, and it's already happened, this was, you know, post-thoughts, that I would think I would find empathy and start understanding people like Beau, you know, a little bit more. And it has, and I was looking for her growth and where she would change, and I wanted to start her one way so that we could see where that would lead, but yeah, there was a hot second where I was like, is this oddly toxic?

Brennan: Yeah.

Marisha: In a weird way.

Brennan: Well it's beautiful that you just touched on right there too, just the idea of starting a character in one place with the knowledge, certainly the knowledge imparted to you from running through an entire campaign to 20th level, but the idea that characters do change.

Marisha: Yeah.

Brennan: So wherever you start a character at first level is not they're they're gonna be at level three or four or five. What level were you guys at in campaign one when you fought the glabrezu, when Pike died?

Marisha: Probably like seven?

Brennan: So think about the idea of like yeah, going through seven levels of adventuring, that's remarkable. And then this event happens that totally changes everybody.

Marisha: Right.

Brennan: And I don't know, there's a beautiful thing, in improv we talk about this all the time, which is that when you're playing a character, even something like, (comedic voice) really different from yourself, right? It's still always you. My favorite metaphor for character playing has always been that characters are translucent and not opaque, where they're like stained glass, right? And in this metaphor, it's sort of like you, the person, are the light behind the stained glass and what the character is, it's always still you but the colors and shapes and the way things are arranged changes and the light shines through differently.

Marisha: Yeah, that's a great metaphor, yeah, yeah.

Brennan: (laughs) Thank you. But that idea too of like every, so it's this weird thing where it's like every character you play is weirdly an examination of--

Marisha: A piece of you.

Brennan: A piece of you, right. And it's almost like me if, right?

Marisha: Yeah.

Brennan: When I've played lawful good characters, chaotic good characters, chaotic evil characters, it's always, to me the challenge is always like, oh, how do I get there, right? I play this chaotic evil pirate character and I joked to my brother about it who was running that campaign where I was like, yeah, what if you born a genius in the lowest class of a society with no class mobility, and you were abused at every level, you were in the Navy, committed atrocities and war crimes, and the only chance for social mobility was to be a criminal. And it's like, oh okay, just looking at these ways of like, okay, I'm taking me and I'm adding this voice and I'm adding this physicality, let's bring down compassion by 40%.

Marisha: Yeah, right? (laughing)

Brennan: Let's bring up impulsivity by 75. And you're just kinda messing with these dials until suddenly you get a character, but what people don't realize is, even in DnD, the reactions are always genuine, they're just filtered through this stained glass.

Marisha: Right, right. And I think touching on what you were saying with like, it's, you're the light, I think that's what freaked me out for a hot second about Beau. I was almost afraid I was tapping into the worst parts of me.

Brennan: Yeah.

Marisha: And it's like, do I want to continue to explore this? And my metaphor, I say the same thing, you still have to, it's still you, and matter cannot be destroyed or created, it can only change shapes, you have to have a fuel, and so that's still gonna be coming from somewhere inside and your own life experiences.

Brennan: Yeah.

Marisha: But I think that the beauty and the joy of that, and I deeply believe in a lot of the therapeutic benefits of tabletop RPGs, because it does give you a safe space to explore some of these facets of you in a relatively consequenceless environment.

Brennan: No, I mean, all that roleplaying stuff does bring you into these places where you get to explore what would happen if you reacted differently.

Marisha: Yeah.

Brennan: And having that space for exploration is so important. I'm gonna move to audience questions, which kills me because there's so much left on the table here to discuss. But everything you're saying, I so deeply appreciate and it makes so much sense. This, so if you're watching this, you coulda watched it two weeks earlier on dropout.tv.

Marisha: That's right.

Brennan: Why didn't you do that?

Marisha: Yeah. I got Dropout.

Brennan: Marisha's got Dropout.

Marisha: I do.

Brennan: I got Dropout.

Marisha: Mm-hm.

Brennan: What's the holdup? Come hang out.

Marisha: I like it. I watch D20.

Brennan: (laughs) Woo!

Marisha: It's great. Watch that Rank Room.

(Brennan laughing)

Marisha: It's good.

Brennan: It's real good, it’s real good!

Marisha: It's good, mm-hmm, it's good, it's real good.

Brennan: Real good. This one's, so our questions are all submitted on our Dropout-exclusive Discord server, this one's from AC Clutch, thanks AC Clutch.

(Marisha giggles)

Brennan: "How do you keep your players from going down a path that they think is relevant to the campaign, when in actuality, it's a meaningless route? Do you plan out a few failsafes to redirect your players back to the storyline, or do you just let them figure out for themselves that what they are doing isn't helpful?" Thanks, AC Clutch. This is a charged one.

Marisha: It is charged. I would say there are no meaningless routes.

Brennan: It got very zen in here.

(both laugh)

Marisha: Yeah.

Brennan: Hell yeah. So what does that mean to you? So can you think back to any moments in these campaigns of like, oh, we really went down the wrong tunnel in the rabbit hole? Like, this was not the fruitful way to go and now we have to double back our steps to find the story again?

Marisha: (sighs) It's an excellent question. I think the closest thing that we've really done towards like, sometimes we will get a little overly attached on a detail.

Brennan: Sure.

Marisha: For anyone who's caught up on Critical Role, the chair.

(Brennan laughs)

Marisha: The chair, you know. It was, it was nothing, there was nothing special about this chair and we were all convinced there was something about this chair, but Matt let us go down it.

Brennan: Yeah.

Marisha: And then eventually he was, through DMing was, as we were saying before, he doesn't want to make the no, so roll for it. Roll to see if you figure anything out about this suspicious chair. And then eventually he let the dice give him permission to say, seems like a pretty ordinary, non-special chair. So yeah, I feel like this question kinda harkens back to what we were saying at the beginning of all of that, which is don't tell your players no.

Brennan: Yeah.

Marisha: Let 'em do it. Worst that can happen is they'll laugh or they'll learn that lesson later on in the future. You do still want to give your players these learning experiences.

Brennan: Absolutely. And I think too with the chair, like, I don't think anyone had a bad time with the chair and in fact the chair is one of the most beloved moments from campaign, the amount of fan art.

Marisha: The chair has fan art, yeah.

Brennan: The chair has fan art. So like, these moments where people are being detoured from the main storyline, yada yada, I would say like, do you have a bus to catch? A detour is fine.

Marisha: Yeah, give it, do a detour. If you feel like you want to keep them a little bit more on track and you want to teach them these lessons about meandering, set a consequence. There should still be an essence of time in all of these games.

Brennan: Yeah.

Marisha: If they mess up, they don't do their research, they go down a long path and an hour later they realize this was a fruitless thing, maybe the bad guy that they were chasing is in another city now, he managed to get in that teleportation circle and he is gone. And then your players will realize, oh, okay. Maybe we should have researched this better, maybe we should have explored other options before we committed to this one, but I think you do still have to, you have to allow it and you have to let 'em learn from themselves.

Brennan: Absolutely. And I would say too that a good rule of thumb, and at least once or twice per episode we try to get a real nuts and bolts tip for people running games, so here's my nuts and bolts one for this episode. To the best of your ability, never have uninteresting consequences. Right, if they've invested a lot of time and energy into something, try to make that result in something. Now let's say that you're, the judgment I would make is this. If the PCs have gone down the wrong fork, you as a DM owe it to them to run back in your head and say, is this actually my players fucking up? Did I make clues really explicit and they have missed something, or there's some mistake that was made that really means they made the wrong choice?

Marisha: Right.

Brennan: Because if they did, and they take the wrong route, and then you punish them with like, oops, you went the wrong way and the villain--

Marisha: And there's nothing or, yeah, yeah.

Brennan: And then the villain got something. I know this sounds crazy, it will actually be satisfying to the players if you as the DM can go back and say, remember that clue back there? 'Cause then the PCs go, ahhh no!

Marisha: Aww, yeah, 100%.

Brennan: That actually is fun for players.

Marisha: Yeah.

Brennan: What isn't fun is you're like, no, you picked wrong. There was no clue that you could have picked the other one, but you did a coin flip and you picked wrong.

Marisha: Well, why did you build this tunnel in the first place?

Brennan: Right, exactly.

Marisha: Why is it here then?

Brennan: So I think the idea is, weirdly, 'cause it sounds very judgemental, but if there's, if you can go like, no, there's something I'll be able to point to that the players missed, that they'll kick themselves over?

Marisha: Yeah.

Brennan: Punish them. If you know that they won't be able to kick themselves and they're just gonna go like, alright, I guess we were fucked because we didn't know.

Marisha: 'Cause we just wasted time.

Brennan: Yeah, we just just wasted time. In that case I would say don't punish them, and in fact, the other thing I would say is a lot of times that they make the wrong call, go down a different fork in the road, consider very carefully, could the clue be down that fork? Could it? Or let's say it's totally inconsequential, could you add some other detail? Let's say they go down the wrong fork. Okay, yes, that's the wrong fork. Is there a secret trapdoor at the end of that fork that if they find leads back to the right fork?

Marisha: Totally.

Brennan: Because I think the thing you don't want is, you get to the end of the wrong path, whatever that path is, either a literal path or just a narrative path, you never wanna get to that and then they go like, okay, let's walk all the way back to where we fucked up.

Marisha: Yes.

Brennan: And take the left where we took the right.

Marisha: Yes.

Brennan: Try to avoid that when you can, I think, either through secret opportunity, there's a trap door in the wrong path that you took, or by punishing them with, you missed something.

Marisha: Right.

Brennan: I think anywhere in the middle of those two extremes can be a little bit of a whomp whomp.

Marisha: For sure. And you're the DM, you still have control. It's your world, we're just walking through it. You know, like you said, if they miss an NPC, if they miss a clue, we don't know if you're gonna move it somewhere else, like the information's, they don't know, it's not gonna hurt them none if you move it.

Brennan: You see that same barkeep you saw in the other town. He's opened a new bar here.

Marisha: Yeah, he's working a double shift.

(Brennan laughs)

Marisha: You know, he's got two kids--

Brennan: I still have all these clues from the other bar.

Marisha: Taxes are high, you know.

(Brennan laughs)

Marisha: He's gotta work two shifts. You know, you can justify anything. You can justify anything.

Brennan: I agree. Question from a DM, oh sorry, this one's from Extreme Otter. Thank you, Extreme Otter.

Marisha: Extreme!

Brennan: Extreme otter! Cracking all kinds of clams on my chest with rocks!

(Marisha laughs)

Brennan: "Question from a DM running their first ever campaign. All five of the members of my party use D&D Beyond." Hell yeah, D&D Beyond.

Marisha: [sings] D&D Beyond!

Brennan: "A website that works like a virtual character sheet or some have their virtual character sheet and rules app. The extra help was useful at first, reminding us about important details of spells and abilities, but now it's becoming a problem for me as a DM. My players are often distracted. I've seen them on Facebook and watching sports on their laptops when the party splits or combat has a lot of enemies. They just disconnect from the session, and I have to waste time bringing them up to speed. All the players really like D&D Beyond and are still into the game. What should I do? Should I make it a paper-only game? Can I even do that without the consent of my players? -Extreme Otter." Thanks, Extreme Otter.

Marisha: It's an excellent question, and really, I wouldn't blame D&D Beyond or the iPads, I don't think it's, it's not the program's fault. Even if you switched to a paper game, like I was talking about from when we were at home and we were playing our eight hour games, we were doing pen and paper and we would still get distracted. You still have your phones.

Brennan: Yeah.

Marisha: You know, they can still look that up and get on Twitter. I think this is less of a problem about the medium in which you use your character sheet and more of an issue of respect, and I think it's just, I think a lot of players, and we were like this a little bit too, and Matt had to have the talk with us a long time ago when we were still playing at home, I don't think players are intentionally trying to be distracted or disrespect the work you've put in. I think some don't honestly understand the full time and effort and work that DMs put into these stories that they're building for you as a gift.

Brennan: Yeah.

Marisha: And you are totally within your right to be real about that.

Brennan: Yeah!

Marisha: And just tell them, and I think just having a conversation and being like, hey guys, I spent all of Wednesday night, spent six hours putting this together, how would you guys feel if when we were at the table we take this as an opportunity for all of us to disconnect and we have a phone bucket. You know, put your stuff in airplane mode.

Brennan: Yeah.

Marisha: I think that's fair if, we have specific little iPad Minis just for our character sheets for the show and we make sure that we don't have the social media apps on there.

Brennan: That's awesome.

Marisha: Take it off, it's not needed. So I really think that that's just a question or just a clarification, do it nice, do it respectably, you don't need to scold your players, but just be like, “Hey guys--

Brennan: Yeah.

Marisha: “I put a lot of work into this. Maybe we can focus a little?”

Brennan: I think that's completely, completely understandable and you're well within your rights. A couple points in that question, I would say first of all, do everything with your players' consent, so talk to them.

Marisha: Talk to 'em, yeah.

Brennan: Talk to them. Almost every answer to these sort of “how to run a game” things is talk to 'em.

Marisha: Yeah.

Brennan: Talk to your players. I would say another thing too, and this is because I have experience. I will trust that this person has seen these apps negatively impact play at the table, but I do wanna raise one little asterisky concern, which is that the presence of these apps does not necessarily mean anything by itself. If you are seeing it sap and drain concentration and focus, that's one thing, but I worked a long time ago at a LARP camp where we did an event for a group of awesome participants that were on the autism spectrum. One of the participants, we would have long world background lectures where it'd be one staff member talking about Galgador and the other realms of Galgador.

(Marisha giggling)

Brennan: And this great, this great participant, whenever we were sitting for more than two or three minutes, he would get up, walk around, and do what's called stimming, right? He would just shake his hands and he couldn't look right at whoever was talking, and the average speaker's gonna look at that and be like, oh, this is disrespectful, I'm not being listened to. No, this participant was fully listening. The physical stimulation of walking and looking at different parts of the room and shaking his hands was part of how he was allowing himself to even be able to focus.

Marisha: Sure.

Brennan: So there's a thing of checking with your players about like, don't assume x, y, z is gonna help your players focus. I have one player in my long-running game where if I don't let this dude surf the web, he will just leave. (laughs) He will just like, that's actually helping him stay in the room.

Marisha: Yeah.

Brennan: I know that might seem a little bit like, I think it's a hard call to make, so the only thing I would say here is use your best judgment. The presence of fidget cubes and spinners, the presence of doodling, like ask yourself why you would let a player doodle but wouldn't let a player check Facebook really quick, right?

Marisha: Sure.

Brennan: So I would say be aware that people have different bandwidths of attention and focus, and it's based on what makes them the most comfortable, so accommodate that. But I think definitely, if you can actually see the game suffering, I think the one thing is, if you go your turn, and a player looks up from whatever and goes, “What, what's happening?”

Marisha: Yeah. They go, “Uh, I attack that gnoll over there,” and you're like, “That gnoll has been dead for four rounds.”

Brennan: (laughing) Right, like I think the proof is in the pudding where regardless of how we all manage our attention, if a player is obviously not paying attention and you can tell because you have to recap the entire battle every time a round opens up and it's further slowing down battle, that is something that you should, I think, address, and then you can say what's sapping our focus and attention at the game.

Marisha: Sure.

Brennan: How do we re-dedicate to each other? I'll also, it's the last thing I'll say here too, is if you are a DM and find that people are losing focus and attention, if they're losing focus and attention in your roleplaying scenes, uh, you know, and I'm not saying this to, I guess, victim blame DMs, but I would say if your players are losing a lot of focus, have a talk with them about refocusing but then also meet them halfway by making sure that your roleplaying encounters have twists or have engaging characters, and I would say, make more of your combats deadly. That'll wake 'em up.

Marisha: That's a good, ooh! That is an excellent tip actually, yeah.

Brennan: People lose focus in battles that don't have a risk of death. People will look up from their fucking phones if someone starts making death saves, and that's a fact. (laughs)

Marisha: Yeah and it, you know, it really is that engagement factor. There might be little things. Like we use music on the show, but that was constant even at the home games.

Brennan: Yeah.

Marisha: Matt always had a playlist. There's nothing, you know, you might be surprised how much setting the mood a little bit might kick up that immersion a little bit more, you know, when we were playing at our home games, we would play music, I would light some incense, light some candles, you know, sometimes that little stuff can actually push it over the edge, you know?

Brennan: It really, really can. All those little things help. They create a feeling of intentionality.

Marisha: Yes, it's an event.

Brennan: It's an event. We're all here together in this moment. I love, I think that's so critical, that's so awesome. This hour has truly--

Marisha: It flew, it's gone.

Brennan: It truly flew by.

Marisha: What happened?

Brennan: My God!

(Marisha laughing)

Brennan: Well, we'll have--

Marisha: We have so much more to talk about!

Brennan: We got so much to talk about! We'll have to do it again some time.

Marisha: Yeah, any time.

Brennan: My guest has been Marisha Ray. Marisha, thank you so much for coming!

Marisha: Thank you so much, Brennan, huzzah!

Brennan: Huzzah! This has been Adventuring Academy. We'll catch you guys next time.


Captions extracted by: gluegunshots

Edited by: gluegunshots