The Giant Beastcast: Episode 132

Here we go!

I'm a dog and here I go too!

Man, Jan has a great voice.

Edit: That sounded less weird in my head. Too late now, I'm committed.

Get Jan on every podcast and video. THAT VOICE!

Jan has THE podcastin' voice!

to give Jeff a chance to explain role-playing games to Dan.

Oh boy. Everybody strap in :p

Edit: My Internet connection cut out at "Let me tell you about Tender Loving Ca--". Even it has seen enough of that game!

No Brad? Disappointed!

"Alexa: End my suffering"

Edit: To speak briefly to Dan's D&D query - in the Horde mode example, the designers could make a level with hundreds of Brumaks and Lambent Beserkers arriving at once. But that'd be no fun to play, in much the same way as the Dragon example.

The DM is that game designer - it can be a bit like a job, but unlike designing a game, the DM can adapt and mould the story on-the-fly to fit their players and what they want to do. It's entertaining for the DM because they not only get to watch someone experience the story they have crafted, they also get to directly influence (and sometimes lead) it as it progresses.

Also for Dan's "Do I just tell them to go into the cave?" - yeah, you kinda do. You could have them stumble across it on their journey, or have another NPC send them to that cave to investigate a specific thing. You can absolutely pull players in a direction, and while they might sometimes deviate from your plan they'll know that (as in a video game) the most exciting content is probably in the direction you're being led.

If you get a chance, you should absolutely ask Austin about the boss fight he designed only to throw it out almost entirely because one of his players came up with a solution so good that Austin just went along with it. Sometimes your players help the DM craft an even better story than they had intended, and that's a lot of the magic of tabletop RPGs.

It's okay Vinny will play Jeff's recording from previous episode

Oh Hero Quest bumper... this is going to be good!

Man, now I have to go watch that Ryan and Vinny Liverpool video again, I never know if it's going to make me laugh or cry

Can't tell if that intro is by Jan or Jeremiah.

Nice of the Giant Beastcast to actually allow Jan to talk!

I want to laugh at Dan for his stupid Alexa questions but then I remembered just the other day that I asked Alexa to play John Cena's entire rap album for me.

Woohoo, nice, more Jan! Man, it's so awesome to hear everyone together, I'm hoping UPF is going to be packed :D

I had that game!!! oh man :)

"Alexa is Robert Stack alive?"

Fucking hell Dan is never gonna slow down is he`?

I played a lot of Hero Quest with my friend as a kid. Good times.

Stop talking to Dan about D&D.

That Thanksgiving joke makes no sense Alex, Canadian Thanksgiving is in October.

Hero Quest is one of the best worst boardgames in existance :) ... It would actually be a good way to explain the concept of Pen&Paper RPG's to Dan. You have all the basic elements of an RPG but you also have a very narrow set of rules and a board to focus on. It's only a few steps from that to a real Pen&Paper.

Yar. Nice. Seeeeeeems like a doozy. Also, the obligatory wrong Jeff joke was missed here. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I'm just saying it was missed.

to give Jeff a chance to explain role-playing games to Dan.

Oh no

I don't know if it's such a good idea to have the one guy who dislikes tabletop games enough that he wouldn't touch them for the GB Unplugged feature to be the one explaining/selling Dan on the idea of playing tabletop games. I mean, in a way maybe Jeff would be good because he feels he knows what tabletop games are and he knows himself well enough to know he doesn't like them, but also he could very easily feed into Dan's already nascent thoughts that tabletop games are confusing and bad.

Never explain things to Dan. It doesnt even take a second for him to forget it.

Dan pretending to understand tabletop RPGs via wrestling metaphors just now is tacit admission that he deliberately refused to understand beforehand. The very first instance of them explaining the concept was through wrestling metaphors, including literally saying "you are Vince, you're trying to put on a good show".

Ok, can we just make a feature, once or twice, where the crew plays Dungeons and Dragons with Dan? I feel like It'd be super fun for both the audience and the crew and maybe Dan would understand, and potentially like it, or not :)

@mattgiersoni: They did a D&D thing with Dan and it SUCKED (imo)!

@monkeyman04: Oh wow, thank you! I'll check it out! :)

Also I'm like 80-90% sure @danryckert understands tabletop gaming, but he just wanted a Fire Boylt moment for himself in 2017, where he so fundamentally botches a layup that you question whether or not he was faking the entire time.

@mattgiersoni: They tried that. It was a disaster.

Please stop talking to Dan about D&D. His clearly willful ignorance is fine when it's about his eating habits, or whatever, but I really don't think it's funny that he doesnt care to understand things about games, which it is his job to understand and evaluate.

I know D&D itself is technically out of his wheelhouse, but I cant imagine him having any grasp of, say, CRPGs, or any number of other games that have D&D roots, and that should be embarassing to him, and ultimately, to everyone. The end result of these segments is me thinking "why did they hire this guy?", and I LIKE Dan, mostly.

If it was genuine, that would be one thing, but I dont believe it, and I don't enjoy this bit

noice

Dangeons & Dragons?

Yeah, sometimes Dan's "Dan" persona is endearingly obtuse, other times he just seems unwilling to admit he has difficulty understanding something.

We all know the D&D thing is a joke Dan is stretching out - it’s basically wrestling and Heartstone and Dans understands and enjoys both. It’s impossible that Dan gets wrestling but can’t get his head around “roleplaying” a fantasy character.

Like a lot of others I like Dan, but whenever it gets to topics like this, the whole Andy Kaufman “is he or isn’t he ON right now?!?” thing has gotten very tiring.

That said I guess my own comment is just venting because the guy is who he is and you take the good with the bad. It’s just recently it seems like there has been a lot more Dan role playing than usual I suppose.

Jan plays League?! As if he wasn't already awesome enough. I was in a similar situation where I fell off for a while cause my friends PC died and it's a bummer to play solo. We just started playing again a couple weeks ago and it's been a blast, check out the preseason if you haven't cause there's a lot of smart changes to streamline the old runes and masteries.

Indeed-Dan's shenanigans is entertaining, but his shallow personality and way of looking at the world creates a pretty tired and one-dimensional gimmick that's probably grown to be the most played out of anyone in the crew from these past three years. Is as everyone's reactions to him. One of the the reasons this site has grown stale to me during the past year and a half.

Shen Long is just Gouken. As close as anything is, anyway. It was a mistranslation of Shoryuken that gave the impression he was referring to his master, and Gouken is that master. They've never done Shen Long as a name of a character in a game.

I feel like Dan not understanding D&D is either Dan doing his own non-comedic "Fireboylt" bit over the course of several weeks, or Dan is just literally incapable of learning about topics that he is resistant to. You be the judge of which option is more likely.

This has to stop. Dan is an intelligent adult video game player. There is literally nothing complicated about the concept of D&D. You want to say you don't understand 2nd Edition rules with THAC0 and what not, fine, but being incapable of wrapping your head around a co-op game that is being engineered by a de facto game developer in real time, is no longer remotely funny, nor is it at all fun to struggle through listening, whether Dan is doing this on purpose or not.

Howdy doody

Is the sound quality a little muffled in this one?
I just had that big Windows 10 update that added... nothing useful to me, and now i'm paranoid everything is worse.

Oh man, the first Robert Stack line floored me.

So compliment sandwich:

Yowza Abby's knocked it out of the park on both podcasts this week. I can't even imagine how enjoyable she'll be for the year end awards.

I want Dan to someday come up with better comedy than simply trying to maximize the amount of cringe in a given episode. It baffles me that users and staffers can't accept that it's not worth trying to broaden his horizons on topics outside his comfort zone.

Whenever I hear Jeff talk DnD it reminds me of how much I love the man. Obviously he's made it abundantly clear numerous times that he has zero desire to engage with the game himself yet he's so astute when it comes to raw game mechanics that it's cool to hear just how much he at least gets that part of it. Honestly he has gained most of his fame and following from his knack for comedic freestyling so it doesn't feel like too big a stretch to think that he'd actually be great at it with enough motivation.

I'll probably be going with 'favorite game' for my personal list as I thought gameplay was fairly standard across games this year. Luckily it's such a great year for styyyyyyyle that there's more than enough for me to consider a full list of ten. Thanks as always for the podcast and the website.

Oh Dan. He is not a lore/world-building/story person. He likes the fun of experience (mechanics/action). It's just not in his preference and perspective to see where the fun is for the greater DnD area. Not a bad thing, just his perspective. MGS seems like an exception, but it's fits in how he experiences it.

He should just listen to a DnD podcast to listen to others' experiences. Learn by just seeing/hearing to their story and pick up mechanics along the way. Listen to The Adventure Zone (which is very casual) or Critical Role. No work on his part, just listen; it's how I've began to explore this area. :)

My Eco, which is in several rooms over from the office at which I listened to this in, only recognized the "Alexa, play the strokes".....now I have random music playing in the background.

Typically avoid beastcast, but this is an exception! #Janinthehouse

'Xur the dipshit that only shows up on the weekend' - Made me do a loud gufaw at work.