Tales About the Table

Hope you've enjoyed the last 20 weeks! We have all had a blast and we are so excited to share our thoughts without any planning. This has been an amazing experience for all of us. We love that you've joined us and we look forward to reloading, resting, and getting ready for season 2!

The difference between stepping into the world and just playing a board game is immersion. Sometimes we play D&D, and other times we feel like we're adventuring alongside our closest friends. Join us as we talk immersion, how we experience it, and the times we completely miss it in our games.

There's a lot that goes into a session of any TTRPG and a lot of times, prep is at the center of any successful campaign, join us as we look into prepping and running the game from the DM's side of the screen.

Think of your favorite story, there's probably a main character that comes to mind with that story. In Dungeons and Dragons, you don't want that to pop up right? Well spoiler alert you might be wrong about that. Join us as we discuss pros and cons of main characters, and why they might be exactly what you need in your next campaign.

Roll initiative! Wait, why? We try to answer that question in the best way we can and talk about types of combat along the way!

Welcome back to Tales Improvised About the Table! We get right into the action and then get very far away from it. You never know exactly what you'll get . Full warning: We get way off the mark in this episode at times, but hey that happens at our tables too.

There's more to building characters than just stories. We also want our characters to be powerful and fill the role in the stories we want to tell. So bring your characters from episode 13 along, and join us as we flesh out the mechanics side of character building.

Let's get into building characters! Grab your pencils, pick up your character sheet, and set it to the side because we're focusing on character stories. Backstories and motivations are an essential part of your character and before you roll for stats, or pick your class, let's try to tell some stories together that help DMs latch on to some plot hooks and lay the ground work for an epic tale. Follow along with us as we talk character building and try our hand at building a few on the fly!

Just how powerful can you be in your TTRPG? The answer is potentially way too powerful, but hey it's a lot of fun! Optimizing your TTRPG can create a world of possibilities for players and DMs, but it can also create a world of problems in the world too. We love optimizing but it definitely hasn't always been a smooth part of the journey. Join us for a meta conversation on a very broad topic that will help us lay some groundwork for future episodes, topics, and ideas.

It's just one game right? Well, kinda... There's definitely some differences between a simple one shot and a long standing high fantasy campaign. There's plenty of overlap, but different tables impact the type of D&D you might be playing. We love playing a really story based type of D&D but we each have other things that make D&D fun for us.

We're back to not having any idea where we're going. Join us as we talk about magic items and modules and enjoy plenty of laughs in between.

So much of what comes to life at the table starts well before any player sat down and picked up dice to play. We take tons of inspiration from media and it bleeds out into our TTRPGs. Sometimes it's subtly putting little details we love from our favorite stories, and sometimes it's overtly ripping off our favorite franchises and adding it to the world. We love to get creative when it comes to playing TTRPGs, building characters, and building worlds.

Everyone has heard a horror story about the dreaded problem player. Whether you read about it on Reddit, or lived through it at your own table, you've come across the worst D&D player or DM out there. We hear you and we want to take a gentle step into this difficult subject. There's so much more to problem players than meets the eye, and we hope this helps give you a little bit more patience and understanding for those problem players.

What else could divide a party? Arguments that your character shouldn't do that because of their alignment seem to happen more than we'd like to admit. The three of us don't agree on alignment and we doubt you'll agree with us entirely, but we wanted to have a fun glance alignment and discuss what we think of with alignment. So whatever thoughts you may have join us as we dissect alignment and how much we vary on the topic.

Not too big, not too small, but what is just right? We're not sure but there's more than a couple questions that you might have about group size. From large tables with several players, to just one DM and one player, group size is one of the most impactful elements to your game.

An important part of TTRPGs is reacting to things on the fly. Why not include that in a podcast on TTRPGs? We don't know where we'll go or what we might talk about, but expect this to become a regular occurrence on our channel. It's going to be a wild ride. We promise to keep it fun, and roll with whatever topic might come up!

Join us as we talk about storytelling in TTRPGs and the different stories that naturally come about in your games. There's a role in storytelling for every player at the table and for the DM. Listen as we discuss some of the stories we've told and what guides us when we're telling new ones.

If you're going to run a campaign, you're going to need to build a world. If you're going to play in a campaign, you're going to need to be part of that world. Worldbuilding can be so much fun to do collaboratively, and when done correctly, can lead to a world that feels real, tangible, and brings you from rolling dice around a table to telling a story that will be remembered forever.

There's a lot riding on this one, getting started. It is so important to rock your session one. Many times, your first session of playing D&D is a tone setter. Listen as we discuss the ways we want to kick off our campaign, not just as DM's, but also as players introducing their characters and quirks along the way.

Welcome to Tales About the Table where else could we start but session zero? Often overlooked, and viewed sometimes as "The boring stuff" we think session zero is vital to crafting an excellent story and world. Player expectations, DM prep, and just setting the tone of how your game is going to run are but a few things we think matter in getting started.

A little introduction of who we are and what we'll be talking about. This is Tales About the Table, a TTRPG podcast for telling great stories, making lifelong friends, and laughing about the games that bring us together.