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[0:24] Michael Doherty: Howdy listeners, game maker Michael Doherty here. We are so stoked to bring you the return of Mythic Thunderlute this winter, and we are recording new episodes as we speak. But before we get to that, I've gotten a few requests for this. So I wanted to explain some things about Dungeons and Dragons for those of you who may not be up to speed on the rules and how it relates to MTL. So if you already understand the rules of D&D, this may not be the episode for you, but for everyone else, it's time for a little D&D 101. I'm sitting here with my good pal Richard R. Henry, who fans might remember as our very own Giovanni Chubb. How's it going, Richie?

[1:01] Richard R. Henry: I'm very good.

[1:01] Michael Doherty: Are there Giovanni Chubb t-shirts?

[1:03] Richard R. Henry: Not yet, but now that you say that, I want that desperately. It was so much fun. It was so much fun to record that. It was really a blast. It's a blast to listen back to. I've probably listened to "Down the Shore" like a thousand times. I love that song so much. My 15 minutes of fame, as it were.

[1:19] Michael Doherty: I'm so excited to have you here. I chose you for several reasons. One, because you're a good pal and you're a very fun person to interact with. Obviously, you're associated with the pod, and as I understand it, you don't really know shit about D&D.

[1:33] Richard R. Henry: I know of it. My older brother used to play when I was a kid.

[1:36] Michael Doherty: Great.

[1:37] Richard R. Henry: And they would come gather in my room.

[1:38] Michael Doherty: Yeah.

[1:39] Richard R. Henry: And I would get kicked out, and they would be there till four in the morning, and I was like sleeping in my mom's bed because they were still in there playing D&D.

[1:47] Michael Doherty: You never played in all that time.

[1:48] Richard R. Henry: I never played, and they would console me by giving me the little cloth bags full of dice to play with. I was very young. And so I played with the dice as a toy, and I thought they were so cool because they were like jewels.

[1:58] Michael Doherty: Yeah, and I love them so much. I got you created your characters in D&D and you rolled the dice to figure out their strength and their abilities and stuff. But I'm much more of a visual guy, so I was like hooked on the video games, you know. I'm intrigued by the whole thing. I'm a perfect guinea pig because I do have an interest in all things dragons and magic.

[2:18] Richard R. Henry: Well, I figured I'd first give you a basic rundown of D&D, and then I can explain how it relates to MTL and how we deviate from it.

[2:25] Michael Doherty: Cool.

[2:26] Richard R. Henry: Sounds good.

[2:26] Michael Doherty: Talk to me like I'm five years old.

[2:27] Richard R. Henry: Okay.

[2:28] Michael Doherty: What is Dungeons and Dragons? Take it from the top.

[2:30] Richard R. Henry: So, in the most broad terms, D&D is at its core a game, and specifically, it's a tabletop role-playing game or TTRPG.

[2:40] Michael Doherty: Break that down for me.

[2:40] Richard R. Henry: Well, let's actually start with the part you know, tabletop. As self-explanatory as it sounds, basically any board game you've played growing up, right?

[2:48] Michael Doherty: Yeah.

[2:49] Richard R. Henry: Now, with D&D, the board is actually a map of the world you're traversing.

[2:53] Michael Doherty: Okay, okay, here we go.

[2:55] Richard R. Henry: So if you're traversing a continent, we use a world map, and there we have like a single space is equal to 60 miles. Then once you enter a kingdom, we use a map of just that kingdom. From there we can zoom into provinces, into cities, and even into individual buildings. So basically, you're moving a little game piece that represents your character across a board and constantly zooming in as we get more and specific with where we're moving into.

[3:19] Michael Doherty: It's like board gaming to the nth degree.

[3:21] Richard R. Henry: Exactly, down to the point where like you're literally moving six feet of space to try to attack your enemy, right?

[3:27] Michael Doherty: Got it. Let's hit the other part of that. RPG, a role-playing game.

[3:31] Richard R. Henry: Basically, any game where you are playing the role of a character in a fictional world. Now, the degree to which you play the character in D&D is entirely up to the player. So while some do voices, mannerisms, and affectations like we do on MTL, others might simply just describe the actions of their players.

[3:51] Michael Doherty: Gotcha. Now, this is not to be confused with LARPing or live action role type.

[3:55] Richard R. Henry: Which I love LARPing. I mean, I've never done it, but I like the idea of it.

[3:58] Michael Doherty: Absolutely. I've seen the documentaries where they like have like spells are like colored beanbags, and they're like really hitting each other hard with these beanbags.

[4:07] Richard R. Henry: I know. And they're like negative 10, negative 10, you know, they're like losing their strength or whatever the case may be.

[4:13] Michael Doherty: That's exactly right, Richie. It's the same gaming mechanics as D&D or any TTRPG, only instead of a game piece, you're using your body in a real world physical space.

[4:24] Richard R. Henry: It's important that people socialize.

[4:27] Michael Doherty: It is, you know, it honestly is a great way to bring people together. And like for D&D, it happens to be just a group of friends around a table with their dice, with their map and their game pieces, and you know, some snacks and you know, maybe some herbal or liquid encouragement.

[4:43] Richard R. Henry: You know, I took a little bit of that to come here today.

[4:46] Michael Doherty: So I'm glad you did. We're on the same page. All right, on the subject of the game pieces.

[4:52] Richard R. Henry: Yes.

[4:52] Michael Doherty: These are the, I follow on TikTok a bunch of these guys and girls who make these miniatures that they paint with like painstaking detail.

[5:02] Richard R. Henry: Yeah.

[5:02] Michael Doherty: These tiny little figures of wizards and dragons and all this stuff. And it's amazing.

[5:09] Richard R. Henry: It really is, it really is incredible. And, you know, obviously they represent the players' characters, as well as any character or creature you might interact with.

[5:19] Michael Doherty: Right. So, like a very prepared DM will have, if you're meeting a cave troll, they will have a six-inch-tall exact replica of that cave troll.

[5:30] Richard R. Henry: So the dungeon master, are you sort of keeping that in your pocket or like hidden? And then you like pop it out and you're like, boom, cave troll.

[5:37] Michael Doherty: Exactly. And everybody goes nuts. Many DMs use like a little board to hide all their little tricks and surprises.

[5:44] Richard R. Henry: But there's got to be an element of theater.

[5:45] Michael Doherty: It's all theater, and that's kind of the beauty of it. And some people go really hard for it. They'll 3D print game pieces and even their maps, they'll hand paint them, while some might just like use a little bag of coins, and you're like, all right, all the players are pennies.

[5:59] Richard R. Henry: Now, question, is that what you do?

[6:02] Michael Doherty: I have done that, but for MTL, we just use theater of our minds. I'm physically describing that the places sometimes I will have the places drawn out from my reference.

[6:14] Richard R. Henry: I see.

[6:14] Michael Doherty: Saying what the physical distance is from all the things entirely imagined, which is totally an option if you don't have the bells and whistles, or if you're doing it on Zoom and you don't want to do it that way.

[6:14] Richard R. Henry: D&D in the world of Zoom.

[6:25] Michael Doherty: No, there are websites that allow you to have digital maps that you can traverse.

[6:29] Richard R. Henry: Oh, that's true.

[6:30] Michael Doherty: So that is still an option. You know, with MTL, we're also streamlining to be a very dialogue and story-driven game.

[6:37] Richard R. Henry: Right.

[6:37] Michael Doherty: So it's very much about the theater of the interplay between me and the players, you know. So you can really play the game however the hell you want.

[6:45] Richard R. Henry: Yes.

[6:45] Michael Doherty: Even in terms of gaming style. So, like if you love combat and you're like, I want to hack and slash my way through, I want to get into as many battles as possible, you can fight every chance you get. However, you could also choose to play the game more stealthily or more diplomatically and try to avoid as much combat as possible.

[7:03] Richard R. Henry: Oh, right.

[7:03] Michael Doherty: So in a group of people, you could have like a pacifist or someone who's like, let's go in, guns ablaze in, doesn't matter.

[7:10] Richard R. Henry: Absolutely. And you could have your friend hiding out in a tree who's a ranger who's just gonna shoot arrows and be totally hidden.

[7:16] Michael Doherty: I see. Of course, the best laid plans often go awry.

[7:20] Richard R. Henry: And that couldn't be more true of D&D.

[7:23] Michael Doherty: And that's kind of the best part because the chaos element of you making it up, you're sort of like created this sort of adventure for everybody.

[7:30] Richard R. Henry: Yes.

[7:30] Michael Doherty: And but you also can take it in a new direction if you want because you're in control.

[7:34] Richard R. Henry: That's exactly right.

[7:35] Michael Doherty: And the cool thing about it is that no one is fully in control of it. Just as I cannot control the player's actions, they do not know what I'm about to throw their way. And none of us know how the dice rolls are about to go down.

[7:47] Richard R. Henry: Right. So what are the actual rules of the game? Like how do the dice rolls work and all that?

[7:52] Michael Doherty: Let's get into it. So for actual gaming mechanics, we turn to the holy trinity of Dungeons and Dragons texts, which is the player's handbook, the dungeon master's guide, and the monster manual.

[8:03] Richard R. Henry: Which one is the most important?

[8:05] Michael Doherty: Okay, so for a player, it's going to be the player's handbook. This contains not only the building blocks for building your character, but it's also basically a layout of the rules of the game.

[8:17] Richard R. Henry: The Dungeon Master has his own book.

[8:18] Michael Doherty: Dungeon Master Manual is mostly for inspiration when building a fantasy world. It serves as a way to build puzzles, traps, situations the party might encounter, and also teaches how to build battles.

[8:33] Richard R. Henry: So, like what kind of monsters and how strong they are.

[8:36] Michael Doherty: Exactly. Right. Okay. So based on how many players you have and what level they're at will determine how many bad guys of what strengths you should put in for it to be an easy, medium, challenging, or impossible battle.

[8:50] Richard R. Henry: So it's like choosing your difficulty in a video game.

[8:52] Michael Doherty: Yes. I always choose simple because they make the games harder because the younger generation are really good at the games.

[8:58] Richard R. Henry: Yes, yes.

[8:59] Michael Doherty: So like they have to make these games super hard, but I'm older, so like I get so frustrated, and I'm like, why am I in a rage right now? Like I'm supposed to be having a good time. So I set it to simple just so my blood pressure doesn't go through the roof.

[9:13] Richard R. Henry: Now the only difference is the dungeon master is the one choosing the difficulty.

[9:17] Michael Doherty: I see.

[9:17] Richard R. Henry: So you could have a DM who's like a little merciless and all about creating situations where players are constantly losing their characters in battle, and then you have to rebuild a new one.

[9:27] Michael Doherty: Right.

[9:27] Richard R. Henry: I'm less about that, especially when we're trying to tell a narrative that has like character growth and character arcs.

[9:33] Michael Doherty: So you could be like a merciless dungeon master where you use where you kill off characters and like—

[9:33] Richard R. Henry: Or just a really strict dungeon master where you know if they touch the forbidden obelisk, they will turn into a pile of ash.

[9:48] Michael Doherty: Okay.

[9:49] Richard R. Henry: You know? Okay. Like, and just be really hard and fast about consequences, you know.

[9:51] Michael Doherty: So there are three main books.

[9:53] Richard R. Henry: Yes.

[9:54] Michael Doherty: So the third one is the monster manual.

[9:57] Michael Doherty: Which is basically just an index of every kind of creature and non-player character that the party could interact with. So if you're building combat, you could just pull from that. It's like, oh, there's a pack of ghouls. Let me look up the stats for ghouls. If we want to encounter a variety of monsters, or a non-player character or NPC, every person the dungeon master voices. Like the tavern guy who's like, hey, what can I do for you? You know, play that guy. There's that guy. The guy who sends them on a side quest. It's like, I'm looking for a pack of travelers. Just like you who could go to the forbidden land of Guarfara. You know? Guarpala. So there's that guy. There's also any big bad enemy that you could interact with, or allies who follow the party along.

Which in Mythic Thunderlute is Herman the Monk. He's sort of there tagging along with the party to be like, hmm, here's a suggestion for how this could maybe be a little easier. Or based on his knowledge of the land, he can like give a little backstory when we need it, you know.

[10:58] Richard R. Henry: Gotcha. So how do we go from the books that are like the Bibles of this thing to the actual gameplay?

[11:05] Michael Doherty: Absolutely. So there are a number of pre-written campaigns that the DM can use to guide the players through. So this is a great way to start if you've never dungeon mastered before. And a campaign is like the quest that the players are going. This is like the, you've been tasked with going to get the crystal from the dragon in the cave somewhere.

[11:22] Richard R. Henry: Exactly. Now, campaigns contain multiple quests, like you're describing, that sort of intertwine side quests that can pop up along the way, usually with a central thrust. For instance, a very popular one is the Curse of Strahd, which centers around a vampire. And Strahd is the big bad of this world. So the stories are gonna kind of revolve around him.

[11:43] Michael Doherty: And can players do whatever they want, or I mean they kind of have to stick to whatever the mission is?

[11:48] Richard R. Henry: Yeah, you know, like let's say they come upon the followers of Strahd. The players can kind of determine whether they want to like ally with the followers of Strahd. Maybe you're an evil character and your mission is to join the bad guys. Right. And so that'll be up to the DM to sort of like herd everybody back to, or be incredibly flexible and be like, okay, this is the path the players are taking. I'm gonna really let them choose their own adventure here and support this narrative that they become interested in. Maybe you meet up with a vampire hunter along the way, and you're like, I'm gonna do exactly what this guy says and sort of fall in line here, or I'm gonna follow my own path for slaying this vampire and figure it out for myself.

[12:29] Michael Doherty: Okay, so how do the dice rolls? I mean, I know that you sort of roll for strength and you roll for all this stuff, but how do they factor into like the actual gameplay?

[12:39] Richard R. Henry: So, yes, you basically roll anytime you attempt to do something moderately difficult. For instance, if you want to climb something or attack someone, or persuade someone to do something, or even just perceive, like if someone is lying, you will roll a 20-sided die to see how it goes.

[12:56] Michael Doherty: Ah, okay. Now, the dungeon master has predetermined how high a player needs to roll in order to accomplish that thing. So roll under you fail, roll over you succeed.

[13:06] Richard R. Henry: That's right, and meets it beats it. So if you hit the number on the nose, you also succeed. That's great. So and what's really fun in the storytelling is always the extremes, right? So you've got a thing called a crit fail, which is or a critical fail, which is when you roll a one. So that means not only do you fail, but something terrible happens. Yeah, so I'm stupid enough to swing my sword at a dragon and I roll a one and the sword breaks or I break.

[13:31] Michael Doherty: Yep, or flies out of your hands or something, exactly. Right. Whereas if you roll a natural 20, the highest you could roll in this die in combat, it's called a critical hit or a crit hit, meaning that it deals the maximum amount of damage, or if you're doing something like climbing a tree, you like fly up the tree in record time. So basically it's a choose your own adventure novel where the dice rolls can mess you over.

[13:54] Richard R. Henry: Exactly, exactly. And that's very much what a Mythic Thunderlute script looks like. I'm a bit more scripted than you might see in a campaign like Curse of Strahd that you would buy, in that I'm really writing out my narration, my descriptions of places and the dialogue that non-player characters say so that I can edit together something that sounds almost scripted, even though we're kind of improvising our way through this thing.

[14:20] Michael Doherty: I'm understanding it better now, and I do I'm curious because having listened to and been a part of an episode, what's the segue between Mythic Thunderlute and a normal Dungeons and Dragons game?

[14:31] Richard R. Henry: Yeah, that's a good question. Like, there's a lot of overlap, right? Like once we have a successful or a failed role that will split the narrative to two alternate realities of possibility from a single decision that the players make. In this way, we are exactly like D&D, right? These decisions could be immediate. Oh, you've chosen the right path instead of the left path. So we're gonna go down this one. Sometimes it's like a character will be negatively or positively impacted by the group, and that character will come back later, much to the detriment or success of the players. This is sort of like the central tenets of D&D that we very much honor in Mythic Thunderlute.

[15:11] Michael Doherty: I see. Now, the biggest difference I would say is in the gaming mechanics.

[15:15] Richard R. Henry: Yeah.

[15:15] Michael Doherty: In D&D, like once you attack an enemy with your 20-sided die, you're then gonna roll smaller dice to see how much damage you deal.

[15:23] Richard R. Henry: Oh, I see.

[15:24] Michael Doherty: So it's like the drama is in the dice roll. That's the theater of it, right? And so for MTL, we want to simplify this and make each dice roll feel a tad more important. So I've predetermined damage. Once a player successfully hits, I know exactly how much damage that they're dealing to these different enemies and vice versa. So that keeps things moving, especially for the sake of the show, because we also have musical numbers to get to.

[15:48] Richard R. Henry: Exactly. So we're trying to keep not only the sessions themselves faster, but we're trying to focus on the dialogue in the story and only highlighting the dice roll when it's like a really dramatic moment. There's a moment in episode seven where they're all trying to jump over this gap in a bridge and they could fall into lava, right?

[16:07] Michael Doherty: Right.

[16:07] Richard R. Henry: And every dice roll that is an attempt to do that feels like incredibly important because they could literally die. So if this is a story, if this is a story that you cannot predict, do you just kind of write new storylines in between each recording session?

[16:22] Michael Doherty: That's exactly right. You know, I've got this much like a campaign, I've got the sort of world that I'm operating in. But once the characters make any of those decisions that change the future of the world, I won't write that next session, that next episode until after we played through to take everything into account, you know.

[16:41] Richard R. Henry: I had no idea actually about any of that. I didn't know how you were coming up with this.

[16:45] Michael Doherty: So it's like a long form improv.

[16:48] Richard R. Henry: Yeah.

[16:48] Michael Doherty: Everything eventually comes around at the end.

[16:51] Richard R. Henry: Yep.

[16:51] Michael Doherty: That's exactly right. And yeah, just like they say in long form, specifically like I did a class at Upright Citizens Brigade. And they always talk about the herald form, and they use the metaphor paint on a basketball, so that everything that gets introduced at the top sort of like melts around the basketball, but because it is a sphere, it all comes together at the end in a satisfying way.

[17:14] Richard R. Henry: I see, gotcha. So that is always what you're trying to do, not only in long form improv, but in a satisfying D&D game. And especially one like MTL, which is a story that we're trying to tell for an audience, you know.

[17:27] Michael Doherty: Is that it? Does that cover it? Is that yeah, I think the next step would be building a character, which I would love to do with you on our next episode.

[17:35] Richard R. Henry: Yes, I'm excited about that. I've already been thinking, I've been ruminating. Like when I used to play, I used to play World of Warcraft, which is another version of D&D back in the day.

[17:44] Michael Doherty: Absolutely.

[17:45] Richard R. Henry: I was a night elf druid.

[17:47] Michael Doherty: Okay.

[17:48] Richard R. Henry: And I, you know, I think I made it to level 80 or something like that.

[17:51] Michael Doherty: Oh my god.

[17:52] Richard R. Henry: And like, but I was never a very good player. Like I liked my outfits to match, which is like not a thing that you should really be doing, you know, like I know, I love it. I looked amazing, but I wasn't the best player in the world.

[18:06] Michael Doherty: Hey, sometimes it's about style too.

[18:08] Richard R. Henry: And I happen to be a DM that really rewards style and innovation and gameplay as much as the dice rolls.

[18:17] Michael Doherty: Terrific. I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to building a character.

[18:20] Richard R. Henry: Great. Well, folks, hopefully you found that illuminating. If you only really wanted like a general explanation of the game for the context of listening to Thunderloot, you can stop here. But if you would like to dive in a little bit more, learn how to play the game. Tune in next month when Richie and I will sit down for the next installment of this series, D&D 201 building a character.

[18:42] Michael Doherty: Alright, thanks so much for being here, Richie.

[18:44] Richard R. Henry: Thank you so much for having me.

[18:45] Michael Doherty: I cannot wait. I'm literally gonna be in the next month, literally like coming up with a look, like how do I want to behave? Like it's a character. I'm literally, it'll be a, I basically should be LARPing.

[18:56] Richard R. Henry: I can't wait to see it.

[18:58] Michael Doherty: Thank you, Richie. Folks, thanks so much for tuning in. If you have any questions, hit us up on social media or on Patreon. This episode was written by Richard R. Henry and myself, Michael Doherty, edited by Alex Kuyper, and underscored by the fabulous Dan Kazimi. A quick shout out to our newest Patreon supporters, Jason Kaufman, Nathan Myers, and Angus Bullock. We are dropping our singles from season 1.0 every month on our Patreon. So please do find us there. Volume one of the MTL album is now available across all music platforms, and volume two is coming soon. Finally, season 1.5 of Thunderloot will premiere this winter. And winter, my friends, will eventually be here. We'll catch you next time on Mythic Thunderlute.