The Player Choice Tale

This week we start with a Minotaur stepping on the gas and it gets weirder from there. We talk about how you can plan for players being unpredictable and how you can recover from them doing something completely unexpected.

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The Expanding Narrative Tale

Ben and Rissa talk about bringing meaning to your scenes and items. From making the blaster your gambler is carrying mean something extra to the framing of a dead body at the start of an adventure. We have ideas and tips for bringing your players into being more descriptive and making those descriptions matter.

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The Driven Tale

Ben and Rissa talk about the differences in approach that character driven and plot driven campaigns can take and are generated for your players.

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The Traditional Tale

We start talking about the different sorts of force traditions there are from the Gand Findsmen to the Dathomiri Witches and try to come up with ways to make it matter in your game.

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The Character Finding Tale

We talk about finding the stories that specializations want to tell and learning to find the ones that are there and not always forcing our own onto the career and specializations.

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The Cheese Wheel Tale

Ben, Rissa, and Leslie were talking about the absolute cheese that is in Star Wars and related products, how it’s baked into the essence of it, and discuss many ways to add it in and vectors to add some tension breaking levity to your adventures

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The Player Mayhem Tale

We talk about the players who shoot first and may remember to ask questions after they’ve looted the bodies. We get ideas on how to make the experience broader with them and how to try and how to make their actions matter to the stories you’re telling.

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The Investigation Tale

Ben is getting ready to run Mask of the Pirate Queen, Rissa runs a bunch of investigation and mysteries for her players. Rissa gives insights from her many adventures and what has worked and what hasn’t.

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The One Shot Tale

This week we’re excited to welcome James D’amato from the One Shot Network to talk about improvisation and some strategies to make it easier at the game table when players throw you for a loop.

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The Captured Character Tale

A scenario that’s always hard to setup is getting player characters captured. We talk about how to make it more intuitive for the characters to be captured, how to deal with a near total party kill, and how to make it so the players get the idea to be captured ‘all on their own’

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The Thisspiasian Tale

We started to talk about playing different species for your games and how to make it matter for your players. From how NPCs interact to how to set expectations at the table

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The Closing Tale

Episode 200, you’d think we’d talk about something profound. We talk about one of the most profound things you can actually do for your campaign. How to end it. Three hosts talk about the different kinds of endings we’ve seen and give some advice for GMs on how to make it satisfying.

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The Challenging Player Tale

The topic of difficult players came up in discussion in the Tales twitter DMs. This brought up the different sorts of ways players and GMs can not see eye to eye on ideas and drew us to this episode topic.

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The Gambler Tale

We were asked about a particular build for a character, it raised a bit of a flag for us and all hosts decided we should talk about specializations that require a bit more work by those around the table.

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The Han Tale

We have  a huge group to talk about Solo: A Star Wars Story and share our perspectives. To a person we liked the movie, but we also are the sort who can look at it and see what could be done better. Continue reading “The Han Tale”

The Difficulty Tale

Communicating difficulty in an encounter is trickier than just giving out a number of dice. The players need to know before hand how to set their expectations. We discuss how and a few things that would normally be missed. Continue reading “The Difficulty Tale”

Into The Character Tale

We talk about how to inhabit a character and create a perspective to separate two characters in a scene. We also touch on ways of acting to make a character unique in your play group as a player Continue reading “Into The Character Tale”

The Module Tale

Ben and Rissa discuss running a module and some of the pitfalls that can emerge from trying to follow too close to the text as written. Continue reading “The Module Tale”

The Steam Setting Tale

We created a steampunk setting in Genesys and look to different ideas that could come from the location we’ve created in Firemouth Outpost.

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The Genesys Vehicle Tale

Ben Rissa and David talk about vehicles in Genesys and how they’re different from Star Wars while trying to remember all the rules for both systems. Continue reading “The Genesys Vehicle Tale”

The Rissa Tale

No, we haven’t gone full Star Trek. We’re bringing on a new host and we’re interviewing her in this episode to give our listeners an idea of her style and some of the things she’s bringing to the table Continue reading “The Rissa Tale”

The Starting Player Tale

Ben and Marcus talk about some of the mechanics involved with starting characters and why somethings are more important than others at low XP amounts.

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The Tale Vs Darkside

Ben has Marcus on to talk about his Force and Destiny podcast he creates with his kids and the lessons that can be learned from there. So much of the advice can be well used for bringing in any new player. Continue reading “The Tale Vs Darkside”