Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Crit School: New GM Survival Guide


In the first Crit School I talked about pretty much everything Role Playing related, and in this second installment I specifically target my wordy wrath at new Game Masters who are running games for the first time and could use some pointer from a grizzled combat veteran of the art like meself!  

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why do you produce your podcast in high quality mp3s Dave? The difference between them and normal quality stuff is imperceptible, and your things are huge because of quality and take ages to download with my bandwitch.

Anonymous said...

Lol, I meant bandwidth.

Nuclear Clown said...

Oh man, BANDWITCH is such an awesome word. I am totally going to make a monster in an RPG called "The Bandwitch" and dedicate it to you!

Now, as for your question!

I have a HUGE crazy obsession with presenting the stuff I do on my audio and video files in as high a quality as I can possibly do. Is it the BEST quality in the world? No. But, it is the best that I PERSONALLY can do. This has the very unfortunate side effect of creating MASSIVE files and downloads and stuff, and I am sorry that downloading and/or streaming the stuff is a giant pain for you.

One time, on accident, I rendered a podcast episode at lower quality than normal, and when I heard it back, I went nuts and was all like "SOMETHING is wrong with this" and had to scour the audacity project to find the issue. It wasn't even a huge reduction, but I noticed it and it bugged the heck out of me!

Yes, I have mental issues. Hopefully this gives some small insight into why my files must be ungodly massive and take forever!

Anonymous said...

Hi Dave, I haste to report that I liked your Fifty Phantoms campaign segments, I suspected, that with game's slow progression it won't reach any final conclusion (since you also said that you rarely play long chains of adventures), still its a pity that there were only three episodes there.

...Huh, now that I recollect your sea campaign I remember one thing about 50P world that bothered me, perhaps I misunderstood something. The witches make that world drown. You said that the water already flooded a great amount of the land and in a couple of years the sea may swallow all of it, but the world you were describing didn't give the vibe, that the cataclysm is happening (waves of refugees, famine) and there seems to be no urgency there - only a few people are questors (yet in a couple of years there will be no land to live on).

Anyway, I'd gladly listen to segments about some good rpg adventures of yours.

Nuclear Clown said...

Hey there! Thanks for listening and commenting!

Now, to answer your inquiries:

50 Fathoms is an AWESOME game. I find the setting and concept simply awesome, and really would have enjoyed running my game longer than I did, but it gets more and more difficult with scheduling and whatnot to get anything going steadily.

I can point out all the difficulties in getting a long running, continuous game going because I suffer from pretty much ALL of them :]

Seriously, though, 50 Fathoms rules. Check it out if you can nab it cheap!

As for your comment on the world being drowned, I may have not explained it clearly. When the Sea Hags first cursed the world, shit got real and the world flooded. It was a major disaster. The world never stopped flooding, but it did slow down. Most people think the HUGE flood was the extent of the Sea Hag's curse, but it is just NOW being discovered by scientists that the world is still sinking an inch or so every few years (I forget the exact rate of the flooding).

So, yea, it's very slowly getting worse, and most do not notice it, but word is getting out that the flood is still happening.

So, at first, it was a massive flood. Then, it leveled out, but is still flooding slow enough for people to not really notice.

I hope that explains things a bit better!