Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 3 - What Makes a Good Player?

Episode Date: March 1, 2020

Enough about DMs.  They get too much glory anyway.  Jeremy flips the screen and talks about the players.  What makes a good player?  How can you help and support your fellow players and GMs?

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in to episode three of the Taking20 podcast. Now we are going to go to the other side of the screen and talk about what makes a good player. We've been focusing on DMs and GMs for two episodes. Time to look at the other side. First things first, I'd like to ask you to please subscribe and rate us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or wherever you happen to be listening to this fine podcast. Also, come see us at taking20podcast.com. You can provide feedback, shoot us an email, ask questions. We'd love to see you there. Before I get started, I'd like to thank our sponsor that I'm not making up on the spot, Maps. Do you need a logical representation of a physical place? Maps have got you covered.

So what makes a good player? We're doing this to have fun. This is a hobby for the vast majority of us. Very few of us actually make money playing Dungeons and Dragons, although some of us would love to do it. If you are playing as a hobby, the number one thing is to have fun. If you are a good player, you have fun while you're playing and you encourage others and help others to have fun around the table. And by the way, that includes your hard-working, enslaving GM who has been probably putting hours of extra work getting the session prepared for you guys. Help your players and help your GM have fun at the table. Be excited and help your friends get excited about the game. I mean, this is a game.

This is meant to be fun. If there are four players around the table and two of them have plans on what you could do next and you're one of them, you don't have to get your way all the time. Support your friend's plans. If it works, tell them it was awesome. If it doesn't work, tell them it was hilarious

and try to make a funny out of it. Being a good player means helping others have fun and having fun yourself. One of the other things that makes you a good player is that you work with a DM about your character design from the very beginning of the campaign. Chances are your DM or GM has a really good idea of exactly where in his or her campaign world a certain adventure will take place. in his or her campaign world, a certain adventure will take place. This DM has specific ideas about how your campaign will start and maybe where the characters could be from and maybe some of their professions, histories, what have you. Work with a DM to find out what would work

and fit your character into the world. Don't worry about making it perfect. There's no such thing as a perfect character. Any character can be made perfect and fun. Yes, even that orc with an eight strength can be really fun to play. Fit it into the world and come up with at least the basics of a backstory. Please note, I said the basics of a backstory. From a GM perspective, it's fairly annoying for a player to show up and say, I have a 17-page backstory that I want you to read. I'm sure you loved coming up with that backstory,

and I'm sure it means the world to you. But when you're a GM and you have an entire world to build, or you have an entire adventure to memorize and run, and you're trying to keep all these things straight, of course a 17-page backstory would just be clutter in our brains. So come up with the basics of a backstory and leave plenty of room for the DM and GM to incorporate your backstory into the adventure. For example, I was running a Pathfinder campaign recently and a player approached me about joining the campaign and he said he wanted to come from a noble family and he knew about the area of the world he wanted to be from. It was someplace a little bit far away. I had two or

three nations in mind. I kind of presented him the options, and he was all about being from Galt, the land of perpetual revolution. He wanted to be from a family that's nouveau riche, so that it gained advantage from supporting the right side of the revolution. He made his character. He was a noble son. He was like the sixth son of a noble, so he didn't stand to inherit anything even after the revolution. So he decided he would try to gain his fortune and gain his notoriety via adventuring. That gave me plenty of room, just the concept of being a nobleman and a sixth son and not standing to inherit anything. There was plenty of room to put that in the campaign world as it stood. Whereas if he had come up with this 17-page backstory of this, he's

exactly from this nation, this family, this land, doing this, and this is what's been going on for the past hundred years in that world. There's really no place for me to put it. To try to squeeze that somewhere into a campaign may involve retconning entire sections of set lore of an area of the world. So leave room for your DM and GM to work some of your backstory in. Plus, as the story evolves, your backstory may evolve along with it. So work with your DM and GM on that. It's something, it's always the most exciting thing for me is when I can incorporate a character's backstory. This same nobleman was contacted by other houses from that same country and was asked to do little favors in support of his family and in support of the country. The unspoken threat there was that if he didn't follow through with it,

that maybe his family wouldn't stand to inherit anything in the new government, and maybe they would be thrown out on their ear. It made for an exciting campaign. I could actually give him little things to do that was, if not counter to what the party was working on, at least in addition to, and that provided a lot of additional tension in the campaign. Anyway, but leave some room in your backstory. Also, build a character that works well with others. The trope that I am sick to damn death of seeing is, oh, I made a character and he's a loner and he doesn't like people

and he cuts himself to let the pain out. Okay, we get it. You wanted to kind of play that gothy kind of character. There's all sorts of ways to play goth without being antisocial. So don't necessarily embrace the antisocial aspect of your character. Please make a character that does and can be around others. We as DMs love new players. We absolutely adore having someone who is brand new to the game and has maybe even never played before, only played a few times, and has never played with this group and is desperate and loves and wants to play.

We love those players. We embrace those players, or at least we should be, and we should make sure we encourage them to have a good time playing this game that we all love. But if you are one of those new players, do me a favor. Even if you don't want to take the time to read the entire book, Even if you don't want to take the time to read the entire book, player's guide, or whatever your system happens to call that particular book, or read those sections of the online SRD document that's released for free, at least read and understand the basics of the game. Like what a round is, what a move action is, what the three-action economy is,

or whatever it is for your particular game system. At least have the basics down and understand what it means to play the game. For bonus points, you can actually listen to some actual play podcasts, or at least one or two. I don't know about you, but one of the best ways that I learned is by watching and listening to other people do it.

It's one of the ways that I started to learn how to woodwork, is to watch someone who I considered a master do it. Am I a master at it? No, but I still have all ten fingers, and I think my wife is losing bets every year that I maintain all my fingers while I'm playing with woodworking. At any rate, listening to some actual play podcasts, Critical Role, Glass Cannon, Dice Camera Action, Adventure Zone, Find the Path, there are tons of them out there. Find one that you enjoy listening to, listen to a couple of episodes.

If you've never sat around a table before, it will really give you insight as to what gaming looks like, sounds like. It doesn't necessarily give you insight about what it smells like. And if there's a certain smell to your gaming table, please ask your players to take a bath. Next up, I will break down what you can do to be a good gamer by activity. In other words, what you can do before the first session, what you can do between sessions, and then later on I'm going to talk about what you can do during sessions, both when it's your turn and when it's not your turn. So before the first session, one of the things you can do to be a good player is to learn your character's abilities. Learn what they do,

what their range is, how many times per day can you do it, what spells do you have available to you, how many clips do you carry on your character? How many shots are in each clip? All this information will make you a better player because there's fewer things that you have to go and dig through the book and look up or try to find on your character sheet. If you're not sure, make a quick reference card or sheet for your character and have it available for you.

You'd be surprised how much faster turns go when you can look down on a 3x5 note card or look in a specific file on your laptop and say, I can do this six times per day and I just use my second one. Check. Having that available very quickly means less downtime and more fun for all. Your fellow players and your GM will thank you for that, believe me. Another thing you can do before the first session is to determine how much role play is going to be versus how much role play is going to be. So what's the difference? Role, R-O-L-E, meaning participating as your character. Talk to the DM and talk to the GM to find out if this adventure is going to be heavy on the R-O-L-E play.

What's the group's dynamic? Are you going to be spending a lot of time in character? Yes, my name is Nigel Hawthorne III, and I am a ranger of the 3rd Cavalier division of F. Or is it more rolling the dice and saying, okay, that's a 22 to hit, and I did 16 points of damage. Both play styles are fun, and different DMs will have different mixes and variances thereof. Before the first session, determine what that group dynamic is. Either way, this information will help you better fit into the dynamic of the group, will better help you fit into what the other characters are doing. Have a good idea whether you're expected to speak in character

all the time or if that's more of a rarity. Sometime before the first session, talk to the DM to determine whether your campaign that you're playing in encourages what's known as min-maxing. For those of you that have never been exposed to min-maxing before, it's a character concept where you make ideal choices to take advantage of rules and rule sets to give you the best possible mathematical outcome in certain situations. Case in point, there are certain races that you can play, or ancestries or backgrounds, they're called different things in different campaigns, where they have higher strength scores, or maybe higher charisma scores, or maybe they have stronger mental abilities or what have you. A min-maxer in the purest sense will always look for the best combination of race and class to maximize their

ability to have the highest number rolled on the die to make it as hard for the NPCs as possible. to make it as hard for the NPCs as possible. Is your campaign encouraging min-maxing? Is your GM building the campaign assuming all of the characters are min-maxing? That all of the players are looking online for what's the ideal way to make an insect fighter? Or what is the best possible two-weapon fighter build for D&D 5th edition? If the assumption is that all the players are doing that, then by all means, min-max. If you don't, you will wind up with an underpowered character and may not have a lot of fun.

But here's the thing. If your campaign isn't built around min-maxing, if the GM says you can make whatever character concept work that you would like, then play a character you want, even if that character winds up with a low statistic. Pulling an example from Critical Role, those of you that have watched Season 1 knows there was a character by the name of Grog on Season 1, and he... well, his intelligence was not that high. The player who played Grog, Travis Willingham, did a superb job of role-playing his low intelligence. One of my favorite moments is when he goes to the market, effectively by himself, and is negotiating to buy,

I believe it was a hat. Rather than trying to negotiate the price down with the merchant, he was trying to negotiate the price up. Great merchant. He was trying to negotiate the price up. Great role-playing moment. In a min-maxing situation, your players may just be very frustrated by that. In a game where I was a player, one of the other characters was very giving of gold and resources and the like. We were given 1,000 gold pieces to go to a crime lord and negotiate for information. The instructions were, whatever of those 1,000 gold pieces we didn't spend to get the information was ours to keep.

Unfortunately, this particular character was the one that stepped up as soon as we met the crime lord and said, we'll give you 1,000 gold for the information. stepped up as soon as we met the crime lord and said, we'll give you a thousand gold for the information. You heard a chorus of groans and just hands slapping the head as this character just gave away a potential windfall that we could have had and we could have used to spend on things like potions and maybe even a scroll or two. He role-played his character beautifully. Now, don't get me wrong. We made sure that that player was reminded of that moment for the next year of playtime. So anytime negotiations started, it's like, it's not going

to be him. We are going to send the guy with slightly lower charisma, but knows not to lead off with all of our money. So min-maxing isn't always right. Flaws can be so much fun. If you want to play a half-orc wizard in 5th edition or Pathfinder, or if you want to play halfling ranger, or a leshy wizard, or an insect seer, whatever combination that you want, if it's a non-min-max campaign, then please play the character that you want. As a GM, I want players to play the characters they want to play, not what they feel like that they have to play. When I'm GMing, for example, I will adjust my campaign slightly here and there if players are not playing min-max. I encourage non-min-maxing, but I still have a couple of players who love to

treat it like a video game, trying to make the exact right character and the most powerful barbarian they can possibly come up with. Now I'm going to shift the focus from before the first session to what you can do between sessions to be a good player. Try to make your DM's life a little easier. What do I mean by that? That doesn't mean things like come over and be his personal manservant. Although my house could use some cleaning. So if any one of my players want to come over and be my personal manservant and help me clean the house, that would be fantastic. Other than that, if for example, let's say you're crafty. One of my players is amazing. She loves to craft. She has more glue guns than I know what to do with.

She loves crafting everything from terrain to checklists to things that we can hang visibly as reminders. She, for example, crafted an initiative tracker using a rod that would hold paper towels using a rod that would hold paper towels and using shower curtain rings that she painted different colors, each color with a person's name on it. So very quickly, Gundahar can look up and see the fact that he has an orange ring and his orange ring is third down the initiative tracker,

which means that he's going after the bad guy and Elfie. But what if you're not crafty? Well, there's all sorts of other things that you can do. One of the things that a lot of gaming groups do is they will have battle music. So they'll find music on YouTube or Spotify or whatever your playlist of choice happens to be. They'll find a list of music that can be played during battles and will start that when major battle scenes happen. It sets the environment, by the way, as a GM. I know this is an episode for players, but for GMs, that really does set the environment when you can start really good dramatic battle music. And when the music starts, you can kind of hear the player say, oh shit, and here we go.

If you have an ear for that sort of thing, if you have a subscription to a major streaming service or what have you, try to find some music for your DM and say, hey, I've made a battle playlist. Is it okay if I play it whenever fights start? Trust me, I don't know a GM in the world that would say, well, absolutely not. No, no, we only play Bach when I GM. No, that's not usually the way we go. Most GMs love having players that are that bought in, that are that interested in contributing to the success of the group. So please, do what you can to make your GM's life easier. Craft stuff, music, even something as simple as snacks.

Bring food or volunteer to host. A lot of gaming groups will go very late in the evening, so bringing things like caffeine usually goes over really well. This is actually a good place to stop this particular topic because we're about to jump into what you can do during sessions to be a good player. We'll pick up with that topic next time. In the meantime, this has been Taking 20, Episode 3, What Makes a good player. We'll pick up on that topic next time. In the meantime, this has been Taking 20, Episode 3, What Makes a Good Player. Thank you so much for listening. Again, head over to iTunes, Stitcher, wherever you happen to be listening to this, and leave us a rating, like us, subscribe to us. Head on over to taking20podcast.com. But until the next time,

I hope your next game is your best game.