Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 52 - Regarding Cody's "I'm Quitting Pathfinder 2e Video" and Using Sounds and Visual Aids In Your Game

Episode Date: December 20, 2020

In the cold open, Jeremy responds to the "I'm Quitting Pathfinder 2e" video by Cody at the Youtube channel called "Taking 20" (not affiliated). Chances are you've watched or listened to a live let's play podcast as they used music, sound effects, and visual puzzles during an episode.  What are some tips for doing that in my home game?  Jeremy can help with that!

Before I get started, I wanted to say that this episode is going to be a little longer than 20 minutes, and I apologize for that. I wanted to address a video that was released on YouTube called I'm Quitting Pathfinder 2E by a YouTube channel called Taking20. I want to say a few things about it before I get to the heart of the episode. Declaring a few things up front. Number one, despite our names being similar, I'm not affiliated with Cody from the Taking20 YouTube channel. We happen to be named similarly, and that was just a happy accident. 2. Regarding his video, he states that combat in Pathfinder 2E is built on what he calls the illusion of choice. He says that there are a lot of choices on how to build your character,

but they all trend back towards a limited range of things to do in combat, because there are only a limited number of optimal things to do for each character class. He further states that Pathfinder 2E combat has the same problems as 5E combat, limited options, and given the choice between the two, he'll choose the easier system to play, which is 5E. He uses the example of a druid in his Age of Ashes campaign who wants to change their character because, quote, all they do is wild shape all the time into a dinosaur or dragon and melee.

I will preface this prologue by saying I'm not a fan of Cody. I've watched a number of his videos, and his videos seem more geared towards garnering clicks than educating. There are good nuggets in his videos, but a lot of his material is repetitive and more marketing than meat. But I'm a nobody, and I would encourage anyone listening to this to go watch his videos, listen to what he says, and form your own opinion about his content. I want to say that the problems that he mentioned isn't caused by the 2e system. I've played in one 2e campaign to completion as a fighter, I've GM'd another, and I'm in the middle of the second campaign playing a druid. In combat with both classes, I always had multiple options.

playing a druid. In combat with both classes, I always had multiple options. Even as the fighter whose primary job is to deal damage, I could grapple to make foe flat-footed, I could intimidate to give enemies penalties, I could use an insightful quip to give them a penalty to their will saves which gave the spellcasters a better chance to wreck that bad guy, or I could hit it really fucking hard with a greatsword. Lots of options for a class that's solely built on martial ability. With regard to the druid, you have even more options since you're a spellcaster. In one fight this weekend, I was a support by enlarging the frontline fighter, healed someone who was critted down to single-digit hit points, fireballed a group of low-level baddies,

and wild-shaped into a bear to take down a creature who had gotten to our flanks. The Druid may be the most flexible class in 1st edition or 2nd edition. Now, Cody had his criticisms, but my response would be that the problems you're experiencing aren't with the system. Pathfinder 2nd edition is flexible enough not to require characters to be optimized, and there are a myriad of options with every character class. If you limit players to only optimal choices and optimal builds, they're going to play the same way every time. Optimal means best, which is singular. The problem you're having is either

with the players or the DM. Cody, I would ask you, have you looked at your DM style? Are you running your combats in such a way that the players are forced to a single play style, wild shaping into melee for example? Is the game being run in such a way that the players are forced to a single playstyle, wildshaping into melee, for example? Is the game being run in such a way that the characters that make suboptimal choices are being punished by you or the adventure for doing so? If so, that's on you. If you're trying to be flexible and the player is doing the same thing over and over and over again, then maybe the player needs to be more creative and look for different options in combat.

Flanking, support, whatever. You are the DM and have the power to change anything and everything about the adventure and the world they're playing in. If a player is always wild shaping into a large creature, put them in a narrow hallway for a combat. Force them to use a different tactic. Have them fight a tribe of bad guys that dip their arrows in a special toxin that prevents any spell or ability with a polymorph or transmutation trait. Cody, I think the answer is communication. Give your players the ability to provide feedback about the game in your gaming style. Get creative behind the screen and either A, give your players the ability to succeed with suboptimal characters, or B, put one-trick players into situations where they can't just use that one trick. Respectfully, PF2E is a great system. It doesn't have the flaws you claim it

does. Now, on to the episode. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to episode 52 of the Taking20 podcast, using sounds and visual aids in your game. This week's sponsor, Light Powers and Shockley Electrical Specialists, helping keep your electrical system current. Sounds and visual aids sound like very different topics. I mean, they are different senses of the human body. But the concept is the same. They're items that can augment or enhance your game in some way.

Let's start talking about using sounds. You watch your favorite live play tabletop role-playing stream, and they use music and sound effects to great effect when they're playing, and you'd like to use them too. Before you do, take a moment to think about the types of sounds that could be added to your games. Sounds come in four different categories. Ambiance, two different types of music, and then sound effects. I'm going to list them in my priority order for adding them to my games,

and I'm breaking music up into two sections like I said earlier. 1. Ambient sounds or ambiance. I love using these. It adds atmosphere to the game session. You can describe a corrupted forest the characters are in, the gnarled, twisted trees, the wind gusts that seem to come from a different direction each minute, or you can have the sounds fill the room. Rather than telling the players about the fetid city sewers they're tromping through, let them hear the weird echo sounds, setting the mood, thick wet bubbles rising to the surface of the viscous fluid just below the iron

grating, then crawl under the table and take a dump to add that smell effect. Or maybe I might have taken that idea too far. Scratch the last one. Ambient sounds add to player immersion. It makes players come closer to experiencing what their characters are going through right now, where they are, and what's going on around them. I use ambiance a lot when I'm playing in person, especially when running horror games. A low-volume environmental sound really helps make the situation more real to the players, helps set an appropriate level of tension at the table, and I'm a huge fan, but it's got to be done right. More on that in a bit.

Over virtual tabletops, it can be dicier because barring having tons of audio equipment on hand, it's hard to get that volume just right so it doesn't interfere with character and GM conversations. Most of the time you're sharing a single audio channel, so that makes it more of a challenge. Second type of sound I want to talk about is combat and battle music. Good combat music can do a lot to enhance the action and tension of a good fight scene. Good combat music can do a lot to enhance the action and tension of a good fight scene. It marks a change in the session from non-combat to combat. If you haven't seen it already, go watch Avengers Infinity War. I'll wait.

Are you back? Good. There's a great fight scene between Wanda and Vision and the agents of Thanos who've come to claim the Infinity Stone. Just as our heroes are about to lose, a shadowy figure emerges as a new ally. Before the identity of the shadowy figure is revealed, the battle music changes to one associated with that particular Avenger. The battle music itself serves almost as a character, revealing plot points even before they're revealed on screen. The third category of sounds I want to talk about is non-combat music. It's a subset of ambient music, anywhere music would be playing. A tavern, a camp, guild hall, Muzak over the loudspeakers, whatever.

It helps set the ambiance, it can help good role players really get into their character. I don't use non-combat music as much. I might have a music set aside for certain areas. A couple of campaigns ago, the party was doing work for one of the Fay Queens. Every time they entered her grotto, I played the same music and ambiance sounds that I had mixed together. It served as an audio reminder that, oh yeah, you're not in Kansas anymore. Not that the adventurers were ever in Kansas or from Kansas. Speaking of Kansas, did you know in 2003 that researchers from the Texas and Arizona State Geology Departments proved mathematically that Kansas was flatter than a pancake?

The more you know. If you use combat and non-combat music all the time, then effectively you're playing music all the time. If your party wants that, fantastic. Have fun. Go find the music tracks that you like. However, I tend to reserve non-combat music for special occasions, important locations, and the start of an adventure, for example. The fourth category of sound I want to mention is sound effects. Now, if you add sound effects to your gaming session, do so with caution. This can get nightmarish fast. Imagine hearing the same sound effect for every sword swing that hits,

or misses, or axe swing, or mace swing, or polearm swing, or what have you. I've played in tabletop RPGs where every blaster had the same sound effect that the DM had to pull out on every single shot. Every batty death sounded the same, every motorcycle, every vehicle, all sounded the same. To keep from driving your players insane, you will need a large collection of sounds, and it will be very labor-intensive to collect them all, to organize them, to pull them out at the right time. Honestly, too many and you start sounding like a bad morning DJ. You're listening to Hot Rod and the Donk on K20 Radio. Now here's an all-ACDC rock block courtesy of Honest Joe's floor mats. You can tell they're honest because it's in their name. Now here's Thunderstruck to

kick us off on KT20. Where'd I go just now? I get annoyed by sound effects too easily to use them with any regularity. I mean, if you and your players enjoy them, then by all means use them to make the players actually feel like they're in the fight their characters are. But they would be the first thing I would cut when time starts running out for gaming. Alright, so that's enough about the categories that I broke them down into. Let's talk about my tips. Use sound effects more sparingly than you think you should. Have you ever played a video game where the music is short and repeats often? How quickly did you disable music in the game options?

If you use the same song or a small subset of songs over and over and over and over, it can be a distraction. At best, the players just ignore the music. At worst, it serves as an irritant for your players. In my teen years, I was a busboy, bartender, and waiter at a very nice restaurant in my hometown. You may be thinking, wait, teen years and a bartender? Yeah, I'm old. Laws were different then. You could get a taco for a quarter, which was also called two bits. So we'd say to each other, do you want to go get a sasparilla and six bits, which meant we were getting three tacos. Bits were also measured by computers in terms of bytes, which was eight bits, and nibbles, which were a half byte each, or four bits. I'm sorry, where did I, uh, wow, sorry.

Anyway, the restaurant I worked for had a CD changer with five CDs. CD changer? Yes, I'm still old. Shut up. Even with almost 350 minutes of music to loop through, over time I eventually learned every song and really started getting annoyed by them. I still have an irrational hate of the saxophonist Kenny G to this day. I mean, he's extremely talented and everything, but I never want to hear another note played by him ever again. Similarly, if you use the same song or sound effect over and over, it will go from great to immersion breaking to if I hear that song one more time, I'm stabbing someone. Not my character, I am stabbing someone. If you want to use music, create your playlists ahead of time for the music you'd like to use.

I have ambiance playlists that I break down by type of area. Some are from commercial products like Syrinscape or YouTube Music, while others are free versions I've found online. I mean, heck, the BBC released a ton of sound effects and music free on their website. I'll put a link in the resources page so that you can go find it. But I divide up my ambiance playlists by forest, swamp, night, haunted house, desert ruins, or maybe

even by type of adventure. Horror, comedy, heroic. I set aside battle music that I pull out for big, important combats. Three skeletons wandering by on a road? You don't get music, we're doing this acapella. But boss fights or a complex combat arena? Yeah, when the players hear that music start up, they know shit's about to go down. I've talked about commercial products, but how do you

create a playlist on a budget? YouTube and Spotify have been my go-to, but I'm sure there are others. Heck, a lot of the virtual tabletops have the ability to manage audio along with the maps and the tokens, etc. If you do feel like paying for a subscription, Syrinscape, BattleBards, Tabletop Audio, and others make great products that can streamline finding music for you. Search for the types of files that you want and build your playlist, whether you're doing a free or commercial product. A lot of times someone has already built playlists and you can just tag those and use them as well. Last tip there is there are also some great subreddits like music for RPG. So go there and get playlists that other people have built for you. Taking a tip from movies, I have dedicated music for big bosses. The only time I use that track

is when that boss is on the battlefield. When the music changes, the players know player Big Bad has entered the game. It works really well for recurring villains that the players will fight more than once. Sound effects become really annoying really quickly. Some DMs and players enjoy them because they add immersion, but honestly they repeat too often and too quickly for my taste, so I very rarely use them at all. Last tip that I'll give, adding sounds and music can become very labor-intensive very quickly. If you're a perfectionist, it will be very labor-intensive. My tip is to find something close, let it ride, and go with it. If you find a scary forest sound effect, but it has a stream in it and your players aren't near a stream close enough. Go with it and say that it's a haunted stream. So let's move on to visual eights.

Like sounds, I'm going to break these down into different categories and I'll also list them in order of preference. I want to talk about maps, handouts, and two kinds of art that you can pull from. Maps. If you listened to my episode on maps, you already know my predilection for maps. That was episode 35, and I had over 5 gigabytes of maps at the time. I'm now at 7.5 gig and climbing. As a matter of fact, every second that I'm here recording, someone's uploading new maps to the Battlemaps subreddit and to various message boards that i've subscribed to um i i gotta go check i go check now Okay, I'm back. Um, so I may like digital battle maps a little bit too much.

Partly because when I draw maps, people can't figure out what everything is. Is that a tree? No, it's supposed to be a rock. Providing a good view of the area can help players understand where they're fighting. As I talked about in my Theater of the Mind vs. Battle Maps episode, you don't have to use battle maps, and there are pros and cons for each, but I like them. I like them a lot. I, uh, I'll be right back. Nope, no new ones yet. Okay, so let's move on from maps to handouts. Anything you can put in the player's hands to reinforce something going on in the game is a handout.

Letters, puzzle boxes, diagrams, notes, postings to job boards, anything tactile, really. It brings another bodily sense into the game and helps with immersion. I love it in role-play heavy games. They don't just know that they've taken a contract to kill the goblin marauder danknugs. They see her picture and see the relaxed but menacing look in her eye. This does take some skill with either photo manipulation software like GIMP or Photoshop

or page layout software. Or you can pay someone to make these for you or find them online. Some DMs will actually go and purchase handheld puzzles for players to touch while their characters try to solve it. It can be great for complicated moving puzzles which can be hard to describe. Same for complicated object motion puzzles where they have to roll stones to certain locations. Make a handout or lay it out on a map and the players can visualize the area much easier. It is labor-intensive, but it really does help with immersion. Another type of visual aid I want to talk about is character art. Finding pictures that represent your NPCs as a DM or PCs as a player. You may have to search

various picture websites, Pinterest, ArtStation, ImageSearch, and so forth. You may have to search various picture websites, Pinterest, ArtStation, ImageSearch, and so forth. You may not be able to find the perfect representation, but there's so much out there. The thing that I recommended previously, and I will do so again, is that if you use an artist's work in your home game, make sure you send them a thank you or maybe even a donation. The really good stuff is time-consuming to make, and believe me, artists appreciate your throwing a little coin their way. Before thinking about using them in a commercial setting, though, reach out to the artist for the cost of licensing rights. A little preparation now can prevent a lot of legal heartburn later. I love NPC art, and I use it whenever I have time.

I'll have the pictures behind the screen and hold it up for prominent NPCs. time. I'll have the pictures behind the screen and hold it up for prominent NPCs. It doesn't take long for the players to start remembering Angred the shopkeep, or Yenna the town guard, or Kaltor the lord of the underworld, who makes the best damn donuts in the city of Fallsreath. Another type of art that you can try to find is location art. Real challenge here, finding the right art for a particular location in your campaign. That being said, a lot of times I have found the art before I designed the adventure, and I would design part of an adventure or an entire one-shot around a picture of a location. You find the perfect picture of gothic ruins in the corner of a small town. It makes for a great adventure to design around.

Make or find a map, and off your party goes to solve a murder or exercise a ghost. Raise the building to the ground, which has so far resisted all attempts to do so. Make or find a map and off your party goes to solve a murder, exercise a ghost, raise the building to the ground which has so far resisted all attempts to do so. Or you find a picture of a crumbling temple in a desert. Is this a dead god trying to come back to life? Is there a desert predator that's resisted attempts to settle its domain? Or is it just simply a home of to bandits and Roberts? Bandits and Roberts. They're all bandits and they're all named Robert.

Or is it a simple home for bandits and robbers? Finding a picture of an ancient bridge spanning a now dry riverbed. It's now unstable and home to a couple of forgotten gargoyles. It's safe to be used by small folk, but if big folk try to walk across, the stones may fall, taking the characters with them. You can find inspiration from random images online and bam, there's your handout or images to show the party. Sounds to play during battles or areas can really add to your player's immersion in an RPG world. Visual aids can help your players visualize things that you have clearly pictured in your head and help them understand how to move the adventure forward. They do require a level of effort to find and produce at the right time. Give them a try next time you game and see if you like it.

Try sounds, then try visual aids or vice versa. See what you and your players like. Add a creepy music track when they open the witch's hut door. Show them the piece of paper with strange symbols written in a language they don't understand. Stoke their imagination by not just describing what the characters see and hear, but allowing the players to see and hear them too. Anything that adds to the enjoyment of the players may be worth the additional effort on your part.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for listening. I once again want to thank our sponsor, Light Powers and Shockley Electrical Specialists, when it positively has to be done right. This has been Episode 52, Using Sounds and Visual Aids in Your Game. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game.