Probably Bad 18: Slender Jesus, D&Daniel and Just Rincewind

(19th August 2020)

THE PODCAST GREMLIN THAT LIVES IN THE BASEMENT

This podcast is supported by patrons great and small, but greatest of all is the triumvirate-Hedwig Mario and Matt. Their generosity keeps me in sandals and hats. Thank you all.

Opening music.

Mod pencil

Hello and welcome to the probably bad podcast a podcast that is definitely bad. I’m pencil.

Paper

I’m paper – today’s probably bad rpg idea is… Scroll through the not an idea tag and use what you find in your next campaign.

MOD PENCIL

This idea is exciting cause you can do it live.

PAPER

Yeah we’re going to do this idea in real tiee so thank you anonymous submitter. The first thing I’m cmongi across that is somewhere even close to an rpg thing is a picture I’ve dubbed slender jesuss which if you can’t get to the picture right now is basically a church in the northwest of england which has I’d guess from having seen it is an 8 foot incredibly skinny crucifix hanging from the ceiling, and it’s terrifying.

MOD PENCIL

It would make a good big bad for the campaign or a good warlock patron. You get all the miracles but stretched out – you raised someone from the dead but they’ve got slinky arms.

PAPER

See I was thinking more of like a combination slender man and jesus – I will cure your leprosy in exchange for your first born, which is just jesus as a witch and I’m into that.

MOD PENCIL

Also a good rpg idea. Also before slenderjesus there’s a fuckton of werehorses, which I feel also counts as a valid warlock-

PAPER

I’ve heard of werehorses.

MOD PENCIL

They may have come up once or twice, which would also make a valid patron. 12 werehorses in a trenchcoat pretending to be a deity

PAPER

Problem is a lot of the tag right now is werehorse based.

MOD PENCIL

Well as you know I’m deeply against werewolves on a fundamental level,But-

PAPER

This list of things I’ve called my partner does seem like an interesting party… Spud, fuckface, admiral lunchtime, simon and flinders bananapants III. That is a classic party. Simon is obviously a new player.

MOD PENCIL

Flinders Bananapants is a bard. Spud is an orc, an orc barbarian.

PAPER

Fuckface is a paladin it’s not their name they’ve just been called that cause of their lawful good attitude.

MOD PENCIL

Admiral lunchtime is a questgiving NPC.

PAPER

Do you have a voice in mind for admiral?

MOD PENCIL

I’m thinking, this might be a niche reference, but the frozen fish food guy, admiral…

PAPER

Birdseye?

MOD PENCIL

Yeah.

PAPER

For those who aren’t british the best description I can give is you take colonel sanders you make his beard a bit longer and put him in the british navy..

MOD PENCIL

And he sells fish.

PAPER

Yes the fish are important.

MOD PENCIL

The admiral shows up and tells your party go collect famous fish I guess?

PAPER

The merfolk are stealing all the fish and he can’t make all his fish fingers.

MOD PENCIL

The twist is you join the merfolk in overthrowing capitalism.

PAPER

And they erect a statue of flinders bananapants III in town.

MOD PENCIL

A sea statue in sea town..

PAPER

What makes a sea statue different cause I’ve seen sea statues and they’re usually made of stone…

MOD PENCIL

As we all know, mermaid society is identical to human society but they put sea in front of everything.

PAPER

So they live in a sea-ciety.

MOD PENCIL

Ey. Podcast cancelled for the fifth time.

PAPER

You can’t cancel the podcast every time I do a bad pun.

MOD PENCIL

Watch me. I’ve been going through the not idea tag which is mostly questions although I did find just welcome to the awful, which I like as just… You’re the GM you’re asked what the campaign is and you slam your fist down and say welcome to the awful and refuse to elaborate.

PAPER

That’s basically what I do at the start of every session I run. Have you considered genetically modified GMs?

MOD PENCIL

I hadn’t but I am now.

PAPER

Special gland that secretes dice. Sorry I disgusted myself.

MOD PENCIL

You can modify it so your teeth are dice so when you want to roll it you can pluck it out and roll it.

PAPER

Sorry I’m just imagining you could have d4s for canines, d6s are molars, but I’m struggling to think what the others would be but maybe the body parts are dice, d20s are eyes, you have d8 nipples.

MOD PENCIL

How do you know I don’t? You could have those wings that flying squirrels have that have the D&D Srd on it.

PAPER

Tattooed on the skin.

MOD PENCIL

Yeah – how many spells do clerics get at 5th level and you shoot your wings out. Also going through the thing you’ll never guess who I stumbled onto…

PAPER

Is it D&Daniel? Who I don’t think has come up on the podcast before.

MOD PENCIL

This is D&Daniel’s debut podcast appearance. For those of you-

PAPER

D&Daniel is basically a figure that goes around licking D&D players.

MOD PENCIL

If you want your D&D game to be official, if you want it included in the final tally of D&D you need to have D&Daniel lick your forehead to officially consecrate your game.

PAPER

Which means all D&D games in 2020 are either invalid or illegal.

MOD PENCIL

We put an update he can now draw a tongue on a photo of you to comply with social distancing rules.

PAPER

That’s good at least, I’m glad we can still have valid games.

MOD PENCIL

He may be a mysterious lick spirit but at least he appreciates the importance of flattening the curve.

PAPER

Nick wishes to inform us D&Daniel looks like the Onceler, and that’s a bad idea of a different kind.

MOD PENCIL

I was thinking that guy from 30Rock, leap day george or whatever.

PAPER

William.

MOD PENCIL

That’s the one. Yeah so there you go Admiral Lunchtime sends your characters to fight D&Daniel with the patronage of slenderjesus.

PAPER

Also you’re all werehorses.

MOD PENCIL

Also you’re all werehorses. Clipclop, bitch.

PAPER

It’s a plan B, if you need to subscribe to our patreon to get access to our werehorse content.

MOD PENCIL

If you like that bad idea and want more, you can pay us money.

PAPER

Or if you just feel like going to patreon.com/probablybadrpgideas. So, questions, we have those.

Question music.

MOD PENCIL

Yes, our first question comes from agent matt six… Any tips for a first time GM?

PAPER

Acknowledge you’re not going to know what you’re doing and make sure your players know that as well.

MOD PENCIL

If I were going to give advice to first time GMs is don’t overplan, because your players are going to ruin your plans what I tend to do is have a basic idea of a plot and a few ideas for a session, working on the assumption that I don’t know where the next session is going to be, and having fun is more important than knowing the rules to the letter it’s better to have a good story than to have a 100% understanding of all the rules. Especially in a game like D&D or World of Darkness where there are a lot of rules.

PAPER

Also it’s not going to feel as cool in the moment looking back on it cause you’re going to focus on making it happen- I’m not saying it’s not going to be fun if it’s not fun you need to look at that, but it’s not the same as being a player in any way. And make sure you’re blessed by D&Daniel.

MOD PENCIL

It’s also very important that you send a letter to D&Daniel so he can lick it and send it back. In terms of bad advice, I think follow our blog I feel like we’ve done a lot of the bad DM advice.

PAPER

I feel like we’re creeping towards giving good advice on here, the bad advice comes out as we think of it – that’s why the queue goes to october.

MOD PENCIL

This is the Dr Jekyll of probablybadrpgideas is this podcast.

PAPER

Yeah, that makes sense.

MOD PENCIL

You got some actual good advice, bet you didn’t see that coming did you?

Question music

PAPER

Goblin wants to know do you prefer romance between PCs or PCs and NPCs?

MOD PENCIL

I think in both these cases it depends a lot on who the PCs and GM are, like if I was rolelplaying with my mum I wouldn’t want to do romance with the two PCs even if in universe these two PCs were well suited to each other.

PAPER

It is very context dependent, cause I would feel weird with my PC flirt with another PC if I was in a campaign with my spouse, but if I was running a campaign they were in I’d feel ok with having an NPC flirting with them cause as a GM you’re less attached to your characters if that makes sense?

MOD PENCIL

Yeah cause obviously as a player character you are playing your character for a whole campaign, but as a GM you’re not. I prefer between PC and NPCs because that’s harder for the line between in game and out of game flirting to blur, if that makes sense?

PAPER

And if you are going to have characters flirt, do clear it with the other players or the DM if it’s an NPC, make sure everyone’s comfortable and consenting. It’s pretend but you wouldn’t randomly stick porn on in front of someone.

MOD PENCIL

Yeah if you’re going to do a romanticc relationship obviously clear that.

PAPER

Could be the character isn’t interested, but the player’s ok with roleplaying the rejection. It’s complicated.

MOD PENCIL

The biggest campaign I’ve been in did have one PC have a crush on another PC, and that became an important plot point thing…

PAPER

Was that-

MOD PENCIL

Sorry?

PAPER

I know in a campaign I was running your character and another were the big OTP of the campaign.

MOD PENCIL

No this was another campaign this was a Dragon Age campaign. A lot of dating in that campaign. But you can do it.

PAPER

Dragon age is just a romance game with fighting.

MOD PENCIL

We captured the spirit of the game. I think all the big couples were GM- I don’t want to say GM player cause that is a very different thing –

PAPER

NPC-PC.

MOD PENCIL

This was our harem rpg game.

PAPER

That’s our probably bad rpg idea.

MOD PENCIL

Yeah run your RPG campaign like a harem anime and date all your players.

PAPER

I’m sure there are some polycules that have fun D&D games.

MOD PENCIL

I’m sure I know one of those. Why are all our ideas turning out good today?

PAPER

I don’t know!

MOD PENCIL

Stab your Gm Idk we’re really losing our spirit here.

PAPER

I think my brain is working better than usual because I will be finishing my dissertation this week by the time this has gone out I will be finishing my dissertation.

MOD PENCIL

Good luck! You the audience can also issue good luck but it will be obsolete.

PAPER

It’ll make me happy though, is my happiness not valuable?

MOD PENCIL

Not under capitalism.

PAPER

That’s true.

Bread and thread plug.

MOD PENCIL

Our final question is from archetypal archivist what’s your favourite class to play badly? Are you fond of the wizard who runs in immediately? The cleric who never heals anyone? The barbarian who thinks spells and ranged attacks are the only way to go? Your loving audience wishes to know.

PAPER

My current character is a paladin in their first fight managed to get in exactly zero hits and do a single heal on themself, but it’s been a fun character so I guess paladin?

MOD PENCIL

Paladin is a good one to play badly cause it’s such a specific archetype that it’s really easy to just – asshole paladin is fun.

PAPER

Bringing back pete!

MOD PENCIL

Ah pete the pathetic paladin.

PAPER

Who was really bad at being evil he got given good powers. And then fell and burned down a hospital.

MOD PENCIL

Unnsuccessfully because the other characters stopped it for some reason. it’s fun playing an evil character who can’t lie. I think my favourite character is blatant rogue. I can disarm traps and open doors but can’t be stealthy about it.

PAPER

I like dumbass wizards, not as in wizard who rushes in immediately, wizard that has two spells cause they got kicked out of wizard scchool.

MOD PENCIL

I like wizard who puts all their spell choices into really useless magic or niche magic; fear not citizen I have learned featherfall 13 times.

PAPER

A wizard good at everything that isn’t magic but has really high dex. I just realised we invented Rincewind. A wizard who is bad at magic but is doing their best.

MOD PENCIL

All ideas lead to discworld. I like the idea of a sorcerer who is born with magic but doesn’t give a shit about it they just learned to fight really good so everyone assumes they’re a fighter but they launch a fireball and say oh yeah I can do that I prefer to punch.

PAPER

I like the idea of a druid who doesn’t like to use wildshape cause it’s gross.

MOD PENCIL

Refuses to use it cause they’re not a furry.

PAPER

Yes!

MOD PENCIL

I’m adding that to the queue.

PAPER

Thing is what we’ve concluded is probably paladin but every class can be played shittily if you think hard enough about it.

MOD PENCIL

Any idea can be a bad idea of you just try.

PAPER

Any idea is a bad idea if you present it to us.

MOD PENCIL

I think that’s all we have time for this week.

PAPER

At least it’s all the questions we have prepared.

MOD PENCIL

All we have this week.

PAPER

If you have a question cause we do always need questions email probablybadpodcast@gmail.com, or message probablybadrpgideas.tumblr.com if you want to support us without using the patreon you can leave us a review. We also have new merch on our redbubble you can now buy things with werehorses on them. Redbubble/people/probablybad to see the designs, one of which I bought myself cause I’m terrible.

MOD PENCIL

Mod paper is doing their part to support mod paper.

PAPER

It’s cyclical, but it works. And now I have a coffee cup. Thanks for listening and-

Both

Remember to have a probably bad day.

Closing music