E21: Adaptation II

In this episode of No Plot, Only Lore, we dive deep into the rich and varied world of media homages to Dungeons & Dragons. Join us as we explore the fascinating intersections between D&D and popular culture, with a special focus on comic books, actual play media, and the unique trend of Reddit thread readings on TikTok.

Transcript

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you're listening to No plot only lore a podcast about games and the tables we play them at your DMs tonight and every night are Josh and Chris you can find us on all podcast platforms or check us out at no ploton lord.com if you like what you hear today please rate and review the show and share it with everyone you've ever met welcome back to no plot only lore Albuquerque's number one D and D podcast we're actually back for part two of a two-part discussion about D and D inspired Etc media is that the way to phrase that no you're just going to let me roll with Albuquerque like it was nothing I just assumed that was a correct statement oh okay it's is it not no oh um I thought I might I might have lied to you Josh oh no I was see I was like genuinely like excited for a second because I'm like hey you know what I know Albuquerque it's the place that every Looney Tunes joke is about and it holds a warm place in my heart and now you're telling me take left turn now you're telling me New Mexico doesn't care about two Canadian dorks talking about tabletop RPGs you know they might they just don't know it yet yeah so for all of all of our all of our listeners just make sure that you're your friends in Albuquerque give us a good listen this was Chris manifesting our meteoric rise to Albuquerque's uh Elite cultural culturally perfect uh yeah yeah H I don't know who else is part of like what could be reasonably considered cultural Elite in Albuquerque New Mexico but I'm podcast scene is just got to be like crazy though because there's nothing else to do in Albuquerque I don't think that yeah actually makes sense yeah now today I wanted to talk like last week we talked about um a lot of adaptation stuff the ways that Dungeons and Dragons and role playing games have been turned into other media and I kind of wanted to continue that discussion but also get into some of the stuff that is less adaptation I guess and more of an homage right we talked about primarily movies and books because those are real media and then uh we got a little sidetracked by books I think in you guys balers gate yeah we are uh that's true but we're both I think originally book nerds um yes yeah I think we're like I wasn't diagnosed for ADHD because I was that kid that sat in a corner reading books all the time because I needed to keep my brain occupied yeah so like yeah my mom tells cute stories about how I would like go to friends birthday parties and then just not participate because I was in the corner reading a cool book I found one of my first party experiences and this is embarrassing to recount so it should be good for Content um one of my first like going to a middle school high school party um I fixed the host's computer and then spent most of the party playing mist just like off by myself playing yeah because it's puzzles and your brain likes puzzles my brain loves puzzles and it also loves socializing but it didn't realize that's what I was there for yeah I have uh I have 500 plus versions of hey this is cardboard socializing in Puzzles yeah so Still Still Still undiagnosed you can't pin anything on me but yeah know I think we both started as book nerds um I got into a habit pretty young of literally getting the biggest books I could find from the library like that's how I ended up reading most of the Wheel of Time series was just like the I grabbed everyone that was out at the time that I started reading because they were the thickest books I could find and that meant they would last a while right before I had a chance to get back to the stetler Public Library yeah that's interesting because i' like as a young reader I didn't read a lot of like traditional fantasy and Stu like I read The Chronicles of Narnia um I read something called the Pilgrim's Progress which if you grew up in a Christian home you probably know what that is and no one else does uh I've never heard of it is it good uh it's fine it's um fantasy the Bible kind of right okay so yeah yeah again that yeah I actually I read a lot of um just a a weird amount of like humor stuff and like cartoons or not cartoons are Comics um and then it wasn't until I hit like junior high high school and I read a black Library novel and that just like sent me down a path um favorite one of my favorite stories from my youth um so I was grabbing those Wheel of Time Books and chewing through them and I think I was on the fourth one when I went to the library like my school library um I wasn't able to find a copy of it at the the public library so I went to the elementary school library to be like hey can I borrow this book and the uh the librarian said something to the tune of I'm sorry that's beyond your reading level oh and you took that as a challenge no I took it to my mom and my mom threw down oh good yeah I went back home and I was pretty dejected because I was really hoping to get a hold of that book and uh my mom saw that I was feeling pretty down and she was like hey what's wrong and I was like a lady at the library said that my book is beyond my reading level and she was like get in the car so she like drove back to the library and tore that lady a fucking strip but good for her I got access to the high school library after that actually Yay yeah they didn't have the book either I'm trying to think of like any sort of serious reading I was doing at that age and so much of my time was spent like on computers which is weird one well yeah like I I read stuff all the time no you know what it was for me it was a this is don't ask how or why it was a lot of reader digest stuff oh yeah um the reason that I spent way more time in the bathroom than I should have my mom assumed I was masturbating but no I was just reading bries um we used to go back to Ontario every summer and there was a little cabin that we would stay at near my uh Mother's parents place I don't know why I said it like that anyways um I've never once called her mother let alone your grandparents my mother's parents yeah yeah yeah you know my grandparents on my mom's side whatever I'm not weird um and this little cottage just had like nothing like yeah no actual TV service no cable nothing thing it was like a block from the beach but like there would be times of day I'm just like I don't want to be outside like it's hot and whatever and they had those like big bound leather Readers Digest Collections and I was just oh yeah yeah that stuff and like I read a lot of like well way too much um how do I describe this technical like military documents oh oh dude my pouring over the user manual like the the instruction manual for the space shuttle yeah that a year a year of my life I spent memorizing the layouts for all of those panels as though I was ever going to go to space being a person who doesn't like to run very much I I knew far too much about um the second world war Eastern Front MH like specifically um the Battle of Stalingrad um which for whatever reason that fight that Siege fascinated me for years like how how the Russians were able to to completely stall the German advance and go on this like protracted Urban Warfare kind of knock down drag thing that turned into like everything sucks and we're eating our horses and then eventually like the fact that they got stalled there sucked so many resources out of the rest of the fight that it actually turned the tide of the war and then I wasting is thats what we're getting out is that we're a couple of fucking nerds like we we are really dorky um and we really like to to read books so yeah books took up a lot of it video games took up a lot of it and then movies but there are some other things that they make out of D and D yeah as much as I don't like to think about them there are other things um have you read the IDW comic series no uh have I read anything comicy I don't think so like I've read other people's like clearly D and D inspired like web comics but right yeah yeah that's the close I get the I'm pretty sure it was IDW they put out hard cover books that were formatted in the same way as manuals okay um during the like early fourth edition days oh yeah they were better than they had any right to be right because like and I think IDW out of all of the comic companies out there they're the ones that I feel do the best job of adapting other people's stuff to Comics right like their teenage M ninja turtles run Head and Shoulders above everybody else who was doing Turtles content since the Mirage days yeah right uh Sonic the Hedgehog fucking Sonic the Hedgehog I do not count myself among the Sonic fandom good the the last Sonic game I played until last year was Sonic the Hedgehog 2 okay yeah in the 1990s yeah I think that's about right this past year I picked up uh who killed Sonic the Hedgehog which was their April fools game oh okay like they did a uh a pointand click um mystery game where you were playing as uh tals trying to figure out who killed Sonic on a train right and it was great um think of anything else that idw's done that I read a lot of like Transformers oh no did not do that oh you should cuz their Transformers run is crazy good I bad I don't want to read Comics like I want to read graphic novels that's what I want to read oh okay um their their Transformers run was so so good and like brought a lot of interesting character depth to the Transformers that like obviously they're missing because they're just a toy line yeah um and I I found the same thing to be true with like the Sonic books right like the the sonic books that they put out um actually made me give a shit about stupid Sonic the Hedgehog furry characters sorry to all three of our furry fandom um because like normally I just don't I don't I don't care about Sonic at all but those books I read them with my son and yeah they were great yeah yeah the something about Transformers has just always bounced off me so maybe I don't know if I find a good like graphic novel compilation or whatever I'll pick it up something about Transformers has always made me really want to like Transformers more than I do right right like I was a Thundercats kid okay in in that era right so like Thundercats right up until Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and then I was a TMNT kid all the way with like a real strong leaning towards Ghostbusters right but like I never got to pick those SS oh yeah you were you were too busy being indoctrinated or whatever uh living in the middle of nowhere mostly oh okay yeah yeah where did you grow up not that we want to put that on the podcast but like said show me a DM because I don't even remember the name of the town you grew up in oh no like I up like just outside of Edmonton um oh right okay yeah but I I was on like an acreage like out in the you know oh okay sticks um Edmonton has gotten a lot closer to the house that I grew up in that's for sure but uh that's fair because like I grew up the first eight years of my life I spent in Calgary right and so like it was really easy for me in grades like one and two to find nerd people to glomp onto yeah and then in grade three we moved to the thriving Metropolis of Stettler Alberta and everything that I liked was the least cool thing when I got to stetler so like I stopped being allowed to like cool stuff without facing consequences so I just faced the consequences um but yeah up until like grade three I was a giant dork yeah and that's the thing my my dork like festered and developed in weird ways until I was like exposed to General nerd culture in like high school right I was talking about Transformers though like Transformers G1 Transformers like the the first Transformers cartoons um I would watch them because they were on and I wanted to like them but there was something about them that just like never really hit me right yeah and I have watched every Michael Bay Transformer movie like every one of them and I still want to like them but they're Michael Bay movies and I have a really hard time with it um yeah and then yeah those IDW Comics that's the first time that I found myself like really deeply engaged in the Transformers thing yeah but I think that has a lot more to do with like idw's handling of character than anything fair off so anyways made some D and D Comics apparently they made a bunch of them into the fifth edition apparently too I see that they published them for several years um they did I don't think that the fifth edition ones are as strong um the fourth edition ones had like a a really tight group of like witty characters who bounced off of each other really well yeah um and then that kind of shifted like the the group that they were following changed into fifth edition and I did not like that crew as much so I didn't really follow past that but yeah those those fourth edition books I bought all three of the hard covers they're gorgeous the art in them is like crazy good as it should be because it's like a d andd product yeah yeah like the writing the writing was the thing that I was the most concerned about going into it and I shouldn't have been it was absolutely Pitch Perfect yeah and actually now that I'm thinking about it it reminded me a lot of the movie oh okay well that's good because the movie was competent yeah yeah like the writing was pretty solid right like it was a a tight-knit personal little thing right like you were telling a few personal stories but you weren't like you were also dealing with like the the saving the world nonsense that you kind of have to for a DND D thing yeah that was really solid and then uh go ahead oh I was going to say like you know it's since we're talking about D andd inspired comics and stuff like that right now I mean like I I did read a lot of um the uh we'll call them just the binwin bronze bottom Adventures that Scott Curts was writing for a long time um I don't know exactly what's going on with it now I think he he put the whole thing on sort of a big pause while he did this like Kickstarter to put out books about it but that whole crew I read a bunch of their stuff for a long time I still read there's a a guy who makes something called the weekly role and posts a lot of it to Reddit that's all very D and D inspired um yeah well then you've got like the the Dork Towers like the the classics order of the stick Rich BR work um is this still going I honestly don't know I probably should have done any amount of research before we started this um right but yeah the last I heard Rich was having some health issues and I unfortunately haven't kept up since then but well we wish him the best but do yeah uh his work was great um I really enjoyed order this and actually I feel like one of the biggest things that we lost when Dragon magazine stopped being like a published thing yeah was like a platform for some of those creators to make stuff cuz like sometimes dungeon would throw out a really bad comic yeah but like it was something that a fan had made and it was vaguely the thing that we were looking at like it was vaguely DND based and it was kind of a joke and so they threw it in there right and if it caught then they would like do it again and if it didn't then they wouldn't right so okay it it created a platform that like um I don't think order of the stick would be nearly as big as it is without dungeon magazine or Dragon magazine or dork Tower I don't think dork Tower would be nearly the thing that it became without that magazine yeah for sure um yeah table Titans that's what it was table Titans I don't think I've ever read any table Titans have you read Scott Kurt's stuff very little yeah well it's you know his Vibe but D and D crew and you know also it's it's not just like in Universe stuff it's also about the people playing those characters so um I think it's worth uh worth giving a look uh they've got four books worth of content is what they're calling it that's how they're structuring the seasons and uh this year they've got a book series coming out for middle grade readers uh sort of aimed at it's the same group of people but in the more kid-friendly City before honor among Thieves came out yeah I honestly thought that that would be the best way to handle a DND movie yeah would be to like focus on both the characters and the story that's happening with them and also the players and a story that's happening with them right and honor among Thieves has proven me wrong right and I'm pretty glad that they didn't go in that direction to be honest because it it feels cheesy right and I don't think there's any way to like get around that cheese yeah unless you're able to make both story lines like really emotionally resonant I think it would be very difficult to get through that cheese that actually leads me to like okay this conversation has been pretty disjointed and we've gone a lot of like different places but like that's us that's us uh what do you think makes like a good adaptation versus a bad one what what makes an adaptation not just of like D and D necessarily but like what makes a good adaptation versus a bad one that's a good question um golly I'll know it when I see it um okay um I think about adaptation Winks at the audience too much okay um we both know what you're doing here right you don't have to be like ah ah remember this H like I think that and I know I'm like anti- Nostalgia so um that's maybe just a personal thing but you asked me the question so I'm going to answer it um I think a so when we say like adaptation are we talking like something that is DND D like but like has the serial numbers filed off or we talking about like putting D and into things I would consider something that was D and D but had the serial numbers filed off more in the homage range of things like I think an adaptation and I'm not limiting this to just D and D stuff but like um making a TV series out of a book series is an adaptation okay um making a movie out of D and D is an adaptation right um creating balder's gate is an adaptation because it's just like taking the idea of the thing and making a new thing out of it in a different media right okay so then I guess for me a big part of it is I want the project to um take itself seriously like I I want it to believe the construct that it's creating um right and I and then if you're doing something like and that's if if you're adapting like D and D as a game into content I think also then if you're adapting like DND d as a um sorry when I say D and D as a game I mean D and D like within the game but then there's also like the the bird's eye view of like D and D as a product and as a game and in the culture and for me any time of any adaptation I see that speaks to something I care about I it matters a lot to me that they don't get any details wrong if that makes sense like um okay so people really liked the South Park World of Warcraft episode did they they did I don't know if you noticed but people I'm gonna take your word on that because I one didn't see it and two don't care about World of Warcraft I care about World of Warcraft I saw the episode and people were like oh my God they're talking about us in pop culture we're relevant whatever and all I could and this is probably just me being undiagnosed me uh is I I couldn't watch the show without being like is not how fucking World of Warcraft works right right like I if I if you guys want to like put the thing in the the game and have people or put the put the thing in your adaptation and have people like playing it or doing it like you have to do it correctly right and I think most of that comes down to like someone on the project actually like enjoying the thing and caring about it and not just stapling it in there like uh so many times you see D and D put into like TV shows or um you know like weird little movie clips and stuff like that where like they're just trying to establish it people are nerds and like they're they're fucking doing it wrong you know okay so you rolled it five on initiative so you get to move five spaces yeah yeah yeah oh my Barian is going to my Barbarian is going to cast his rage spell I'm like that's not what I fucking do yeah I'm actually yeah surprising no one um I'm going to take a bit of a different direction than okay cuz I I don't care about the details as much as I care about the soul of the thing or like I I want them to catch the flavor more than the niggly little details okay right so like I I think where the honor among Thieves movie works but Dungeons and Dragons the movie did not okay is that Dungeons and Dragons the movie had a very different idea of what the soul of Dungeons and Dragons is right it was taking itself too seriously like it wasn't just that they were taking the the subject matter seriously they were taking the movie too seriously and they were not really embracing the inherent goofiness that comes from the narrative form that is Dungeons and Dragons okay um and so like if honor among Thieves got things wrong and it did right I was more willing to forgive those because the soul of the thing was still intact right like the fact that a druid up until the movie came out can't turn into an owl bear with their wild right right right part of me was like that sort of a weird thing to miss and the other part was like house rules I'll allow it right yeah so for me yeah like having having all of those details right matters less to me than making sure that it feels like the thing that you're adapting that's also the one of the big problems that I have with the Wheel of Time tv adaptation right is that it doesn't have the same feel as the books it has like a late night CW Series twist yeah on the books and it just it doesn't feel as Grand as it should yeah right like I would look at something like um Game of Thrones has exactly the right tone in the first four seasons right like it's exactly the thing it changes a bunch of stuff from the series right not a one for one and a bunch of that stuff is like hugely plot impacting yeah right the the fact that like um Lady Gray or whatever they were calling Caitlyn um appearance yeah right but like she's a huge part of the books and she's just gone yeah in the the show right like so that that that's big change but they got that Soul so right that you kind of forgive it right yeah and I I feel like that's the the biggest thing that a good adaptation has that a bad adaptation doesn't okay I it's funny though too because like you're talking about adapting um works of art that don't have mechanical rules right you know um I mean that's that's so unique to DND D in so many ways though yes but it's not unique to like things being adapted from Hobbies like you know look at um like Halo Halo is a good example of the thing that you're talking about right right Halo Magic the Gathering Warhammer to a certain extent like obviously they file the serial numbers off but every time they adapt one of those things they just do some stupid thing that's like half ass you know like annoys me the big one that I'm remembering from Halo I only got two episodes into Halo um but the fact that he took his helmet off the fact that Master Chief took his helmet off in the second episode yeah I barely play Halo like I I have maybe a grand total of five hours of Halo under me yeah but that annoyed me so much that I had to turn it off yeah but that wasn't just because of the mechanics of the thing that was also just because like you you have clearly lost the soul of this thing like this actor thinks that it is more important that we see his face than well that's that's not the actor that is the studios that is them saying we need to bank on this guys so make sure the audience knows who is he should have been prettier then um he he was fine I guess but why you so mean I'm I'm sorry if you're listening to this you're you're a very attractive man but not attractive enough to take the helmet off if you're playing Master Chief bro you're going to ruin my chance to play some sort of Covenant I want to be one of those big brutes are are you telling me that if they offered you that job you would take it yeah all right are are you out of your mind I'd probably pass why because it's so bad I know it's bad but you get a chance to get paid real money to go pretend to be an alien on TV like as part of you know one of the biggest game franchises of all time who cares if it's bad you have a story forever I guess yeah see as soon as you said you have a story forever I was more on board getting paid to be an ex like I know what ex is get paid no I listen I I'm saying like they it doesn't cost you anything to do this like they they are Mak my dignity oh dignity is overrated also I'm calling BS like on just the idea that you have too much dignity to go and like be on TV for fun I wouldn't even audition for that role is the thing like they would have to come to me with it yeah I'm not saying like audition I'm saying someone was like you know I know a guy who looks exactly like the flood whatever you know I don't know if that's a compliment or not but like I said I've only got about 5 hours of Halo under me yeah well um it's not the best compliment I could give you I'll say that anyways anyways um so one of the things that we did want to talk about and I have a feeling that this is going to take up a a fair chunk of our time uhuh is that you and I I think are both of the opinion that actual play content is an adaptation an homage correct um I have I have listened to recordings of people playing actual DND MH and it is it's awful it's so boring it's just like just listen to someone flipping the pages in their rulebook for a half an hour that's that's actual DND like there's so much about DN that like people don't realize it's actually just like really boring because their brain deletes that part of the day right like yeah I played D and D for six hours last Sunday I actually played D and D for two hours spent an hour and a half dicking around and making fart jokes with my friends and two hours correcting someone's rules error because I used a spell I'd never used before right like you you and I play D and D very differently um I'm just say the general tabletop experience doesn't really I think there's something to be said for having a paid full-time DM whose whole job is to like essentially write scenes that have fill in the blank moments right where you get to role play for a team of professional actors right I have played in games that were more similar to D20 than a lot I think than a lot of like the standard D and D experience and I think part of that is like I I have a bit of a background as like a performer and I have a fairly broad group of people that I can draw from to like put my tables together yep and so you know you you gravitate towards the people that are going to enhance your table and don't necessarily bring in the people who won't right and so like you you and I playing off of one another have had a lot of moments that would be similar to things that you would see in D20 sure but like I think it's not the majority yeah and I'm saying as a Counterpoint to that there was all of the times and nights where like we just weren't clicking or didn't feel it or like we were trying to Spotlight a character who just doesn't have the same like improv chops that do and the same familiarity of bouncing back and forth off of each other and things grind to a halt where you have to watch them think through this sentence they're about to say yeah and like I I also get where like my play style can be occasionally very intimidating right and so like people will clam up on that like that there was one player at our table not going to name names but there was one player at our table where I like tried to engage in an emotionally charged scene and like I was starting to raise my voice in character right and I watched fear appear in their eyes like actual fear of me yeah and then they stopped talking and we had to take a break so that is definitely something and I I have a feeling that there's more of that that happens in those shows than we see maybe I I don't I don't know I it's okay I think it might be important to like draw a distinction between something like D20 and something like critical role I think they are very different flavors of show with different levels of character and player influence into how they go speaking just as someone who is casually watched stuff um it feels like D20 is a lot more collaborative in the overall story arc and the freedom that characters are given to do unexpected things and CR feels a lot more like one person has essentially written the rough outline of a story they want to tell and then taken scenes and had very specific objectives in those scenes and then let people like speak in character according to I don't want to say a script but like a yeah a guideline right okay um it just it feels a little too like well I don't know why I'm hesitating to just like talk shit about this guy directly but it feels like you're going to be working with him someday and you don't want to like burn that bridge now but okay fine you know what I'm just going to say it and because I don't want to work with him I don't want to I want to work with the D20 guys uh okay it feels like CR is like Matt Mercer just sort of masturbating on camera for two hours um and then everyone else gets to watch and comment on how good he is at masturbating like okay once once in a while there will be a clip that Circle circles on YouTube where a character or person says something insanely funny um and it's great but the funny thing only happened within the context of like the conversation that Matt wanted to have with them in the first place right it's just I I don't have as much experience with critical role as I do with some of the others like um I listen to currently worlds without number and previously NAD pod and previously Dungeons and daddies on my way yeah so like um I I bus everywhere and that is a great opportunity for me to just like zone out and listen to a podcast for a half hour sure and my my big thing with critical role I I keep bouncing off of it um and I think maybe it's just because I'm a bit of a completionist in that I want to start the story at the the beginning and I don't think the beginning is where critical role is the strongest right but I have a really hard time suffering through the thousands of hours of content that they've created to get to the good stuff and so my my interactions with critical role are pretty surface level yeah um but a lot of what I see with that is that there there's less editing than D20 like the I think the thing that really set Dimension 20 apart early and the thing that like catapulted it to the Forefront of actual play stuff is just how incredibly slick it is right right like the characters are pretty consistently funny the like scenarios that they're put into are sufficiently weird to capture the imagination and kind of hold it until you get into a place where you actually care about the characters the editing is so tight like I I don't think that I can overstate how important the editing is to making Dimension 20 work yeah but it really really is their editors are a master class in making sure that things are hitting the way that they should and like that goes for their whole fucking crew right like the sound editors the video editors the like camera people everybody who is working together to put that show together are doing a fantastic job of putting a show together hear that showes yeah um but it is a show yeah right and I recognize that as a show it has very different goals and aims than a normal game of D and and the big one is me right because when I'm playing DND I don't have an audience right the audience is just the other players around the table the the DM or if I am the DM my players yeah right nobody else is paying attention to me doing this yeah and so there's a need to clarify there's a need to streamline and provide additional Focus right in those shows that isn't there at a normal table Yeah well and I just feel like so much of that comes down to like prep time and like yeah they're getting paid if if I was getting paid full-time to just think about five hours of gameplay once a week like yeah I I could probably produce something close to that level um you know you have the level of control and the ability to like like you talk about flow charts like I would have every contingency planned for so that there wasn't actually improvisation on my part right I'd be I'd be like the chess robot of DMS well and I think like I I kind of want to take a step back from that a little bit because I do think that the production schedule that they're under is intense and like I know that uh for Brennan at least there is a lot of balls that guy has up in the air right like he he isn't just coming up with the like content that his players are going to be playing through he's also like the executive producer of that show right right and so he's got like all of those responsibilities that he needs to maintain plus he's coordinating with the art team plus he's coordinating with like the the director right like there's so many things that he has to do and my understanding is that they um film them on a pretty tight schedule right so it isn't like coming up with like five hours of stuff for the week it's coming up with like 12 hours of stuff for three days right and I I definitely understand that but I don't think the I think the ratio still works out you know um yeah I mean you've got a lot of like a fair bit of time between sessions like between your games that you can like plan things out I guess and shoots but yeah um yeah get getting paid for it is definitely a big we should just become rules as written guys oh we gotta stop dancing around all right this dude and just take one full episode to air our grievances never talk about him again I kind of like that he's like this weird Spectre in our podcast like if you go back and listen to our podcast there's a few times this guy just gets mentioned and the Never referenced again yeah yeah yeah he's the The Phantom of the podcast which is exactly what I'm about to do now so um yeah so like I I do believe that out of all of the content that is an adaptation of Dungeons and Dragons the actual play stuff comes the closest to being actually DN D yeah yeah um like it it's still not a real DND experience I don't think but like if you want to get an idea of what it's like to play at a table a very very good table a table that will set expectations far beyond what you should have for the DM that you're playing with um you know iame I was going to say something along that line because and not specifically that like oh the DM's not going to be as good and your personal game the other players are going to just be far more unpredictable and shitty and chaotic in whatever game you find yourself in than what these people are producing quiet yes so quiet like just definitely quiet interactions between player characters may take a lot more effort to get started yeah I was going to say they just won't happen but yeah I guess we could be that way about it yeah um but yeah it is it isn't just like the the expectations for the DM I guess it is also setting like some some strange ideas about how interactive the game is going to be and like how responsive everybody's going to be and how funny everyone is going to be because like these are just your friends they're as funny as your friends are going to be we we know that if we're sitting down at a table with Josh he's going to be gut busting hilarious the entire time and if we're sitting down at a table with Christopher he is going to Yammer your ear off about some philosophical nonsense that nobody fucking cares about like that's just the way it works and to take the expectations that you're seeing from those products and applying them to a home game doesn't really make a lot of sense but I think that like it's the closest right okay yeah yeah well yeah like aside from like just actually having someone play D and D on TV like yeah which they shouldn't do because it would be dreadfully boring no and you can even see like in stranger things with the parts where they try to put in like real D and D initially are just like what are these dorks doing and I guess maybe that was the intent is that they were just trying to establish like these are dorks and they're doing dork stuff um it doesn't make me feel good as like a fellow dork but but you're not supposed to you're supposed to understand that these people are to be reviled for their basement dwelling that's mean but yeah that is also that is also just how they view US I mean we talked about the problems with you know the the adaptations of that you see on on like big bang and whatever so MH yeah they're definitely laughing at you not with you yeah Community put together one of the best DND episodes of a thing and Big Bang Theory can go straight to hell no I I think I'm coming around to your idea that like the the strength of the adaptation is in the heart and the the intention behind it you can get details wrong if people can tell that you love the thing that you're trying to do yeah and and I think that's true for those two franchises right like the the folks on The Big Bang Theory whenever they were mentioning D and D stuff it was like haha look at the dorks yeah where the folks who were doing the community episode clearly understood what playing at a D and D table was actually like yeah down to being like incredibly uncomfortable while a character seduced the lass at the Stables that gave me some flashbacks to a lot of like actual scenarios that I had been in yep no no Erp at this table thanks um all right and then we've got about 10 minutes left and I kind of wanted to touch on one of my least favorite I don't even want to call it an homage because it's more of a insult right to gaming and that's the people who read Reddit posts about D and D on YouTube for I okay all right let's can we just talk about like YouTube and Tik Tok Reddit content as a whole sorry YouTube and Tik Tok DND content as a whole oh yeah sure um so I I am not I'm not fully talked I'm not a uh a Tik toist I don't participate in Chinese spyware I uh I really it's it's bounced completely off me but I'm actually surprised because it's like hardwired into my brain yeah well and I think that's part of the problem is I've seen it infect friends of mine and now I'm like oh no I must avoid um no I do I have to avoid it at all costs because as soon as I'm in it I'm done for the day and it the thing is it bleeds into other avenues and so they they'll get me with the reposts on Instagram and stuff once in a while but like the there's so much low effort DND content out there that just I don't know why but it seems like people are able to just Farm entire careers off of like throwing a sheet over their heads and making a joke about Wizards dying to 1 D4 emotional damage like while using a like vaguely insulting Chinese accent yeah yeah and so then like the the outgrowth of that has been I mean I don't know if we want to like mention which guy in particular that really infuriates us but I'm not going to say his name but like he's incredibly pretty and has a nice voice okay I W to just he is pretty but at the same time not attractive right does that make sense yep yeah so yeah he's got a half decent voice and he has figured out that or or the algorithm has taught him that he can just read someone else else's like tweet or tumblr post or Reddit post um and then do a really bad fake laugh I don't think it's bad I think it's actually really convincing uh like I don't want to give the guy props where they are not due cuz like he's an art criminal can you please stop like just he's the worst person but I do think the laugh is very convincing stop complimenting him um I think he should go to jail uh for art theft um and he's the worst example of it but he's not the only example there's a lot of people out there now who can just it's okay there used to be like a phrase to refer to like Attractive people or whatever is that like i' i' watch i' listen to them read the phone book or whatever and they've like actually found a way to make that a career except that this time the phone book is internet DND D posts and it's like specific to D and too it seems to be like one of the weird things that I find about it is that like if you're going to find a weird Reddit post that somebody is reading for content right for a lot of the subs that you're looking at it's going to be like an AI voice yeah like the stuff about how humans or space works right like um all of that has like a weird AI voice as somebody is doing like a Minecraft parkour and we get to hear about how awesome humans are at doing space War right right but like for some reason in the D and sphere it's always a person reading it out and then laughing at the end of it as if it is the most aborus funny thing they've ever seen yeah and like it it gets a sharp puff of air out of my nose right like there's never been a time where I've read one of those things and actually like gut laughed about it and so I mean you're you're generous with your puff cuz I've not once like cracked a smile or raised an eyebrow out of one of those posts I mean the hardest part is that I've already read them right yeah it's really rare that they're like throwing something at me that I haven't already seen especially I already speed Reddit two days ago yeah like like the guy that we're talking about seems to like sort by top of all time yes yes yes that's his crime that his crime is not that he's doing this his crime is that he's competing these because we've already heard them in our own heads two weeks ago yeah well I I think his crime is that he's making a lot of money off of posting YouTube shorts daily where his only performance is his laugh right right and again like you want me to stop complimenting him but like the performance of the laugh is solid it's not though I disagree all of the framing for it is crime and it hurts my feelings in a deep and personal way I I wouldn't say that like all DND content on YouTube or Tik Tok is bad um like there are a few creators that I've seen that are genuinely trying to create instructive and informative content um but then there's a lot of it that's just like am attractive girl who does makeup costume change I can't remember her name but I know who you're talking about no but like that there's one in particular actually that I find very difficult to engage with so I don't but their entire content is like creating outrage about watsi okay where outrage does not need to be had right right like it's it's a weird misinterpretation of something that watsi has said or done and then they'll go on like a hourong rant about that thing right and then the next week they have another hourlong rant about whatever News Post watsy posted since then right no my my least favorite one is there is a fellow whose whole career is hey why don't you try this alternative rule in your home game it's way better than the actual rules and then without fail it is the most cripplingly stupid thing you've heard in your life brutal yeah because there is there is one guy that I can think of that I I genuinely appreciate um okay he does YouTube voice okay so like as soon as he as soon as his face shows up in my head I can hear Hey guys are you ready to do some YouTube voice um is this the guy with a vaguely English accent and a beard sure is and his his content is usually like here's some races or Feats or items that you may not have considered for your game or stuff that like is a little bit overpowered in certain combinations and like it's rarely super accurate but yeah uh that's the man I'm thinking of and I hate him oh okay because I I hate the reading a Reddit thread guy significantly more can we put the two of them just in a cage let them fucking fight it out that would be hilar or what we could do is put them both in a room with two different editions of DnD and see if they make a collab yeah and then make money off of that I guess if they're going to steal art I want to steal their art oh I just want them to inflict Grievous bodily but like it's it's the lowest effort version of taking a thing and converting it to another medium yeah like this is this is not a podcast that is adapting DND that's not a thing that we're doing we are talking about DN yep talking around DND yeah and like all of the other various games and things that we we talk about but like even if we were going to make make a podcast that adapted DND I think we would do it in a very different direction yeah yeah um one thing I've talked to you a little bit about that I'd like to kind of consider is like audio Source books right right like just like here here is some people talking about a setting that doesn't exist yeah and like all of the cool things that you would be able to find there or whatever so like that that would maybe be the direction that I would go in because it is something that's actually creative and yeah adds something to the discourse instead of taking something from the discourse and repeating it with my laugh at the end right it's it's beyond transformative it is additive yeah and I wouldn't even consider like reading a Reddit thread to be transformative well legally it is for the purposes of not getting thrown off of YouTube yeah but like oh God they're so bad yeah and there's a lot of them there's a lot of them the movie only made it worse yeah hey thanks for making it all the way through this episode of no ploton lore if you're looking for more you can always find us at no ploton lore.com and at all the very best podcast platforms if you like what you heard today please share rate and review the show to feed my NeverEnding need for attention and validation