The Glass Cannon Podcast - Glass Cannon Radio #7 – Dungeon Crawler Carl, Reddit, Beat McD

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

The Book Club gathers to discuss Dungeon Crawler Carl. We also discuss our favorite dungeon crawls, how we use Reddit for gaming, and Mario Day. Plus, a caller steps to the stage for a chance to Beat McD! Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/5QFT1X0kgGs Access exclusive podcasts, ad-free episodes, and livestreams with a 30-day free trial with code "GCN30" at jointhenaish.com. For more podcasts and livestreams, visit glasscannonnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I've got this condition where I don't feel pain. You're a superhero! No! If this is how intense Nova Kane sounds... Oh wow! Imagine how it looks. Is there more? Yeah, big time.

Nova Kane. Forming theaters March 14th. You are listening to the Glass Cannon Network. This is Glass Cannon Radio with your hosts, Jared Logan and Joe O'Brien. Oh, coming at you with March 5 coming in like a lion and then later we'll leave like a lamb. Welcome to Glass Can of Radio, the show where you sound off about stuff that in the bigger scheme of things isn't that important. My name's Jared Logan. This is Joe O'Brien.

We are here to take your calls and discuss the nerd news of the day. What's going on Joe O'Brien? What's happening in your life? Not much buddy. Things are fantastic. Very excited for today's show. Lots of really fun stuff to talk about stuff that I get super into. But I do have a problem. I wonder if you can help me with this. Okay. And this is a real deal. This

this began last night. I found out last night. Oh, I have mice. Oh, my kitchen. So last night, my wife is like, I'm dealing with the princess doughnut. Exactly. I need a princess doughnut with a level eight magic missile. So she's like, my wife is like, I'll go get some traps at, at home Depot as I'm like dealing with the kids. So I'm like, great. And she's like, but I'm not setting them. I'm like, yeah, I'll set them. She's like, I'm not getting rid of the mouse once in there. I'm like, no problem. I'll take that mouse corpse out. I'll be happy to. So she brings in these traps.

I read to put some peanut butter on there, put peanut butter on the trap, two traps, one under the oven where I saw some droppings and then one under the sink, just cause I feel like that's classic, right? Go to bed, wake up this morning, both traps, no peanut butter did not set off and shit all around both traps. Just laughed at me. Tricky smart mice. They just pooped.

Yep. You got a Jerry on your hands. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So we've got smart, smart mice. Got some Chippendales rescue Rangers in your house. Listen, it's the worst problem imaginable. When I lived in New York in 2008, when I moved into this really kind of rundown apartment, my first apartment in New York, we started noticing like

crumbs on our counter and droppings. So we started putting down traps. Uh, in the first week, guess how many mice we caught? How many? Zero. Nine. Oh, nine mice, Joe, in the first week. And then, um, subsequent weeks, the numbers started going down and the mice

started getting smaller and smaller because their daddies and mommies couldn't bring them food anymore. So now what was the baby mice? That is so sad. And the traps, I mean, what, you know, the humane traps, which is, yeah, I know the sticky traps are not humane. I don't know what you want to say about humanity or not. I don't know what's humane.

I think an instant kill is pretty humane. That's my take and that's the ones that I use. My roommate back in... Oh, this is a whole other story. But my roommate back in the day, when I first moved to New York, he used sticky traps when we found that we had mice and the way we found out we had mice was crazy. But he used sticky traps. I found a mouse one time still alive in the sticky trap. It was the most heartbreaking thing I've ever seen. I had to kill it with my own hands and I was just like, never again, never again. Yeah. I use a sticky.

You had to strangle it. Did you strangle it? No, it was just a little brown bag and a hat. How did you find, you said the way we found out was crazy. How did you find out? All right. The short version. I'm living in New York. I'm broke. He's living in New York. He's broke. He's an actor trying to be an actor. He works at Chipotle. Long story. Like the first Chipotle in New York, because he's from Kansas city where Chipotle started. So he worked at like the first ever location. He knew the guy and stuff. So this feels like additional information. I know, I know. But

he's so he's working there and getting free Chipotle all the time. So I'm just eating Chipotle constantly because that's, it's just free food. And we would just throw these, the silver burrito like covers into this trash can in our living room and it would fill and then we'd empty it, fill on empty it, whatever. So then one day we were like doing a spring clean and we pulled out the two love seats that we had in the living room and under we had no idea we had mice because we were gross. Underneath the love seats was just a snow of aluminum foil, like, like, like eaten to the tiniest dust level. And there was just mouse poop

and they were taking them out of the trash can and picking through the crumpled aluminum to try to get bits of cheese and lettuce and bean oil and just like, and it was all underneath our couches. I was just like, oh! Joe, that's fucking disgusting. I know, it's so gross. You're nasty, dude.

I know. You're filthy, bro. I know. Bro's so gross. You're nasty, dude. You're filthy, bro. I know. Bro, you're filthy. I cleaned things up. I cleaned things up when I got older. Yes, I'm a very neat man now. My wife sort of cured me of my slovenly habits

and I thank her for it. You need a good woman. That's what I'm gonna say. You need a good woman or a good man to get you on the path of the righteous. Listen, let's get the show started. If you want to call in, just come to our Discord stage, Glass Can of Radio in the Glass Cannon Discord. And you have to be a subscriber, but get on there. You can raise your hand. You can get in on the conversation.

And if you are not a subscriber, it's easy. Just go to jointhenh.com and lickety split with two shakes of a lamb's tail. You're in the show. You can be a subscriber and you can even do it for free with the code. What's that code, Joe O'Brien? GCN 30, 30 days for free.

GCN 30, you get 30 days. 30. 30 days for free. So call in, let us know what you think. That's what this show is all about is to hear from you. And I would like to just kind of go over what we're going to talk about today. And then we'll launch into our first topic. First of all, I'm so excited because today is the first discussion of the glass can and radio book club. Yeah. Gather around, get everyone loves a wine. Everyone loves a book club.

Book clubs are the number one way to read books that you do not like. And I, I think they're just a fantastic avenue for that, but we're going to use that discussion to leap off into our next discussion, which is dungeons and role playing games. Maybe you want to talk about Dungeons and Video Games, okay. Or I would really like to talk about Dungeons and TTRPGs. Please, weigh in. I'd love to know about your favorite dungeon that you've ever played in a D&D game or a Pathfinder game or some other type of game. So let us know about that.

After that, we are going to hop into the world of Reddit. It's a huge nerd resource for me personally. I mean, there are so many things about Reddit that are good and bad. Some people think it's old hat. I use it every day personally. So if you have some thoughts about Reddit, how it works, how it helps you manage your nerd obsessions, please call in to tell us about that. And then March 10th is Mario day.

Yeah, it is. It is the day that we celebrate with religious, uh, sanctity, uh, with religious fervor, uh, super Mario from the Mario franchise of games from Nintendo. We will be talking a bit about Mario before we get into a beat McD that is super Mario themed. Yeah. So, uh, one lucky caller will be able to face off against McD in a series of super Mario

trivia questions. Super Mario trivia questions. Stick around for that and get your chance to go up against McD for a fun prize. We're going to be giving away a Nintendo e-shop gift card. So you get yourself a game. Be dope. Yeah. So that's so cool.

McD, you get a sweet prize. And I think I made it pretty hard this time. I don't know Well, I told you I couldn't answer any of these but I also am NOT super into the Super Mario world But who knows who knows? Yeah, I might actually be until you're not super into the Super Mario Brothers franchise because you just called it the Super Mario world brother's franchise. Cause you just called it the super Mario world. Um, uh, you sound, you're not all the way to a mom talking about it, but this close, uh, okay. Well, I think then it is time for us to, uh, get into our first topic. Everybody's sit in a circle with your book in your hand. And we are going to talk about our GCR book club pick.

Dungeon crawler Carl by Matt. So the first of my discussion questions is Joe, did you read the book? No, of course not the book? No. Ah, I knew it. Of course not. Of course not. Well, I didn't finish the book, I'll put it that way. But I read a chunk of it. I mean, don't read too much into that

because I do mostly start books and not finish them. That's sort of my- Right, sure. My schedule of reading is kind of like that. You know, we got a lot of things that we're working here. And so I tend to like have to dive into reading a lot of stuff that is not what I necessarily want to read, but I kind of need to read. And the rest of us read the book is all I'm saying. I know, I know. And that's why please, please callers Jared, take over the discussion because I, maybe I would have an unfair opinion having not read the entire thing. Well, I think that we have already established that this is just like a book club out in

the real world because there are people that haven't read the book who are in the book club. But give me your impressions on the how far did you get about halfway about halfway through it. And what were your impressions? What did you think? I thought, well, I've never read anything in this new realm. I thought that it was the most groundbreaking, like, novel writing that I had ever read. I hadn't, I wasn't prepared for it at all.

So as I started reading it, I was like, what in the hell is this? And then I did some back it, I was like, what in the hell is this? Yeah. And, uh, and then I did some back research cause I was like, are we reading the first ever book of this type? And I guess not. I guess, you know, books like this have kind of been around. Uh, but this is a really, really popular one in the, what are we calling it RPG lit lit RPG lit RPG.

So the other way around. So lit it's a lit RPG. And I understand that some are more about like a tabletop kind of a perspective on RPG. This was very much in the realm of computer, video game RPG. Yeah. But also, yeah, video game RPG. Sure. Not just a straight up video game, but an RPG specifically. And my impressions were it's not for me.

Really? Yeah, I wasn't into it and I don't expect I'll finish it or read another one. But it's just the style. It's not really for me. For various reasons that we can get into, but I don't want to really, I don't want to say too much because I want to see what callers say. If every single caller loves this book, then that's great. And I'll point out some things that I didn't like. And if, but I'd like to hear from other people if they had any issues with it.

Well, um, I'll give my opinion, uh, which I think should weigh more than yours and all of the callers, uh, given that I am, uh, a voracious reader, an eclectic reader of nonfiction fiction novels from all eras. So my opinion is probably more valid than your opinion or the opinion of any single member of the niche. I saw people on the socials going like, this wasn't a very deep read. This just wasn't like a, you know, a really kind of complex novel. Really? Dungeon crawler, Carl.

Wasn't the next great American novel. It didn't, uh, it didn't change the way you look at the world. Don't worry guys for the next, uh, book club. We'll read the plague by Albert Camus. Okay. But for this one, we chose something that sort of intersects with a lot of the topics that we talk about on this show. Oh, I couldn't imagine a better, a better audience to, to start this book club

with, you know, like this is, this is perfect. I've also seen people on the socials go, I already read all six and it's like, okay, slow the fuck down. Okay. Yeah. Today, there might be some spoilers on the first book, which we were all supposed to have read, but please, I don't want every call to be like, well, when you get to book four, that doesn't matter anymore.

I don't want to hear that. I don't want to hear any vague, you know, hints about what's about to happen. Let's talk about book one. So far, you're just kind of like laying into the book club audience without saying what you thought of the book. So what did you think?

I loved it. General impression, you loved it. I loved it, I loved it. Look, when it started, I I said I don't know about this You know, I really don't like like talking cats and things like that in books Cutesy yeah, I When I agreed on that but now I see that that you've changed your ways Well, this man to know you change your ways anything can can work if written a certain way

So for me the way he played that relationship and played that character worked for me. I really liked the humor in the book. I thought that some of the jokes didn't work, I'll be honest, but he takes so many swings on jokes. Yes. Some of them really, really did work. It's just joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke. I was like, not funny, not funny, not funny, not funny.

A couple times I was like, that is really funny. I will point out one that I literally laughed out loud, but I'll save that for a little bit. It was great. Okay. Well, it reminded me of things I really like, like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Rick and Morty. It also reminded me of things I really like, like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Rick and Morty.

It also reminded me of older stuff. There's all that kind of new wave sci-fi from the 60s and 70s where an Earthman is transported to another world. It reminded me of a lot of that stuff, like by Philip Jose Farmer and, um, uh, who wrote Thomas covenant? Oh, I know that, um, Steven R. Darnoldson stuff like that. So it also had, it was reminiscent of that stuff, which I also like. I, it had, it had everything.

It had action, it had fantasy, it had horror. I thought a lot of it was very horror oriented and I'm a huge horror fan, but overall, man, I just thought that he, the book moved at a great clip, which is huge for me. I think that for a book like this, to move at a great clip to at every moment, just trying to entertain you. He just never stops trying to entertain you. And not every single thing he does,

Matt Deniman might entertain you, but he's trying so much that a lot of it does. Matt Deniman might entertain you, but this, but he doesn't say he's trying so much that a lot of it does. Yeah. So, um, I thought it was a, just a super fun read. I do intend to read the next book in the series and, and probably the subsequent books. However, I have piles of stuff to get to. I mean, I still need to read. I mean, from our discussion a couple of weeks ago, I'm like, I'm into the expanse now again. So there are some other, you know, foundational series that I need to consume, but I will be coming back to dungeon crawler Carl. That's my two cents.

Why don't we get some callers up here? Let's get some colors to the stage. I'm assuming if your hand is up, you, you want to talk about dungeon crawler Carl. So if you, if you see me flag you and you want to come up and talk to us about it, Megan seems interested to chime in. Megan, can you hear us? Hey, yeah. Can you guys hear me? Hey, yeah, we got you. What's going on? Awesome. I'll say a long time listener, first time caller.

Awesome. Thanks for listening. Welcome. Yep. Calling from, uh, sunny Omaha, Nebraska. That's in the middle of a blizzard warning. So that's exciting. Oh my gosh. Batten down the hatches. Yeah.

Uh, perfect day to curl up with a good book. Yeah. It's so true. I hope you want to have hot chocolate with marshmallows in it. Go ahead. Yeah, it's so true. I hope you also have hot chocolate with marshmallows in it. Go ahead. So I will say I kind of get where Joe's coming from with some of his complaints about the book. Oh, you also only read half of it?

No, I read the whole thing. Oh, okay. Let her finish, Jared. Let her finish. She's getting Joe's side here. Let her finish! All right, continue. The funny thing is, it was actually suggested to me by, originally by a guy in the Pathfinder game that I've been playing at my local gaming store. And then you guys picked it for book club. So I was like, well, I guess I should check this book out. But I was a little hesitant because I'm not always, upon first inspection, it just seems like another Hunger Games style book.

And it's like, how many times do we have to read about a dystopian future where like humanity is ruined? Right. Or has to play games for spectators in order to survive. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But I did think it was really fun. And one thing that like, I think kind

of stuck out to me a little bit, I think it gets stronger in the second half of the book too. I think it kind of finds its footing a little bit. And as you learn more about the, the other alien races, and you see that like, you know, even the people that seem like they have power in the game are really just another cog in the machine. Like they're, they're working so that their family is safe. And it really just like, it, it, it opens up kind of an interesting question about like how much humanity even really matters in a system like this, you know?

And I just thought that was kind of interesting. I agree. The second half got the second half. Thank you for calling. Thank you, Megan. I want to take as many callers on this as we can. So yeah. Yeah, let's do it.

The second half does get more complex. You learn more about the world outside the game. And you can tell he's building towards something, you know, a lot deeper about how to escape the game or the world that has created this game. So I would agree. Yeah, so I didn't get to that. That sounds really interesting. I did think that the that the NPCs by and large were interesting.

There was always little interesting tidbits about why they were there, how they got there, and how they plan to survive and stuff too. So that added another layer, despite, you know, all of the silliness that really made it feel kind of grounded and gave you, gave stakes to everybody, you know, within the dungeon. Uh, we got an old friend here, uh, Jared that wants to talk, uh, dungeon crawler, Carl, uh, your good buddy and mine, Clint Trucks. Oh yeah.

Trucks is in the discord. Can you hear us Clint? Wooty! What's up Clint? Oh, yeah is is in the discord. Can you hear us? Hey fellas All right, let me jump right in Jared if you just get to like this book seven, it's I Know I know I knew if I didn't say that at the top nine people would say Well, allow me to be the first. But I think everything you guys are saying is completely fair. And I started this with every expectation to hate it.

It seemed, you know, I don't love the frivolous Jared. I know. Yeah. You and I like deep literature. We absolutely do. And I also, I will admit a certain literary chauvinism to the idea of this lit RPG or progressive fantasy thing that's been happening. And generally speaking, a lot of those books get terrible reviews because they're self-published

and frequently not edited. This was self-published until a big publisher picked it up, until ACE picked it up. And I think that sort of brings me to what I think is actually special about Matt Denim and this author and this series, is that the quality is like, maybe it's because I went into expectations, kind of phenomenal. I find myself being shocked constantly about how clever he was. And forgive me, when you read a little bit further the depth of thought and planning in the world I love feeling like I'm in safe hands with

an author because they have really thought about the situation and this does not disappoint in fact it will surprise you endlessly as you yeah are there really really good word seven eight nine but how many books are there seven a book seven came out recently. Books and you've read them all. Right. Clint. I have read them all. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Keep in mind. I started like two months ago. Wow. Right. Like I tore through the engine. Clint reads way more books than any of us. Um,

I would say clever is a good word. And normally if you told me a author or a book was clever, it would make me wince a little bit, but this is like legitimately clever in the fullest and most positive sense of the word. I agree. I also perhaps I might've been more turned off if it was more TTRPG based that it's a video games,

reality TV, internet culture, social media stuff is actually more interesting to me. So I've enjoyed that portion of it because it becomes expressly about reality TV and social media as the story continues. Right. Yeah. They've got to accrue the followers and whatnot. And you get to see more of the world outside of that.

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, I mean, that's probably one of the main reasons that, uh, that I didn't like it and it, this is not a failure of the book or the writing or anything like that. Well, why I say it's not for me is because I have such like intense negative reactions to social media and reality TV in general that like as I read about it like I don't find it to be like a great satire right is that the right word like like a you know kind of look inward and see the problems that you have I'm like I'm well aware that these are major problems and I I don't know it's I take

it too seriously when I read things sometimes it's not I mean it's not an escape to bring in those elements for you, maybe. The problems with the modern world is it's so over the top, there's no satirizing it, right? Right, yeah. Yeah. Well said, well said.

Clint, do you wanna hang around for a minute? I mean, I'd love to take more callers, but you don't have to go if you've got time, if you wanna stay and keep chatting. Do I have to be nice to the callers? No! No! Oh? No, no. What? Oh, great, yeah.

Never been a rule. This is an open book club. Anybody can say what they want. Let's get the great Kavun up here. Great Kavun, I know, is excited to get into this conversation. Hello, hello. Hey, there you are.

Hello, Kavun. How are you? Hey, sorry, hiding at work. Awesome, awesome. In the closet, in the mop the mop closet, it works. Just I don't see just about so. But I didn't like read it. I listened to the audio book.

I hear the audio book is great. And that's reading. That counts as reading. Oh, the audio book is amazing. I think Jeff Hayes does it. And just the. Different production value and what it was really good, like they actually change voices per character, so it feels like you're actually

getting the perspective from everybody, even like the AI. The AI is a hilarious voice. Yeah. So the narrator does different voices. Yeah, it's not one narrator doing like the AI. The AI is a hilarious voice. Yeah. So the narrator has different voices? Yeah, it's not one narrator doing all the voices? It's a full audio production. Yeah, it's a full audio production. Yeah, it's really good. It might like, now that you like,

for me, I like the voices they pick for them are forever ingrained in my head about like, just Princess Donna's voice is so funny and then just she nailed the uh that her attitude and everything like that so I would definitely check out the book uh the audiobook and I purposely didn't start the second or third or anything else after that just for the fact so I didn't know more than for book club. So awesome. Well, thank you. Thank you for eliminating yourself. Thanks for the call, man. And highlighting the audio book aspect.

Yeah. Clint, you said the audio book is phenomenal. So did you reread it audio wise or have you read some of the series in audio and some in regular? I switched back and forth, but I found myself going mostly to the audio because it was so exceptional and I think some of the jokes play better spoken than read. Yeah, I could see that. Some characters I like much more.

Like, Princess Donut is a character who seems designed in a lab for me to hate. And I am so deeply in love with Princess Donut. Wow, wow. Yeah, and see, that's how I set off. Like as soon as the cat started talking I was like I hate this and like I mean Joe that's how I felt and then Princess Donut won me over I know from a lot of people and that's that's really cool. Let's get the audiobooks There is a bit of celebrity stunt casting in the audiobooks that it comes up later as well. Wow

Interesting nice. Let's get Jen with two ends up here Jen raising your hand for hello. You want to talk? Call her Carl Jen. Oh, yeah, man I actually started listening to the audiobook before it was recommended for book club some folks and I were Discussing it in the books channel here and I listened to it in the middle of the night it in the books channel here and I listen to it in the middle of the night like feeding my newborn daughter and I would just be cracking up and it would wake her up like there's a point where princess donut is like frank is an American hero call and I just lost my damn shit like and now I use the princess donut voice as like you know the voice we use for my daughter all the time, like, it's so funny. And like, I am not a deep thought reader.

Like I'm here for a fun time, not a deep thinking time. Like I read so much dumb TikTok book girly smut. Like this is so fun. Like if you're trying to analyze the literature of this series, stay away. Like this is fun, it's great. There's a lot of Easter eggs in there Like it's just a great time and I'm so glad you guys picked it for the book club. Oh, awesome I'm so happy to hear that. Thank you. Thanks for calling in. Yeah, I played at night. We listen to the audiobook

I don't know. This sounds interesting audio books I have a love-hate relationship with I usually tend to like love. I usually end up loving nonfiction in audio books more than fiction for whatever reasons, the single narrator doing a ton of different voices. It makes it a little bit tough for me to, to stick with it. I'd much rather just read a book, but when you're on the go, you can't necessarily, and this is why you and I are two halves of the same piece of. Hi, because I only like nonfiction read. And then I love like, if it's like an action fantasy, sci-fi series, I like that for an audio book.

Yeah, it's very interesting. I guess, I guess with the nonfiction, it's kind of like, it almost sounds like taking a course or something, you know, to me and it makes my brain can kind of, uh, you know, get into it a little bit more. I'd love to get someone up here who hated the book. So if you hated the book sound off in the discord. Um, because I want to hear it cause we're getting a lot of positive perspectives. I think we're only going to get positives. Let's get bent paddle up here.

I mean, there's a reason the book is insanely popular. Ben, uh, do you hate the book? Uh, unfortunately I did not. Sorry, Garrett. That's okay, that's okay. No, he can stay, Ben can stay. What were your thoughts? Anything to add to the discussion?

Anything that stood out to you? Oh, a little backstory. I was actually worried I wouldn't be able to read it entirely before today because I was waiting for it to be available at my library and I'm a slow reader, but I blew through it in about two days. Wow. Yeah. Kind of switching back and forth between the audio book and the physical book.

And I absolutely just, I crack it cracked me up. That's something about the book I noticed too, is I was able to blow through it really quickly. And just a quick note here, this book to me seems, it seems to me insane that this book like sells to me, because it seems like the most niche of niche, nicheness ever. And Ben Paddle mentions library.

I went immediately to the library and my library has like 13 copies of this book and they were all out. And I was just like, what is happening? This is like mainstream? What's going on? So yeah, I couldn't get it either at the library. It's, it's extremely popular. So, uh, good, good. So good for Deniman.

Why do you think you were able to read it so fast as a slow reader? Why do you think you were able to read it so fast? Oh, just the way the characters interact and the way he kind of keeps the reader engaged with the humor. Like you guys said, he's just making joke after joke after joke. And some of them, yeah, don't hit. But a lot of them for me did. And it just it kept me so enthralled with the story and with the characters. It's very plot propulsive, like the characters

have time to put on pants for an entire book, right? The train never stops. Yeah. Thanks for the call, Bent. Let's get Sushi Ghost up here who may have not liked the book Sushi is this true? Hey. Hey. Hey, what's up? Welcome. How you doing? What's up? Yeah, it's this is a weird one for me I read it in about two or three days I was excited to read it every night, you know go to bed get to read another chapter And at first I was like, you know, go to bed, get to read another chapter. And at first I was

like, you know, this is different, kind of a cool concept, but then I think as the book went on it got just more tedious with the jokes, the dick jokes, you know, the Chad humor kind of thing. And I just thought it was Chad humor. Yeah, it didn't really hit me and when I was done with the book I was like, huh, okay, I guess I don't know it's a really hard thing for me to describe why I didn't like it I had a hard time Imagining the dungeon and kind of the setting To me in my mind I was just imagining just like blank stone dungeon hallways the entire

time. There wasn't a lot of descriptive text about where he was. Yeah, I'm with you on that. I wonder, you know, but that's part of, I guess, what what Clint and Jared love about it is, you know, to use that term plot propulsive, which is a great term, is like, he didn't spend any time delving into like long scenery discussions, right? It just was like action, action, action, action. You fill in the blanks, you flow in the blanks. And, uh, yeah, sometimes that, that,

that makes it seem like it's set upon a blank canvas, which, um, sometimes you want J R R Tolkien to give you three pages on the specific flora of the landscape or I get it. Omniscient narrator sort of telling us, everything is Carl's POV and internal monologue, right? Occasionally we'll go off other people's POV internal monologue, but 90% of the time it's Carl.

And he's more concerned about dying than telling you about the nature of the slate. Thanks, thanks for the call, Sushi. Happy to get a negative. I don't know, did you guys find it to be Chad humor? That was the hurtful comment by Sushi just now to me. I don't know what that means. Oh, that means like bro-y frat boy humor, yeah.

Which I would say that there was quite a bit of crude humor, but I love a good dick joke or an asshole joke or a fart or a poop joke. I'm not above any of those jokes. I'll tell you what I didn't like right out of the gate and it never grew on me. I hated the AI humor in the item item descriptions and like the rewards and stuff. I was like, this is so off putting to me. I couldn't describe it. Like it's like if I played it, it was like, it was like breaking its own fourth wall,

like over and over again, like look how much we know about video games. It's like, I don't know. It irritated me. It wasn't the humor that came out of the moments I thought and the dialogue, some of it was very funny. That humor of the AI bothered me. It rubbed me the wrong way. I would say if the book has a thing in it that is most wearing what it is on its sleeve and trying the hardest, it would be those AI, those little AI paragraphs.

Absolutely. It was, it was trying. Sometimes they worked for me. Not always, but sometimes they worked for me quite well. I'm sure that we can get some, I love the foot fetish stuff. I thought that was hilarious. Uh, I did, I missed that. You missed the foot fetish? Why, that's the whole book! No, um... Let's get somebody else up here. Lagness. Lagness, you've raised your hand. Do you want to chime in? Are you playing a harmonica? Did you just... Yeah, what's happening, Lagness?

Lagness? Lagness? Lagness? We'll come back to you, Lagness.. Raise your hand again if if you get a chance. A new a new would you know what's going on, guys? Yeah. What's up? How's it going? Good, good. This was a great first book, honestly. It's a middle school level book.

And the humor is definitely military humor. Oh, is it? I want to bring up that point where they fought the goblin boss and then the cats are like, yeah, I did get to see it. Yeah. He was reading a book, man. And there was a bunch of babies in there. Like that. Like that. Let me ret that is our humor right there.

Let me retell the story. That is what I highlighted before as the moment I laughed out loud. I thought it was so brilliantly funny because you're reading it and she says, she comes out breathless and she's like, yeah, he's in there. He's in there. Throw it. And he like, he hits the button for the bomb and it's like, boom. And then she's like, and there were so many babies. And I was like, that is amazing. That was very, very funny. And then he turned, he turned the page and he's just like, what did you say that there were babies in there? And then I just want to, I just want to remind me Joe, cause when we get into dungeons in general, um, I have something about those, those goblin babies that I want to share. Uh, and then one more thing and I'll let a new keep talking, which is, and then just

after that, it's again, pointing out one joke I did really like from the AI. It's when it came up and the achievement was you killed 24 non combatants in a single action. Oh, the achievement was war criminal. That is so funny. You psychopath. Yeah, exactly. Oh, bad. Good. You caught you grabbed, Anu. That was my, that was my favorite moment. Do you got anything else you want to add before we take somebody else? Yeah, honestly, I think great book, first book. And I think with more book clubs, you know, yeah, we'll get more in depth with better reads as far as sophistication goes. But, you know, this is a great first book for book club, honestly. Awesome. Awesome. I'm really glad you dug it. And book for book club. Honestly. Awesome. Awesome.

I'm really glad you dug it. And thanks for calling in on book club. Hey, thanks for reading. Yeah. Thank you so much. Um, well, Magnus is back in, but, uh, let's see, let's see if we can get you up here. Uh, had to restart discord. Get down with the lagness.

Did it work? And now it's done with me. I think so. It's working for me. Yep. Okay. Yeah. I just restarted this.

No, I thought I was going to hate this book because I think the name lit RPG is so stupid. Like, I have it recommended several times and I was always like, Oh, this sounds really stupid. I mean, it's more like absurdist comedy book, the bleak backdrop. So I think if someone thinks, Oh, that's a stupid name, it might give it a chance. I did the audio book, uh, on audible. And I thought it was great to be honest.

Awesome. Well, yeah, thank you for the heads up. Uh, I'm going to read the future ones via audio book because people are reading about the audio book. Now I'm kind of tempted to check this out. I do want to highlight, you know, there's not a lot of negative reviews out there, so let's get some negative reviews in here from Butterbiscuit in chat who says, I thought it was completely unreadable and I refunded my audible credit to read something good.

Ouch. I want to know what butter biscuit thinks is good. Yeah. That's the follow up question, right? He's like, I refunded it and then I got a good book, a court of thorn and roses. I have a lot of respect for people who can pull a rip cord on a book. Like just decide not for me, close it and put it away. I think that's great. Yeah. Yeah. I do a lot of that. Yeah. I had to do that recently. I had to do that recently. I was 200 pages into something and I was like, I'm not going to get through this. You know? Good for you. Good for you. I mean,

it's okay to do, you know? You read some of it. You know, you tried. Move on. Let's get Farrell up here. Feral, welcome to the stage. Feral Cat! Hey guys, what's going on? Hello! Welcome back! How are you doing? Your thoughts on DCC?

Thanks! I loved it! Well, it's funny because I posted this in the Discord that I used to be a huge reader when I was younger, and then I had a kid and life happened. And it was like 10, almost 15 years where I didn't read a single book and I just couldn't get into anything. And this book series got brought back my love for reading. Wow. I've read all seven books.

And I flew through them. I'm a pretty fast reader, so it was pretty easy. But they were so fun. I agree with most of what's been said, but they are just entertaining and fun. I felt like there were so many things happening in the world that made me think of GCN. Like, I feel like the AI is an amalgamation of Jared and Troy. Maybe that's why I had enough of it.

It was great. And I said in the chat, I was talking to Jen with two ends, and I had said that I thought that I saw a lot of Jared in the AI. I said, I feel like he's made the foot fetish joke before. And then Jared, you literally jumped in and talked about how you love that part. Yep.

I did. I mean, the AI will also just shit on the players and be like, why are you taking that? Like the whole trope that Jared hates where players will just grab like random dirt and broken glass and be like, I might need this. Yeah, it was. The AI kind of sounded like a Jared GM, you're right.

Right? But then also the Troy part that describes things disgustingly where I could just, I could hear it in my head, just Joe going, Troy, what are you, seriously? Wow, that's, yeah, go ahead. I just I thought that was was a fun kind of tie in crossover. I will say like, Joe, I think once you get into it, I think you will enjoy the depth of the lore that I think. Agreed. That it that he had fleshed out this world within a world so deeply that I had thought

like this could be its own RPG game. Like, oh, it will be. Don't worry. I imagine it's coming. But it is just it's so fleshed out. There are just all of these different relationships and like in fighting and wars and you know, all of this deep, deep lore inside of this game happening. And when you discovered a lot of the dumbest things in the world are motivated. That's

a fun discovery. Yeah. Yes. Well, thanks for the call, Farrell, and excellent points. I hadn't thought about the crossover with the GCN. That makes good sense. I read something that says that the author keeps a spreadsheet of all the things that his characters find, and then he'll write himself into a corner and then look at all their items and figure out how to get them out of it Dude, yeah, you know that thing of every time we talked about another crawler

They'd say that this is crawler 12 million four hundred thousand those numbers occasionally will let you learn something about what is happening in the wider game Which is crazy Wow That is well, it's some deep shit By the way, and this is this, Jared, got to bring this up. So you said, I want to know what butter biscuit thinks is good. And what butter biscuit went off to read is something we discussed about doing in book club, which is the start of the first law trilogy by Abercrombie. Yeah. So we, you and I had talked about this.

We were like, we should read the Blade itself as part of a book club together. Cause I think we both read it or partially read it years and years ago. I read it a long time ago. Right. And that's another series along with The Expanse that is a blind spot for me. Yeah. I only read the first book. I would love to start from the first book again

and try to read, you know, Abercrombie I would love to start from the first book again and try to read You know Abercrombie because I I've left it on the shelf. Yeah, I think I would like it I I read most of it back in the day, but I don't remember anything about it except liking it And I don't know why I'm announcing so are we are we soft launching the next book club pick right now? We soft launch it right now, dude? I wouldn't be opposed. I'm soft right now. I can tell you I'm soft. Oh, I can see that.

Wait. Yeah. That sounded bad. This is interesting. This is interesting. We're getting some, some- I think it would be a good pick because I think that it's, it's modern enough. It's, it's light enough that people could get through it.

It's action. It's plot based enough that people could get through it. And it is a, it is now, it's like a new classic of fantasy, you know? So that's what it's becoming. I've also heard people rave about the black tongue thief, Joe. I'm just saying a lot of people in the discord also fantastic. It's a fantasy novel. Uh, is there anything you haven't read, Clint?

For real. The black tongue. Joe, there is nothing I haven't read, and I'll go so far as to say, I read the last book you recommended to me, sir. Really, which one was that? Do you remember what it was? The Physician by Noah Jordan.

You got through the whole thing? I certainly did, and I really enjoyed it. We've never had a chance to talk about it, but it's an amazing journey or what? It's really great. Yeah. Oh man. Well, we'll talk about that off there. Clint reads like 100 books a year.

That's crazy, Clint. Good for you, man, because that book, the physician is, that's like a thousand pagers. So it's like, it's one of those ones that takes me six months to read it. That might be a little extreme, but still four months. But we got to keep it moving, man. We got a lot to do. I know other people want to talk about DTC. I think so.

I think we have to at least touch on it. I don't know. It's up to you. It's up to you. I think we should. So jumping from our... Bye Clint. Thanks for calling in.

Au revoir, Clint. Thanks for calling in. Au revoir Clint, thanks for calling in man. So jumping off of our discussion of dungeon crawling Carl, let's get into dungeon crawling in general. Let's just talk about dungeon crawling in our games and yeah, what makes a dungeon, right? What are the best parts of dungeon crawling? Do you hate dungeon crawls?

Do you love dungeon crawls? I'm curious where you stand on this Jared because, because I consider you to be, for a long time, because my first impression, first impressions are really important. For a long time, I considered you to be a much more narrative-focused and role-playing-focused gamer, as opposed to a tactical gamer as being something that you enjoy Now I know you love all of it. And so I'm kind of curious You know, do you love a dungeon crawl? Is it something you look forward to as a player or GM? You know as a as a forever GM I haven't gotten to play in a lot of dungeon crawls

but I have run quite a few and what I will say is you know, the more I run them, the more I want to run more of them, because I think they are the most compelling TTRPG scenario, because every room is an encounter. The suspense is built in. It's baked in each new door. There's so much suspense. What's behind the door, you know, like, and, uh, sometimes it can be hard.

Uh, it can certainly be harder to run scenarios that involve events instead of rooms that involve NPC encounters, as opposed to different rooms of like a complex, you know, I mean, there's something just so simple yet so, um, infinitely complicated, is that a word about a dungeon that makes it like a really, really beautiful, beautiful thing. Uh, and, uh, my favorite dungeon, the favorite one I've run is, uh, from the Gary guy, Gax module, the keep on the border lands, the main adventure areas called the caves of chaos.

And it's just this like Valley filled with caves up the mountain walls. And you can explore the caves in any order you want. And some are hidden. You have to really look for them. And when you go inside, different caves are inhabited by this ecosystem of monsters where, you know, some of them are a little bit at war with each other. Some hide from others.

Some are like the prey for others. But what I was going to bring up in connection to Dungeon Crawler Carl is you go into some rooms and it's like orc babies and orc orc non-combatants. And what do you do in those situations? That's a completely different kind of encounter. So I love a dungeon and I think it is really one of the most elegant ways to experience TTRPGs.

I agree with you. I think it's probably my favorite part of all of this that we do. I love, there's, to me, they're not mutually exclusive. You can role play inside of a dungeon. One of my, I'm going to give you my number one favorite single dungeon that I have ever run. But before that, I'll say that I did read deep into and did some shows before COVID killed it of the Emerald Spire, which is the epic mega dungeon from Pathfinder, which is like a 13 or 14 level dungeon, each level written by a different classic RPG writer.

Oh, cool. And I, yeah, it's fascinating. And one of the things I loved about it is it's built to be, you go in and then you come back out to like the border town. You keep going in and out and it created a lot of elements for role play that are not necessarily in the book, but that you can generate as the GM. So that was, that was really fun, but I love it as a GM because I like having sort of, even if there's a lot of rooms, there's still a finite number of things you have to kind of think about and prepare.

Right. As if it's like you're entering a new city and it's just like, who do you want to talk to? Like that stresses me out as a GM, right? They like to have a whole, you know, to have every shop, you don't have to have them all prepare, but you never know what players are going to want to do. And you want to give them the keys to the car fully in an open world scenario. That can be stressful. I love when I know we're in a dungeon. It's like each session is ready to go. And I enjoy the, you know, how you can think about the way someone will move in a dungeon and then see the complete surprise, you know, by what players end up choosing to do. So I think that, you know, not only do we want to have callers come up and talk about

dungeon elements that they love or don't love, but also, you know, some of your, your actual favorite dungeons. I'll say for me, the thing that I dislike the most in dungeon crawls that are an essential part of many dungeon crawls are puzzles I Do not like puzzles because I find that ultimately For me as a player. I will never figure one out ever right and as a GM I find that most of the time I'm just giving the players the information anyway Whether it is from a role right like a knowledge role and you just give them the information,

or I'm just telling them what to do because what seemed so easy to me as a GM, the players are just not putting together. I feel like it's a very rare thing for the players to see the pieces and go, I get it. We have to do this, this, this, and this. If you have that kind of player, good for you, but the whole escape room thing is not something that I get it. We have to do this, this, this, and this. Like if you have that kind of player, good for you. Uh, but the whole escape room thing is not something that I think shines. I'm 100% with you on that. And I think, uh, you know, we could talk about this later, but mysteries and

puzzles are very hard to run in a role playing game because we're not all Sherlock Holmes, so it's, it's hard for us to do that. Um, I'll just say one other thing. You said that a dungeon is easy to prep. I think a good dungeon dungeon can be hard to prep. And the reason is I think a good dungeon should have multiple directions you can go in at any given time. It should be complex enough that you can go up and down and that you come into

rooms where there are multiple paths to take. And if anytime there are multiple paths to take, it means that I, if there are two paths, I'm preparing twice as much. If there are three paths, I'm preparing three times as much. So sometimes I think a dungeon and a hex crawl, which is just an outdoor dungeon. Right. We've done a lot of that in blood of the wild can be, can be tricky or it can be labor intensive to prep. I would say more so honestly I say more so than an event or NPC out in the village based adventure where you can kind of move things around to where you need them to be you know a little bit more.

So yeah yeah yeah I agree with you maybe I'm just remembering it with rose colored glasses. Cause I really haven't run a dungeon in a very long time. I I'd love to, you know, I think one thing that I would see about as I was preparing for this segment is like, I should not stress about the greater grand story. Of a dungeon and take a dungeon that I love that's in the middle of an AP and just run it for some time. Run that. Hey, what a really smart idea.

That's a great idea. Like without having to do the AP. So I'll tell you. What if you just ran calamity caves from Blood of the Wild, you just ran that by itself. Why not? You give them a little bit of detail. You say like, you are a, you know, sort of in a hunter gatherer band and you have to make it through this cave. And, and you're, that's all, you know, that's all you need to know.

It's interesting. So my favorite, when I thought of this, I thought what's my number one favorite I ever ran. And mine comes from Council of Thieves. When I ran Council of Thieves, there's a dungeon in there. It also has a great name. I'm going to actually show it to you right here, Jared. I'm going to put it on screen. It is called the Nessian spiral. I love that. Great name for a dungeon. Take now there's, yeah, whatever spoilers for council of thieves from 15, 20 years ago, whatever. Take a look at just this map from afar. How dope this map is. Let's see if we can get this right. There it is. Ooh, beautiful. So there's the dungeon map.

How dope is that? It's awesome. And it has, especially in the earlier parts, players, sorry, players enter from the bottom, oh God, from the bottom part down here. And you talk about different paths. It's like these, this is a secret door here, right? And this is a secret door here.

So there's these just outer ways around all of this stuff that's regular gray stone. And there's like, you know, creatures living in there and stuff, not just monsters, but like, you know, little societies and stuff. And then I also just have to point out as a little tribute that this map is the first place I ever killed a character. The character, I looked at the map, I haven't looked at it in however long, right? A decade. And I knew in this room, F22 was the first place I ever killed a character.

Isn't that so fun? Like you look back at these things and it just, it just, you know, good, uh, good memories, good memories. So that's cool. Yeah. Yeah. That was Nick Lowe, Nick Lowe playing a character died in that room. And I was like, I did the damage.

It was a natural 20. I was like, Oh my God. Uh, and I'll, I'll never forget that. I actually looked at it and I was like, I think it was that room. Then I went to the detail of F 22 and it was like, yep, that was the monster. And it was, so I knew it was that like immediately. So cool. You not only have a memory of killing, but you have the place and how it happened. So specific. Yeah. It's a very memorable event, you know, like a lot of the other things in here. I remember some details as I read the paragraphs,

but like mostly I don't remember the character death, man. That'll stick with you. Uh, let's, uh, let's, let's see what other people have to say about this. Uh, um, DeSiccio, uh, you want to weigh in on the old, uh, dungeon crawl? Yeah, absolutely. You guys hear me? Yeah.

Yeah, we got you. We got you. Sorry. We didn't get to you during Dungeon Crawler Carl. I'm assuming you're a big fan and we can just move on. Well, you remember that I told you about the Dallas. I wanted to speak exactly about that. But the good news is Jared brought it up.

I wanted to talk about the spreadsheet. So it was brought up. I'm good. Okay, great. Great. Yeah, that was a cool element. So what's your favorite dungeon? What do you love about dungeons?

What do you hate about dungeons? All right. So this is probably recency bias on my case but I'm currently running my players through the skull and shackles adventure path and The end dungeon at book one. I'm not saying it's like the most elaborate thing in the world It's not a mega dungeon by any means but I just like how it felt real to the world So some spoilers for skull and shackles it felt real to the world. So some spoilers for Skull and Shackles. The final dungeon is actually this cave system

that was caused by the erosion of the ocean into an island bay. And so it's partially flooded depending on the tides. And that was my favorite part. Your players had to choose what time did they want to go in. If they go in at high tide, the cavern is almost completely filled with water and you'll need a party that is capable of swimming and dealing with breathing issues.

If you go in at low tide, taller characters can walk, the smaller ones to swim, but you're closer to the sharp rocks at the bottom. And if you go in when the tide is either going in or out, if I remember correctly, I think like the DCs for avoiding those rocks just from like the motion of the ocean, slamming you against the walls could be increased. Motion of the ocean, bro. Dude, that's so cool. I like that there's like kind of a timing kind of element to the entire environment. Yeah, you gotta watch the tides. Yeah, that was like one of my favorite things. And then of course you've got like the actual enemies that are living there and it's their home and it kind of makes sense that they're there. Um, but just like the natural elements explaining the dungeon and becoming

such a pervasive threat in and of itself was quite unique. And I loved that. Yeah. It's always cool when there's just like a kind of a real deep lore to the place itself, you know, that explains why all these things are here and what created them and stuff like that. I mean, that's why you get a full story out of a dungeon. Even though it's just a series of rooms and challenges, you still get a full story as

the picture of what this place is comes into view. Have you ever written your own dungeon? I have. I did homebrew 5e for almost three years one time. So I would pepper in dungeons that were pre-made occasionally in, in that campaign. But I would, you know, I, I personally think if you are going to run homebrew D and D or pathfinder, the best thing to do is to do dungeons and to do like, um, to do locations. Like just like pick some monsters and pick a map, you know, that's

the most important thing to do. If you, if you get those two things right, then you'll, uh, e story and all that will emerge on its own. So you, you reverse engineer. This is all that will emerge on its own. So you reverse engineer, this is what I've told people for years. You reverse engineer the story into a map you already find. You don't try to make a map of the story in your head. It's so much extra work that is really not necessary.

And if you start with the map, you can make amazing story. It's like coloring in the lines, you know, like you can be all as bold as you want colored outside of the lines, but then like probably going to end up looking like crap. But if you work within this, within this structure, it can be great. Yeah. Right. Sometimes in my five E game that was homebrew, I would pick some monsters and

then I would just my all of my whole prep was just drawing a place I thought that they would live and would be cool for a fight. And I am a, I do draw, so I'm able to draw. So I would just do that and that would take me, it might take an hour, but it might take less and I was ready to go. Okay. You know, yeah. Yeah.

I guess I am thinking a little bit more of like, uh, you know, when you're playing online and stuff like that, but yeah, they're, I don't know. I liked the idea of taking them out first and then, you know, back building it. I'm also loving this idea of like, if you love a dungeon that's in the middle of an AP and all you want to do is run that done, just run that dungeon. Cause I'm thinking about this one from back in the day. I know I'm thinking about this one from back in the day. I want to say this is like a level eight dungeon

or something like that. And it's like well into the AP, but you don't really need the whole story. I mean, you just go in with like a couple sentences of story and just go do it. Here's a question, if you're home brewing or if you're a professional designer, right, in a book, is part of designing a dungeon,

do you feel like you need to like build in an area to rest for players to rest? I mean, I think that you, you probably would, if you're smart and you don't want it to be too hard, but then like you say, you can also design them so you can, like the Emerald Spire you were mentioning, where you can go in and out, you know? Design it so that they can do that. Don't make it too hard to get out once they've gone in. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, one of the things that they did in the building of the Emerald Spire is, the dungeon,

meaning from the meta, is they, once you got to certain levels, they put in magical effects that would warp you out, right? So you didn't have to like walk up and walk down every time. And they had a good explanation for it with these magical runes and how they worked and everything. And so it made sense, but it made it like, yeah, you could return to the town and stuff like that, interact.

And there were other people interested in those dungeons as well. And that's what created some, other people might wanna go in there and stuff like that interact. And there were other people interested in those dungeons as well. And that's what created some, other people might wanna go in there and get rewards as well. Doc, Doc Robotnik, why don't you come up and tell us what you think about dungeons.

Hello, hello. How's it going? Oh, it's going well, it's going well. Fantastic. So dungeons are one of those things, they are probably my favorite part of TTRPGs. I love dungeons, I love dungeon crawls as a player, as a GM, they're just my favorite thing.

You know, I think one of the things I think is, it's my biggest struggle with 2E, is that I don't think that dungeon crawls work conceptually very well in 2e if you actually care about things like time. And part of that just is because by nature of how healing works in second edition, you are at a minimum looking at 10 to 20 minutes but likely closer to an hour between every meaningful encounter. And that to me feels a little bit ridiculous. That was one of my favorite things with earlier editions with 3.5 with Pathfinder First Edition

and even older games than that. You could have, you know, it's like, okay, when you're going in here, every encounter, everything affects something else. Who's on the other side of that next door? Are they allied? Are they preparing defenses? Do we need to just heal where we can

and charge into the next room so that we can push as far as we can and then pull back a little bit so that we can rest? Love them. They're just, it's one of my favorite things. I still don't understand why, I don't understand why second edition doesn't do that as well. Well, correct me if I'm wrong, Doc, but I think you're saying that the encounters in second edition as they're written in these dungeons is they're sort of, the game is kind

of bounced in a way that every encounter, nearly every encounter drains resources to the point, even minor ones, to the point of needing to refocus mechanically between every room and needing to treat wounds because there are no wand heals anymore. That's part of it. Getting rid of cure light wound wand spam was great. That was a fantastic thing. I think that the medicine system as a whole is quite elegant, but you know, even if you have a resource

that you can kind of spam out that isn't like 10 minutes of treatment like a champion or a blessed one's lay on hands, that's still, that's not gonna get you to full health. That's not gonna get you a quarter of the way up after a couple of levels. But maybe you're not supposed to be at full health. That's not going to get you a quarter of the way up after a couple of levels. But maybe you're not supposed to be at full health. Yeah, maybe you're not.

Seems like a very player perspective. I should be able to be at full health between each encounter. I agree. The problem is that's not how the math of second edition works. Like the math of second edition says you should be near full health,

not necessarily at, but at least above three quarters health or you run the risk of even a party level plus one encounter causing very serious chances of player death when really it shouldn't or PC death rather. I'm reading the APs, you know, I'm running an AP and I've, and I've started reading a lot of APs and I'm seeing a lot of moderate encounters in there. I don't know if I agree. I think that people need to embrace risk a little more. Low HP, let's go in, let's give it a shot.

Well, I'm definitely coming out of the gauntlet of Gatewalkers. And it might be a bad example because I've heard groups outside of ours that it's particularly difficult, uh, AP with the single, uh, single creature encounters that are, you know, of way higher CR and stuff like that, because we've just had so many character deaths, like so many. And it's really, and that's even with full HP. And so it does make you gun shy to go anywhere without being maxed. And then you're kind of over resting, which is annoying and stupid.

And I think ruins a dungeon crawl when you're resting. You know, what is it? Like the 15 minute adventure day or whatever they say, right? Like that kind of mechanic can be frustrating. It's, you know, if you're playing a fighter, it's great to go in there swinging away room after room. As long as your HP is up, you can go all day. There's no stamina.

There's no tracking of your exhaustion. Really? Beyond the gym saying, oh, you know what? You're probably exhausted for it. You've been at this for nine hours. You should rest like for a wizard or a sorcerer or a bard to be as effective as possible, they're burning their stuff and they're going to get to a point where they're out of their resources and they're going to have to rest.

Well, that's a dungeon design is so tricky. I do think that a dungeon needs to have social encounters. It needs to have encounters that could be combat, but maybe diplomacy will work. It needs to have encounters that are just, let's not say puzzles, but encounters where you're interacting with stuff instead of things that are just trying to kill you. And then that way, maybe the adventuring day is going through a series of rooms that are not a fight, getting to one that is a big fight, losing resources and then going and healing, you know? Yeah, yeah. And I also don't think, you know,

I think it's an opportunity, you know? While everybody's healing, you send in an enemy that's like heard them or something, that's fun and interesting. I know that that seems hard from a player point of view, but I don't know. I just feel like, I feel like it works. I don't know.

It is a fine line. Uh, eight bit deity, uh, come on up. You raised your hand recently to talk about dungeons. I suspect your, your mic is muted eight bit. You're gonna have to unmute that. Um, I do love- Check one two. Hello.

Yeah, there you go. There you are. What's up? Hey, thanks Rick. Thanks. Long time listener, first time caller. Awesome. Great to have you on.

Yeah. So I have some thoughts on this. I've been running Pathfinder two weeks now for about two years. I'm running two instances of the Abomination Vaults in different groups. Awesome. And something, generally, the one thing I think about dungeons. vaults, different groups, and something generally. The one thing I think about dungeons. So as written, like some of the aspects of abomination vaults are a little too campy, like monsters attack on sites.

I do think my players have been enjoying it more when I take some of Jared's thoughts of social encounters, sort of parasocial nature of these dungeons and like levels and like these sort of little subcultures that exist in a dungeon. And so that I think makes it more enjoyable for all of my player groups that we play. It's not just open up role initiative. Like you want to have some of that brooding element to build some tension for the players and they give them, give especially the social characters more opportunities to engage

that aren't just role initiative. But the one thing I think, you know, kind of similar to Doc's point is, I think. I don't like it when my players burn like an hour between encounters. Like, I do want to try to create a little bit of urgency. But I think that's hard with the system. And I do think that's a challenge on the system, where I want consequences of a combat that don't mean the inevitable death spiral of a group. And, you know, HP is kind of the only tool we have to deal with to reflect these consequences. I mean, we have resource expenditure through like spell slots and focus points, but HP

is sort of like a, how hurt are you? And it's always been, you know, we call it a sacred cow of tabletop RPGs because it is this very, very naive representation we have of how injured are you. And I feel like the pathfinder condition system has some space to create other consequences over time, but it feels like kind of design space that's been underutilized at the moment. I'll say, you know, when I think about like classic D and D from the 80s and the way it was designed, it was extremely deadly if you were in combat. Okay. I say is, you know, when I think about like classic D and D from the eighties and the way it was designed, it was extremely deadly if you were in combats.

Okay. It was so deadly that every combat could mean a party wipe or a player character kill. Cause at early levels you had like four hit points, eight hit points, something like that. And the idea wasn't to just conquer combat encounters to just like beat down monsters. The idea was to get the treasure out. And that means sneaking. That means tricking, like dropping ceilings on them or setting bombs for them.

The kind of stuff that dungeon crawler Carl does. So if, if the design of the AP is just is just beat these combats, then I see where this problem with 2e comes in. But if you allow the players the creativity to handle things sideways and do things that are not just we attack it with our swords and spells, then I think that this problem goes away. Yeah. swords and spells, then I think that this problem goes away. Yeah.

Um, well, I mean, it might go away for your game, but I think that there is an interesting point being raised here about the mechanics of the system and the utilization of, uh, and thanks for the call, but that was a really good call. I love calls that like make me think right about how I want to run a dungeon crawler or play in one. And I think that there's a good point there that something is un mined here, which is hazards or creatures that through a traditional combat, instead of merely doing hit point damage or, or maybe they're not doing hit point damage or or maybe they're not doing hit point damage at all what they're doing is applying conditions conditions like

stupefied that won't go away with rest you know conditions like sickened or something like that that usually you're fine after ten minutes but like things that make you feel the degradation over the course of the dungeon run that aren't necessarily just hit point loss. Uh, I think that that's the, it's an interesting thing to explore. Uh, you know, maybe when this creature attacks, it's not just a slice of the slicing open your skin. It's doing something to your mind.

It's making you less, it's implanting fear, fear that won't go away. You know, making you less, it's implanting fear, fear that won't go away. I love that idea, attrition through conditions and other things other than hit HP loss. But I will say the system, like you said, sickening goes away after 10 minutes. Like it would be difficult to do that. You would need conditions that, that you'd have to home, you'd have to home brew it like you have to home brew it. And all you'd have to do is essentially say like, and they do this and split with

specific creatures or monsters or abilities or situations. You'd have to say something like you are frightened one and this does not go away. Right. With rest or anything, you can get a saving throw on it, but if you fail to save, you have it and it does not go away like until further notice. And it's definitely not pathfinder as written. No, certainly not. Uh definitely not Pathfinder as written. No, certainly not.

Pathfinder is written around an encounter system, and once the encounter's over, you spam, treat wounds, and then you move on. Yeah. Speaking of moving on, let's keep it moving here. I know that you were interested in talking about Reddit, and you had asked me, what do we, do you use Reddit and stuff like that?

And I was like, Oh, no, no, no, I stay away from Reddit. And largely it was because of the, the, you know, the idea of utilizing it for glass cannon stuff. But that's just not upon thinking about it. I was like, I'm on Reddit all the time and I don't just like browse around Reddit, but I find myself there so much for information and you brought this up as a topic I'm curious what your thoughts are you said that you were like You're like you said in the beginning. There's a lot of good and some bad and I'm curious how you use it in your research

well the number one thing I use Reddit for is when I'm reading role playing game books, which I'm doing all the time, or I'm looking up like what other people thought. Have people played this module? Like have they played this adventure? You know, um, if I'm looking at like character builds, I want to see what other people think is the optimal character build. Or, you know, if you want to be a guy that throws things, what's the, how do

you build that, you know, Reddit is filled with stuff like that beyond that. Like I'm constantly watching movies and reading books that are non RPG related that I'm like, has anybody else seen this? Has anybody else read this? Well, on Reddit, someone definitely has, and there's an entire thread about it. So you can go in and you can kind of see what other people's opinions are and be involved in a conversation about it. Unfortunately, like sometimes I'll read a book and I'll be like, what did

other people say about this? Oh, there's a thread about it. And it's from six years ago. And I'm like, well, I'm not really going to be able to get the conversation going again now, but I am able to go and see those things. Also, I use Reddit purely for entertainment. You know, I go to, um, I go to one of the main things I follow are fast food restaurant reddits.

So I follow the Reddit for Chipotle. I follow the Reddit for Panera Bread. Are you serious? Oh yeah. Joe, Joe, they are so funny. So just for entertainment value. Yeah. I mean, I go in it. I don't know. I'm fascinated by like the disgruntled workers posting their complaints about how their boss schedules or posting photos of how a customer left their table. And it's like this like massacre of food all over the table or like people complaining about their burrito bowls, not having enough barbacoa in them. Like to me, that is really amusing. So I'm all over that.

And but I hadn't thought about that angle. That's funny. But there are many thought provoking or like hilarious reddits. I mean, McD pointed one out to us that I thought was so, so funny called first responder cringe, which is just first responders

posting, you know, posting cringy videos about how valorous and, uh, brave and amazing they are. Um, so, uh, I, I know that people criticize Reddit as being filled with, you know, trolls and, um, close minded jerks and people that are going to shout down unpopular opinions. I'm sorry. I haven't found it to be that I haven't found it to be that. And maybe it's cause I'm mostly lurking.

I'm not like, you know, trying to prove my point to anybody on there. I'm using it more as a resource than a, um, social connection of any sort. Cause what I would say is if you're using it to as a resource than a, um, social connection of any sort. Cause what I would say is if you're using it to connect with people in a community, it's like all social media, it doesn't really work that way. I don't think, I think it's everybody posting their commercial for their opinion. Um, you know, it's a resource for, for knowledge, but not necessarily a, uh, Um, you know, it's a resource for, for knowledge, but not necessarily a, uh,

a social community like it, it, it claims it is. So I would love to hear what people in the niche think and, uh, just get some thoughts on it. Is there anybody watching right now or listening on discord that utilizes. Reddit that is a member of the glass cannon subreddit and actively posts. right now are listening on Discord that utilizes Reddit, that is a member of the Glass Cannon subreddit and actively posts. I'd be curious what you think about Reddit in general, how often you write, how often you respond to things.

Jared, it seems like, let's say you have a fringy book that you've read and you're like, does anybody read this? And boom, there's a whole discussion on it. Do you find yourself chiming in at all if it's not from six years ago and it's from two weeks ago? Do you respond? Do you write your thoughts? I find that, I find that actually contributing my thoughts, it never goes in a good direction. I know, right? If people disagree with me and down vote me or ignore me, I'm like that, that,

you know, that's like, well, blah, wah, wah, you know? Um, and, um, I very rarely had a different experience than that, to be honest with you. So again, I really don't think that it works as like a social community where I feel like I'm really like connecting with people and becoming friends with people. I think it works more as like, what were some other opinions? What were some opinions on this? And I also think you need to take those with a grain of salt. You know, you kind of got to go in and go, okay, well, what's this guy think?

Well, what do I know about him? Nothing, but that's, you know, sometimes they will, the Reddit community is really good for pointing out links to other sources that are probably more substantive than their opinion that they've pulled out of their ass, you know? Um, I get very, I, you know, I was kind of, I came out of speech and debate and was raised in a way with the importance of discourse and the importance of argument and the importance of rational argument and, um, you know, seeing multiple sides of an issue, figuring out what is valid and relevant in that issue and what actually isn't, and is more of a distraction and that kind of thing.

And, uh, so I love a good argument, love it. And so I don't, I don't like to shy away from it, but something about a lot of reddits that I read that devolve, uh, really just, they make me uncomfortable. I get very uncomfortable, very fast reading someone telling somebody else, uh, that they're stupid or a piece of shit or whatever. You know what I mean? In such short order over text, it kind of weirds me out. And so when those kind of things tend to happen or a certain subredditor community tends to be like that, I immediately, you know, I'm not interested. But there are a lot that have

like really, really good discourse and they, I would say mostly people don't call each other, people don't call each other stupid or you know, the mods, mods clamp that down in most of the communities. What you, what you get is you get ignored or you just get kind of downvoted, you know. And I really like this process, right? Like the voting process to me is this is what I like about Reddit. It's like things that people are interested in or comments they like, or, you know, kind of get, get raised to the top.

And I believe people have issues with that. I'd be curious what the callers have to say. You know, they may think, Oh, well, that's silencing a minority opinion. Yes. That would be important to hear. Like I get that aspect, but I'm not talking about world politics. Uh, I'm talking about like, what's a good, um, you know, what's a good novel to read if I liked the born identity.

Yeah. That's a perfect Reddit question. Right. Let me tell you something. Also, I find that the people that get downvoted all the way, because I read the whole thread, you get all the way to the bottom and the people that get downvoted usually, at least in like the Pathfinder or the GCN reddits that I've been, are the people like, I hate this.

This is crap. Who cares about this? Like a lot of the negative stuff gets pushed down, you know? Like the substantive discussion I feel like really does get voted to the top. That's my experience. I want to hear what people think. I want to hear what people think. Okay, great. Let's, let's get K Rob up here. K Rob, are you active on Reddit there? K Rob? I am. I am. Interesting. So what are your thoughts on the, on the platform in general? How do you

use it? So I use it just to get information. Just because I feel like, I mean, Twitter used to be like, it used to be my source of information back in like the mid 2010s, I guess. And then Reddit just took over that because I feel like, like over the years, obviously, Twitter has gone down. I either, well, there's two things. I either get information, like I go to the NFL sub Reddit, like I just found out Sam Hubbard had retired today.

Um, news from, or, um, I go to the glass Gannon sub Reddit, just people that I generally just answer questions that people have, cause I have a little bit. More information than Normal people right? Yeah, cuz k-rob mods on our channel and stuff like that It's right of knowledge about the operation and stuff. And so yeah, you can give give Information yourself in that subreddit. Yeah yeah, and Like a lot of times it's just like anytime I search something on Google, especially now it's blah, blah, blah Reddit.

Cause that's where I know the information is most likely a real person. And it's yeah, like Jared said, it might've been from six years ago, but it's definitely still useful. Um, like I've been playing a lot of the college football game and I've been looking for some good sliders to get a better gameplay experience and I go to the NCAA football series subreddit and I found a good slider set and I've been having a blast. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that's a good, thanks for the call too, Karell, but that's a good like, I end up using subreddit for my hobbies, right? Or using Reddit for my hobbies and finding people that like these things and how to expand upon those things. When you mentioned builds in Pathfinder, that's probably the most thing I've read on Reddit is like builds in Pathfinder. And as you know, as those builds get upvoted, and as they get commented on with multiple people saying like, Oh, this works, this works for me or I love this bill or whatever.

It lends to me, it's silly. It's only four people, whatever, but it lends legitimacy to me and makes me want to explore a little bit more down that road. I honestly don't know where else you would find information like that these days. I think some people throw up websites of their own with that kind of info, but that's less and less. Yeah, but finding is hard. Oh yeah, I agree. I absolutely agree. Sometimes there are articles from websites that are

kind of obscure that have stuff like that. I mean, good Lord. Sometimes I'll find a WordPress or a blog post somewhere from so many years ago. But yeah, Reddit is really where all of that kind of stuff has gone to live. Let's bring Pug up here. Pug, whose picture on Discord is, you guessed it, a pug. Shocker. Oh, what's up, Pug?

Hey, how you doing? Y'all have kind of touched on this, but yeah, Reddit is, it feels like the quote unquote old internet a little bit with, you know, forums and things like that. And it, it's not as social media, it's not Facebook or Instagram or of course now Twitter. And it's also with more and more AI, you go to Google, you type in something and like the first five things are ads or AI. It's I mean, there's bots on Reddit as well, but usually you can

tell that they're pretty basic. So I do love it just because it's a place you can get away from the everything is bots or people trying to sell you something. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's a good point. I mean, even if it, and thanks for the call plug, even if it does feel a

little bit like, uh, oh, this is just one person's opinion. It's like, okay. But like you, you get the sense that like, this is an actual person, this is their actual opinion. And then the people that are chiming in on it, you know, you get, you get that sense that it's not something that's, you know, being sponsored or that's being like, being like shown to you, right? Because the algorithm thinks you'd be interested in this. It's really just keyword searches. And then it doesn't feel like there's much clout chasing going on.

You know? I mean, I guess you can clout chase in the universal monsters subreddit, but it's like, who cares? Like, I don't know. It doesn't feel like people are posting for likes, you know, they're posting to exchange information. I agree. I think that I, like I mentioned before that book example,

I think I probably use Reddit for finding books and TV shows and documentaries and stuff like that more than anything else. It acts for me as a very good, like, and TV shows and documentaries and stuff like that more than anything else. It acts for me as a very good like, if you like X, you'll like Y and Z sort of like connections. You know who's raising their hand here, Jared? It's somebody named Butterbiscuit who I guess couldn't talk earlier, but has their hand raised regarding the Reddit discussion.

Butter, if you're there, come on up. If you're not, we'll check in with you later. Butter? While we wait, maybe great gray squid can come on. Oh, there's butter. Hold on a second. There's butter, Biscuit. Hey, sorry. I was in an elevator. Yeah, no worries. No worries. Happy you could call in. I'll be a little bit later. Yeah, sorry. I was hating on your book for a little bit, but anyway. Back to an earlier discussion there for just one second.

Are you just starting the First Law trilogy or are you rereading? Yeah, so I remembered you guys talking about it a little bit, I think when we were discussing Book Club first. Oh, okay. So we did mention this before. Yes, and it just came across as something that I would like, and so I started listening to it maybe a month ago, and I am now on the third book, and I cannot stop it as X.

Okay, good to know, good to know. So do you utilize Reddit, Butter? Oh yeah, well, so what, sorry, one second. Oh, yeah. Well, so what? Sorry, what's that? Oh, all right. Sorry, I was being arrested. Yeah. No, no, it wasn't my boss story. So like Jared was saying,

us role playing game endoriers have a very niche interest that not very many people are talking about, especially if you're into like small role playing games. And so it's really hard to find anyone who is like played or has thoughts about smaller role playing games like that. Except anywhere, anywhere except on our RPG, where there is always someone who has played it. Like you said. Yeah.

Yeah. And so it's really useful for finding things out like that, like, is anyone played this adventure or this game or whatever? Yeah. Yeah. Good point. Thanks for the call butter. It is a great place for those real fringe, like you said, books and TV shows, but it's also like real small RPGs, indie RPGs. There's always somebody on there who has talked about it, who has ideas about how to run it, who has stories about what worked, what didn't. Same thing with finding if you like X, you'll like Y. If I like Blades in the Dark, what else would I like? And you will hear the names of RPGs. I mean, I'll tell you a subreddit that I love going down the rabbit hole of is Delta Green. Delta Green has great Green has great content. Yeah, I bet that's great.

And it has a great community as well. It expands beyond Reddit, but with people writing material all the time and having set piece ideas and having encounter ideas and stuff. Anyway, it's really fun. Great Gray, if you want to unmute yourself and join in. Thanks for your patience. yourself and join in. Thanks for your patience. Hey Joe, no problem. Yeah, so I have been a Reddit user since 2012. I remember I created my account on on leap day on on February 29th because I thought it would be funny and it never wound up being funny to anyone but me. But I actually am a moderator of two of the Pathfinder subreddits. And let me tell you, there's a lot of stuff y'all don't see about the Pathfinder subreddits because we take care of it. The moderator for our subreddit matters more than just about anything else that I

can think of in communities that do not have a deep moderator community. What kind of stuff are we talking about here, Squid? Yeah, can you reveal some comments in their usernames? No. What kind of stuff are we talking about? I mean, there's a lot of people who just, they're having a bad mental health day, or they are flying off the handle in general,

and they go on a rampage and yeah, horrible trolls and people who do not belong to the community but pop in because a keyword pops up in a discussion and so they're going to go after whoever used that keyword. So I mean, it really does matter moderators who are looking at the community and seeing the activity spike in a place where it wouldn't normally or something like that and also that communities can report to the moderators when there's stuff like that happening because we can't be everywhere all at once right so you really it's a back-and-forth between a community having a moderators that do their job

and the community knowing the moderators are there to do the job and so can report troublesome users. So the health of a Reddit really, who the mods are matters hugely. Well, this is fascinating to me. Let me dive a little bit deeper here. So you're in two different Pathfinder subreddits. How do you, how many moderators do you know of in each one? So the Pathfinder subreddit community is divided in a weird way, right?

The original Pathfinder RPG subreddit was created as Pathfinder RPG because the original Pathfinder subreddit was for the Nissan Pathfinder. Then that's that Subreddit. Nobody was posting to that, and so the guy who created it was like, oh hey, Pathfinder people, do you want this? And so the rPathfinder Subreddit became the Pathfinder Society Subreddit, which has confused people forever. Wow, that is confusing.

I am a moderator of those two, and the Pathfinder Society one is just me and one other guy. Wow. And it's, but it's a very small volume subreddit, right? The Pathfinder RPG subreddit is, I think there are seven of us round about that. And, you know, we have to be all over the world because people post at all times of day and night. And it's, it's just, you know, it's, it's sort of a volunteer job in a lot of ways. You know, you just sort of volunteer and do a little work. It's work. Well, it is a really great way.

No, well, then it is a volunteer job. Yep, it is. Yeah, it's not like a volunteer job. It's a volunteer job. Do you do you do you have direct contact with people at Paizo? Like, do they talk to you about the Reddit or its information or moderating it or anything like that? Or is it just totally fan run? Yeah.

No, we work sometimes with the Paizo marketing people because they want to do something and so we'll work with them to make sure that can happen without any hitches. On the Pathfinder RPG subreddit, we have very strict rules about self-promotion. And we wanna make sure that people aren't just coming in there and promoting, my generic RPG product does this. We wanna keep things Pathfinder.

And so there's a lot of rules that we have set in place to prevent that kind of activity. So making sure that something is what we want to have discussed is very important. Well, that's awesome. Thank you, Greg. I mean, you've called multiple times and we've had you on your great caller and thanks for that insight. That's really cool to get that kind of insight for it because I use Pathfinder RPG Subreddit all the time. Right. And to know that the reason it is readable and usable is because there are people devoting their time to cleaning it up. The internet is a cesspool. So yes, it is. And we have to squids in there squids in there with his filters and his little net pulling the turds out of the

cesspool. Exactly. Okay, buddy. I you don't belong here and you just pull that dirt out of the cesspool. Exactly. Okay, buddy, you don't belong here. And you just pull that turd out of the cesspool. All right, let's keep it moving. We got more to get into this amazing show. Our final two topics. Our final two topics. March 10th! March 10th is Mario Day.

Mario Day. Mario Day. Or as I call it, Mario Day. Do you say Mario? I say Mario. Super Mario Brothers. Is that a Philadelphia thing? I guess it's a Philadelphia thing. I'm not sure.

McD will probably correct me on that in a second. McD we're going to bring in for this segment because I think McD is one of the biggest Mario fans I know. And I think that it's a fascinating topic. The only thing that I'll say on it is I credit, we talked about this a little while ago about your birth into video games. I credit Super Mario Brothers with my birth into video games. I may have played a little bit of Atari, but nothing consumed my mind like the original

Super Mario Brothers video game, which I became obsessed with, which our whole neighborhood was obsessed with. At that time, it was a phenomenon. Parents wanted to know what kid had gotten through World 6 on the block. It was a phenomenon. And when I beat it, it was one of the most amazing moments of my young life. And so yeah, I'll always remember that as my gateway game. Obviously, and I loved, I was obsessed with getting Super Mario Brothers 2 and Super Mario Brothers 3 for my money was the best. But then after that, I didn't really play much as it got into the next generation consoles. What's your sort of history with Mario Brothers? I love the Mario Brothers games.

I think it's kind of cool that you and I were kind of there when they came out. You know, we were alive and we were at the right age to start consuming them. I'm kind of curious what people who were born in 1990 or 2000 think about Mario, because at this point, Mario is an old man in the video game world. But I was just reading up on it and I thought that there were some interesting things about it. The game is like the first game where instead of just a high score, instead of every level being the same and you doing the same thing over and over. Mario, it added so much more free will and took advantage of the

video game format so much more. You could navigate the levels in different ways. The warp zones just being one example of that, but really like how you chose to, you go over the top, do you go down low? Like, and then each level being actually different, you know, when you played pitfall or pac-man, like the, the differentiation in levels is minimum if, if nonexistent. So it really opened up this whole world where video games can be these, um, these fictional lands, you know, that we, that we think of as places like middle earth or Iraqis,

you know, there's the mushroom kingdom. That's a place, you know, I don't think where is Pac-Man set? I think we, you know, in some sort of dark maze that never changes. Backland McD says, oh, Pac-Land. Sorry, McD. Well, anyway, I would just say that that's what's so incredible about the Mario Brothers games. And mine is favorite. My favorite is definitely the one from the first SNES, the Super Mario World is my favorite. Okay, let's get McD up here. McD, I'd love you to weigh in on your... Can we get him on video?

Yeah, there we go. There's big D. Yeah. Uh, I'd love you to weigh in on your favorite, uh, among the series. Cause I know you played on multiple consoles over the years and, you know, uh, I'm not sure how many you delved into, uh, or how recently, but, um, I asked you to put together like a top five list, similar to what we did for the winter movies, uh, of, of the games in the franchise, uh, your favorite games I asked you to put together like a top five list similar to what we did for the winter movies

Of the games in the franchise your favorite games across the you know the entire History thus far. What are your what are your top five Mario games top five? Mario Brothers Super Mario Bros. 3 be is the best Super Mario Brothers game Then Super Mario World 1 number one. Then Super Mario Galaxy. That one's tough. Galaxy 2 also really good. They're kind of like the same to me. I don't know. I played a lot of them. They put them a lot and Super Mario 3D land and Paper Mario the Thous year door is. Fantastic.

Paper Mario. That is a deep, deep franchise when there's one just called paper Mario, the thousand year door. Sure. I mean, it probably sold like eight million copies. It's pretty deep cut. But it's in the Mario RPG branch of the Mario games. Do you remember where Paper Mario came from? Well, yeah. I mean, so there was Super Mario RPG for the SNES.

That's where Enix made. Right? And that game was fantastic. And then there was Paper Mario for the N64, which was originally titled Super Mario RPG 2. But they, you know, but a lot of the mechanics, a lot of battle mechanics, sort of, there was like a timing based mechanic in the battles of Super Mario RPG that carried over into Paper Mario, but it was an entirely new art style, essentially, where everything's made out paper.

It's very cute. Everybody's flat. It's relatively funny. Yeah. My brothers three. I still remember getting that game like, do you remember the huge banners on the sides of like Toys R Us and Kiddie Cities was like Mario is here and it was like, we got to stop.

We got to stop the car, right? Get out of the car. Like we have to go in and get that right now. Let's go. Yeah. It was such a big deal. It was in the wizard. It was in that movie, the wizard. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that one, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't that the first one to have the like, like the mini map where you would move along to kind of choose your world board that you wanted to play and you could, and you could do it in like a sandboxy way. There would be forks in the road.

You could choose which board to do. You could finish a world without doing a board in that world. Right. Yeah. I don't think that happened in two. Right. You couldn't like, you know, like you could work past certain things. But like, yeah, that was interesting. It introduced us to gambling at a very young age.

Yeah, it did. Yeah. Yep. Yep. So you had to fly. That was the first one where you could fly. Yeah. Yeah, that was incredible. That was you could fly. That was incredible. That was really fun, the raccoon tail. It taught us what Tanookis were. We had no idea before.

McD, did you ever play, and I wanna take a couple callers here real quick and then we gotta move on to a beat McD, but McD, did you ever, have you played any of the newest ones say the last five years? Uh, you know, super Mario 3d world odyssey. I played odyssey. Yeah.

Uh, I played some of wonder. I didn't wonder was fine. Um, okay. Good not great. It's no, it's, it's great. Not amazing. Mario is such a, like a weird bar. They don't put them out unless they're fucking awesome.

And so they're all real good. But you know, it's just like, I'm good. I thought Odyssey was terrific. I thought that was a really fun game. I thought the mechanics in it were terrific. I thought Bowser's Fury, which is like a DLC add-on, which is kind of like a sandboxy version of, it was like an open world Mario game in a lot of ways.

Very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So I had, I've fallen off the side scrolling Super Mario games. I've been chipping away at a game called Super Mario Brothers Special, which actually I played on Extra Life for a little bit

couple of years ago. It was a Mario Brothers game made by Hudson. I don't know if you guys remember Hudson from back in the day, Hudson Soft. They made Adventure Island for the PC. I've heard of it. Yeah, it was made for the PC. 8801 is like a Japanese home PC. And it's horrible. It's like impossible.

It doesn't scroll smoothly. It goes screen by screen. So you hit the edge of a screen, then the next. And there could be like, there could be a dooboo right there. Like as soon as the screen scrolls, it's really something. You get a hammer for some reason. You get Donkey Kong power-ups in it.

It's really, it's a bizarre, great, horrible thing. And I've been playing a lot of that recently, just because, you know. Oh, that's funny. Sunshine doesn't break your top five sunshine. Oh man. I like sunshine. I mean, I like sunshine, but like, I mean, Mario 64 is not on my list. You know, I put that.

No, you make a good point there. You know, they're great or they're amazing. And, uh, that's sort of the, really good. Um, yeah, it was hard to wrap your head around, right? With like, just the mechanics of it were a little bit weird, I think, for people, especially at the time, right? Cause it wasn't really about running and jumping. It also had those extremely difficult kind of like side warp worlds.

Impossible. You know what I would say? They were impossibly hard. Yeah. Really hard. Yeah. Really hard. That was, see, but even like Mario, have you played Mario 3D Land? Either of you guys, it came out now.

Yeah, it came out 3DS. They released it on Switch. It's terrific. But there's some of that in Mario 3D Land. There was like really short, tight, hard platforming challenges that you'd have to go through. I mean, Mario Galaxy did that too. I think to greater effect. You know, there was something like a little weird about the way Mario get Mario Sunshine controlled.

Yeah, I like that Mario will still bring the pain, you know? You know, like I said, it hated street art and I like street art. Let's let's take a call because then we have to get into the contest. Uh, yeah. I mean, we might have to get into the contest right away here, but I do want to go into the contest. Yeah, well, let's just go. Let's go into the contest here.

I want people to, I want to take a second. Everybody think about this. We're going to give away a $40 gift card here to the Nintendo eShop if you can beat McD at Mario Brothers trivia right now I encourage you to raise your hand now if you'd like to join in if you'd like to give it a shot if you'd like to go head-to-head I'm gonna kind of look away from my chat list here as it comes up, then I'm just gonna randomly sort of scroll and pick somebody to come up here and face off with McD for the chance to win a

Nintendo eShop gift card. We'll go through the rules as people start to try to enter. We are, remember, McD is going to remove his headphones so that he can't hear the questions. And to start off, you will get one minute to answer Jared's five questions that he has created surrounding Mario, and you will get one chance to answer those questions. There's something I didn't say last time

that I'd like to mention this time. You do have the option to pass and return to a question if you'd like. If you need some more time or you wanna move on to the next one, you have no idea, maybe you want to come back to it, you can pass. Jared will ask you the next question. Then Jared, you'll have to remember to go back to that question if there is time. No problem. Is it like the SATs then where you're not, you don't get a, it's not marked against you if you don't answer, but if you do answer it is marked against you? It's whoever gets the most questions correct is the winner. So I guess it's not marked against you. It's whoever gets the most questions correct. It doesn't work

against you to guess and get it wrong. However, maybe guessing too fast would be, you know, a foolish use of a few seconds. Take a couple seconds and think about it. You can pass if you'd like. In the event of a tie, we'll go to a tiebreaker. But yeah, whoever gets the most right out of five wins the contest. So we've got some people lined up here. Let's just do, do, do. All right. It's going to be garbage boy. 44. Are you there? Garbage boy. Garbage boy. Hello. Garbage boy. How you doing? God. Um, nervous. I just kind of raised my hands. I saw it'd be fun. I'm no, I barely know anything about Mario. So we're going to see how this goes. Oh dear.

Oh, it's not going to go well for you then. Oh no. It's not, but it'll be fun then, I hope. All right, all right Garbage Boy. We'll give it a shot. We'll try to make it fun. We'll try to make it not knowing things is fun for you. McD, why don't you go ahead and take off those headphones there, buddy. And, uh, step aside for a second as we, uh, prepare garbage boy for these questions.

Uh, all right. So garbage boy first, before we get into it, why don't you tell us where you're calling from? I'm calling from the sunny state of Iowa in the middle of the blizzard. Wow. That's the second one today. Sunny state. Yeah.

Yeah, our second I win. The country is getting pounded today, Joe. Yeah, apparently, just absolutely pounded. All right, garbage boy, from the time Jared finishes asking the first question, I will start the timer. You'll have 60 seconds to get as many of these right as you can.

We'll see what you can do up against McD. Jared, whenever you're ready, you can read the first question. Question one, what was Mario's original name before being renamed Mario? It has to be Italian, you'd think. The most stereotypical Italian. Like, um... Pass, I'll pass, I'll come back to that one. Pass, okay. This is a good bet.

The game Luigi's Mansion was first released on which Nintendo console? Uh, I think it was the GameCube. Correct. In what game can Mario get a boo mushroom that turns him into a ghost, allowing flight and passing through walls? Are you still there, my friend? Yes, I'm still there. Uh, I think I'm going go with 3d world 3d world Incorrect question for and what game did the Koopalings Bowser's children first appear?

That's Ludwig Lemmy Roy Iggy Wendy Morton and Larry which game were they first in? Sorry garbage boy. We are out of time But you did get one correct. You got one. You did get one correct. We're going to put you back in the audience here. Just sit tight and we'll bring on McD. Come on back in, buddy. Bring it back in from the. Oh man.

Okay. You got to beat one. Don't tell him what he has to beat Jared. Come on. No, I want to get them all. McD, hey. My goal is five. I has to beat, Jared, come on. No, I wanna get them all. You gotta be one, McD, hey. My goal is five. I don't like your chances, pal.

All right. We'll see, we'll see. I made these real, real hard. Okay, McD, the timer will start as soon as Jared finishes asking the first question. Whenever you're ready, Jared. Question one, what was Mario's original name before being renamed Mario? Jumpman.

Question two, the game Luigi's Mansion was first released on which Nintendo console? GameCube. In what game can Mario get a boo mushroom that turns him into a ghost? Mario Galaxy. And what game did the Koopalings, Bowser's Children, Ludwig, Lemmy, Roy, Iggy, Wendy, Morton, and Larry first appear? Super Mario Brothers 3. In Super Mario Odyssey, Mario is joined by an ally that takes the place of his hat. What is the hat's name?

Oh geez. That's a good question. Cappy? Five for five, ladies and gentlemen. Oof. Oh, man. Amazing. God damn.

God damn, McD. Come on back up here for a second there, garbage boy. You know, hey, you gave it a shot. Pressing. You should be proud. I'll tell you what you got one. I wouldn't have gotten garbage boy. That was, that was impressive.

I knew the joke. His name's Mario jump me and Mario. I didn't know that was his actual original name. Wow. Yeah. I didn't, I didn't know that either. Carpenter and don't keep going. Yeah. You know, like I said, stereotype will tell you name. Wow. Yeah. I didn't know that either. Jumpman the Carpenter and Donkey Kong. Yeah. You know, like I said, stereotypical Italian name. Yes, Jumpman. Jumpman. Jumpman. Classic.

Well, sorry Jumpboy or, uh, Gar, Jumpboy. Sorry Jumpboy. We're your Jumpboy now. Now you're Jumpboy. Yeah, I've been downgraded. Sorry, Garbage Boy, but thank you for trying. I really appreciate it. Man, I love the beat McD. It's a good time. It's a good time. Yeah, we're going to keep doing these. We'll find something McD doesn't know about.

I don't know. But yeah, I knew it would be a challenge with Mario, but I didn't know. Honestly, I thought those were great questions. I didn't expect McD to five out of five of them. I think the only one I would have known on that list is Cappy. I played a lot of those. Yeah. I would have known Cappy, but like the other ones.

Whew. I want to tell you this. I made the questions and before I made them, I would have known zero of them. So there you go. They were good. They were good questions. They were solid. Awesome.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, let's talk a little bit about what we got coming next week. Before we before we get out of here, we have got what is it next week? There's Oh, it's so we're we're sort of gearing up for St. Patty's already by next week, which is, you know, a fun time for all of us. So definitely, we said we're going to do some, like Leprechaun RPG talk, right? We're going to do it. We're going to, I want you everybody to brush up on their

folklore. We're going to have a folklore conversation about, uh, Gaelic myths and legends. I think that would be fun. That would be fun. Uh, we also talked about talking about daredevil might get some daredevil conversation. Daredevil will be debuting and I think it'd be great to get into daredevil, the shows, the comics. So, um, stay tuned for that as well. Yeah. So, so lots of good stuff coming next week. Uh, thank you guys so much for, for hanging out with us. Uh, as always, you know, we appreciate you, uh, coming out and supporting, uh, the show live, watching it live.

Everybody on Discord, thank you so much for listening on Discord, for being a subscriber, for supporting the show, for coming up, talking. Those of you that we didn't get to today, I'm sorry. Keep raising your hand. We will get you in in future weeks for sure. There's a lot of people want to get on, which is awesome, but we want to get as many of you in to be heard as possible. So thanks again to everybody and have

a fantastic week. Have a great one and we'll see you next time on Glass Cannon Radio. Peace out, everybody. Bye bye. It's time to make your membership official. Start your 30-day free trial today and become an official member of the Naish at JoinTheNaish.com with the promo code GCN30. That's JoinTheNaish.com and use code GCN30 to gain access to exclusive podcasts, ad-free episodes and content you can't find anywhere else. Once again, it's JoinTheNaish.com and use code GCN30 at signup to get your first 30 days for free.

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