The Glass Cannon Podcast - Cannon Fodder 6/26/24

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

The Fod is about to go on summer vacation, but before Troy and Joe hit the beach, they debrief the first ever GCN Retreat, reveal some of the content that will be coming to YouTube during Gen Con, and break down why Episode 40 of Campaign 2 is a huge change in the direction of Gatewalkers. In We Are Stupid, how Lore Skills are meant to function, and General Feats vs. Skill Feats...is one more valuable than the other? Cannon Fodder will be dark for two weeks for summer vacation and will return on Wednesday, July 17th. Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/C_bfVvp6-5E For more podcasts and livestreams, visit glasscannonnetwork.com and for hundreds of hours of exclusive shows and benefits, make your membership official and join Glass Cannon Nation today by becoming a subscriber at jointhenaish.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You are listening to the Glass Cannon Network, the premier source for role-playing game entertainment. Welcome to Cannon Fodder, a behind-the-scenes look at the Glass Cannon Network. Yeah! What is going on everybody? Welcome back to Cannon Fighter. It is Wednesday, June 26th, 2024. And I'm your old pal, Joe O'Brien. And I'm Troy.

Clearly my voice has recovered faster than yours. Oh, valid. I truly thought my voice would be OK today. I didn't use it much this morning in order to save it for the FOD. So I never did anything quite at that projection or that volume. And as soon as I did it, I was like, oh, no. It's still gone.

It's still gone from the most amazing weekend ever. A weekend of incredible shows in Denver and Nashville and the first ever GCN retreat in Nashville. And holy shit, man. I mean, I don't even know if we have time in this fodder to debrief accurately that weekend, but what a weekend. We'll try, we'll try. We'll try.

What were your main takeaways from the first ever GCN retreat? I mean it was just wonderful top to bottom. I kind of went in assuming it would be. I don't know. I was just very, very confident that it was going to be wonderful. I was very confident in the amount of preparation that went into it and I just felt like right from the get-go, I was like, I want to create something that has very small chance of failure. You know what I mean? Don't create a bunch of different things where it's like, oh, we didn't print out the blah, blah, blah. We

didn't have the banner hanging. I was like, I want to just create something that focuses on people, like-minded people getting in a room together and playing games. Then it's like impossible for it to fail And I mean it's just exceeded all expectations and my expectations were already pretty high. It was wonderful I couldn't stop thinking about it. Even when I got home. I felt like such a Weenie I just kept like checking in the the nice hype channel the national hype channel on discord being like what are people saying? I miss my new friends. I miss my new friends. I miss my new friends, exactly.

I had that leave, I told you this, I had that leaving the con melancholy, like leaving Gen Con, like the last day of Gen Con, when you see them rolling up the rugs and everything's getting thrown in the trash. It's just like, it's so sad because you had seen so much life and vibrancy, vitality,

love of gaming overflowing all before that. And that's what it felt like the day we left the resort to go to do the show. I was just like, oh man, I just want to be in there playing more games. It was so much fun. So we ran gauntlets with members of the nation that played iconic characters. So that in and of itself was a blast. I remember early on in one of my games, I'm running a game, you're behind me at a table running a game and I just see you go,

hey Joe, oh Brian. And I turn around and you're like, Lord just missed, shocker. It was amazing. All the little emergent stories that happened with the iconic characters playing together, all these crossing, you know, crossing so many different shows and stuff and different parts in history of the network, you know,

Baron side by side with Eris, you know, just like you're going cross-eyed. It was really, really fun. But then board gaming as well. You got to board game, which was great. You really had a good time playing What Hero Quest and Cthulhu Death May Die. Yeah. I played HeroQuest with a great crew and then we played an extended long session

of Cthulhu Death May Die where for the last hour, only one player was still active. The other three characters were dead, but we were all so engaged. We're like, we're going to figure this out together. It was amazing. Closed that place down at 130 in the morning Saturday night. That was Friday night. Friday night. Yeah. Then just Saturday, more gauntlets. Then we were like, fuck, I don't want to go do the show. I just want to hang out and game more. Then we'd go to the show and have, as you and I have now said several times, the best show in tour history. Saturday night in Nashville, it was the single greatest thing that's ever come up.

I know. So for those of you that were not there, and listen to Strange Giants, I am so, so incredibly excited for you to get to the Nashville show. I certainly don't mean to overhype it, but I just am excited for you to hear it. Maybe it had to be there. I don't think so.

I think it'll translate, but it was wild. And as an even just in gaming, the session itself was one of my favorite sessions ever. It just had everything. So I'm really, really excited for everybody to hear that. And watch it if you can. That's one. Oh my God. It's just a lot of stuff you're going to really want to see. The visuals are just, yeah. But yeah, no spoilers. No spoilers here. But it was a fantastic time. I'm sure you'll hear more and more of it

as other episodes of other shows record. Everybody's going to be talking about this. And so we'll get more of other people's reactions as we go. But we have a lot to get to in today's FOD. We got a lot of news coming down the pike. We're actually on the cusp of a little fad summer vacay Troy and I are taking a little vacation. So we're not gonna have fad for two weeks. So we two weeks no fad But we'll be back on July 17th and on that day

We're gonna have a lot of fun stuff to talk about as well. But I said Okay, what I mean to say is since we're not gonna be on for two weeks There's a lot of news to get to right now to cover the next couple weeks of stuff that's coming down the pike. Of course, we'll talk about episode 40 of the GCP. And then we are stupid. And I'm going to give a little extra time to listener mail since there isn't that much to talk about in the episode this week in terms of analyzation, because it was a great just like kind of role play and move the plot in an interesting direction episode. All right, so let's start with news. Just a couple plugs real quick.

Today, Wednesday, June 26th, I'm going to be streaming at 11 a.m. Eastern time on our Twitch channel. If you have not, if you're listening to this in the morning and you can catch it, I'm streaming more Elden Ring. I'm very excited to do a run to the DLC. Very excited about that. I've got this path in mind that I'm gonna be streaming at that time that is going to hopefully be like,

like a way to skip a whole ton of bosses and just get to Moog where you have to get, but like I'll be way under leveled. So we'll just see if it's like even possible. Well, I wanna ask you about this. So like, I kinda wanna do it. And my character that I platinumed with,ed with, I'm like, well, it would be so easy to just go in there, be overleveled and do it. I kind of want to start over.

As I started to research it, it was like, if you want to do it and be of a commensurate level for what is supposed to be a very hard DLC, you should really invest 50 to 60 hours of gameplay doing it like doing X, Y, and Z. Leveling yourself up. I don't know if I have another 50, 60 hours. I never beat Starfield yet. I want to go beat that. I don't know. I'm so torn. I could also respect the character and I don't know. I don't know what to do. Yeah, so it is, it's in my mind as a potential option if I have to fall back on it to respect the character, but I have a spec in mind I want to go in with and part of this, I'm going to put at least 20 to 30 hours into it. Part of that is going to be learning how to play the new spec,

right? Like if I just read, it's like, oh, I have a 15th level paladin. And I'm like, all right, well now I'm going to play a 15th level wizard at the next session. I'm just going to respect like, you're going to be abysmal at that thing. And unless you like, unless you evolve with it and you know, the weapon moves and the weapon sets and because I'm moving from a caster build to a straight strong strength and endurance build, heavy armor, heavy poise, large colossal weapons. And I want to play with that,

but I've never really done that before. And so I want to, I want to learn it as I go. And I'm going to play a lot of it off air so that as soon as possible, I can get to Shatter of the Erd Tree on air. Anyway, that's, that's the idea. I'll be streaming that today, Wednesday at 11 a.m. Eastern. You're streaming tomorrow, Thursday.

You're back to Baldur's Gate. That's great. That's it. That's it? This is my last stream. Yeah. I've done everything except the final boss. Oh, wow.

I didn't realize that. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it's going to be a two-hour stream, if it will go a little long or if I'm going to have to like, you know, you can usually tell pretty early like, fuck, I got to reload a save. I got a scum save here. So we'll see. It's definitely going to be my last stream one way or another. I'd like to beat the game on stream, but I don't, I haven't looked to see like how long

the elder brain fight is and like all the other shit that goes down because there's a couple other like quests, personal quests that you can only do at the finale. I think you're given like choices throughout the fight. So we'll see. I've done everything that I could possibly want to do in that game. I have only one real open quest and that's to go to see. All right.

Well, you heard it here. Do not miss the finale of... What's his name? What's his name? Stiff Dickerson. Stiff Dickerson. Here, do not miss the finale of, uh. What's his name? What's his name? Stiff Dickerson? Stiff Dickerson. I started this fucking character for extra life.

Yeah, November. The only game I've played since November. I stopped playing Call of Duty. Well, no, in December I was still playing Call of Duty, a little bit of Starfield, and then I was like, all right, I want to dedicate myself to this in January. I'm done. I'm done with this game. Done with this game. It's fantastic. It's one of the best games I've ever played all right, I want to dedicate myself to this in January. I'm done. I'm done with this game. Done with this game.

It's fantastic. It's one of the best games I've ever played. Yeah. It's amazing. It is an amazing game. It's time to move on. What else? What else?

All right. So going in chronological order, we're also going to have another Talk Nerdy Town Hall with Jared and myself on Discord for those that want to hang out. And we'll be talking about a nerdy topic, bringing you up on stage to talk with us. It's been a blast for those at the Vorpal or higher tier on our subscriber service. You can come to the private Discord and hang out with Jared and I. We have a great time. That's going to be Wednesday, July 10th. So Wednesday, July 10th at 730 Eastern, 430 Pacific. We're going to be live on Discord, just hanging out with you, bringing you up to the stage, talking about what you guys want to talk about.

We'll have some great giveaways as well for that. I'm already stocking them up. Then, in a couple weeks after that, and we'll be back on FOD before we talk about this more, but remember, we're going to Comic-Con again. We're going to San Diego Comic-Con again. That's going to be, oh my god, I don't have the date ready. Friday, July 26th?

Yes. Friday night, July 26th, we're doing our show at San Diego Comic Con playing Marvel, the Marvel multiverse role playing game. It's going to be fantastic. It's me, Joe, Skid, Matthew and Sydney, the good enoughs. There might be other guests. I don't know, but we'll definitely have me, Joe, Skid, Sydney and Matthew. I'm very excited about that.

It's a Deadpool adventure that will be debuting, that may or may not have a variant cover featuring us. So that's very exciting. I had never seen Deadpool. Never saw it. Did you watch it? For whatever reason. And I watched it on the flight back from Nashville,

like for the first time, the first one. First one, yeah. And it's probably not gonna to come as a surprise. It's fantastic. It's great. I was like, wow, this is really great. I remember seeing the first five minutes at some point late at night, maybe at somebody's place or something hanging out.

And I was just like, all right, this isn't my vibe. Like the overly disgusting and overly foul and fourth wall breaking. I was like, it's not really my thing. But once you settle into it, it is a great character and a really good origin story. And so I was just like, I'm so into this. And so yeah, I'm looking forward to watching 2 and then Deadpool Wolverine and then just like getting in the zone for that show. You'll be doing a lot more research than I will. I was never a big Deadpool guy and just everybody loves Deadpool. I think everybody loves Deadpool because he looks like Spider-Man, but he swears and has like guts.

Yes, exactly. And that's what I thought too. And I kind of wrote it off. I really like his origin story. It's a fantastic origin story. And so it's just really like, it's just a take that I never thought of before, you know, on the whole X-Men mutant thing and it's really, really fun. I'm very excited to dig into that. I think we still have Marvel Unlimited. You should read, go back and read some of the comics. Yeah, absolutely. I'm also going to be doing Faster Purple Worm Saturday at Comic-Con. I don't know what the time, I can't remember what the time is. I feel like it's five o'clock, but I'm going to be sneaking another show. I might be on a panel Saturday morning too.

So listen, if you're in, if you're coming to Comic Con, please come see our shows. If you're in LA, California, Vegas, anywhere in Southern California area, just come and see the fucking shows. It's, it'll be worth it to get a day pass and see these shows. The show that we did at Comic Con last year was so good and it never saw the light of day. You know, I think they're gonna try and film it this time around, but you never know. Anything could go wrong.

So if you can come out there and see it live, we'd love to have you supporting us. We're going to be at the Con this year, prime time. It's fucking Marvel. This is a big deal. So please come out if you can. Yeah, come out if you can. And all you need is a pass to the Con.

This isn't like you gotta buy tickets to the show. You just gotta have a you can. And all you need is a pass to the con. This isn't like you got to buy tickets to the show. You just got to have a pass to the con, and it's free to come to the show. You get a day pass. Get a day pass. All right, awesome. And then last thing is, I don't know, you've talked about this.

You've teased this a little bit. I'm not sure how much it's sunk in with people. When we made the decision to change over what we're doing at the booth this year, and that we weren't going to do live broadcasting from the booth, but instead do those gauntlets and play with the nash in the booth. We decided that we wanted to still have content for those that couldn't make it to Indianapolis and those that just want to hang out on the floor and watch it from the booth.

We're going to be premiering new content every day of the Gen Con weekend on YouTube, and we're crushing through this stuff right now. Like we're in the midst of recording stuff. You're not gonna see it yet. We're grinding away in the background, so things might be like a little quiet, but all of a sudden that weekend at Gen Con, you're gonna get new premiere actual play content

from Chaosium, from Paizo, from Evil Hat, from Marvel, separate from San Diego Comic-Con, all new stuff, Free League and more, like we're gonna be playing. Renegade. Renegade, we'll be playing a bunch of different games, actual plays are gonna premiere all weekend long on YouTube. We'll come back with all different specific titles for you and games that we're gonna be playing when we hit back the next FOD on July 17th. So tune into that FOD and we'll have more specific info on what games we're playing and what times we're gonna land and stuff.

Yeah, it'll be 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then that short day on Sunday at least. So it'll be just like the years past, except it won't be happening live. I can't wait, there's some really fun stuff. I'm gonna play in something, I've switched out. I'm gonna have you GM something, and I'm gonna go, just so I can go wait. There's some really fun stuff. I'm going to play in something. I've switched out. I'm going to have you GM something and I'm going to go just so I can go play in something

even that I don't play anymore. And yeah, dude, that whole, I cannot believe that we're already in like Gen Con mode because we start Gen Con mode January, but like now we're a month away. It's crazy. Yeah. It's crazy how fast it's going to be. Getting to play those gauntlets this weekend, I cannot wait to run the gauntlets in the booth.

We're going to have the Terrain and the 3D Minis and everything. There's only a few slots left. There are, I think there's Jared's got a 1130 AM on Thursday slot. That's the second slot because I opened up the booth with my slot. That sold out. Jaren has the 1130. There's a couple tickets left to that. And then Matthew Thursday at 1245, one ticket left.

Jared Thursday at 330, there's a couple tickets. Jared Thursday at 445, one ticket. And then Jared Friday at 1245, one ticket. So there's really only a couple tickets left for these gauntlets. And if I was going, no offense to anybody else, I would play in a Jared Gauntlet. Especially hearing the stuff that he pulled at the Nashville retreat. I mean, they were screaming constantly, like left and right. He played the one ring and he did Khaza Doom and replayed

that whole thing and he had all these point systems for how much noise they're making and will they raise the Balrog and fighting all the goblins and orcs, whatever. So awesome. I mean, they had a blast and then he ran a Call of Cthulhu and basically just did the end of a long-term campaign. It was like, because you only had a two-hour slot. So basically, it began with Cthulhu rising out of the water, and they just had to fight Cthulhu. That's amazing. I didn't know what happened.

He was just cracking up. He was literally laughing out loud and cackling at Cthulhu's stats. He was like, you should see this. He's telling the players, I wish you could look at this. I wish you could look at this. Yeah, he's like, I roll to hit Oh, 87. That's a hit. Just like ridiculous, ridiculous. But anyway, they all had a I mean, they were just raving the next day about it. So yeah, anyway, I would play in a table as well. Introducing the Miller Optix 2KW Handheld Laser Welder.

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So things might be a little bit fuzzy, but what a fantastic episode for me. One of my favorites in terms of turning points, really kind of shifting the focus finally of this adventure away from Kniepoh and the, not the nightlands, what do they call it? The thin lands and a night hold and kind of, you know, something that was very, very confusing and very ethereal to something that is much more focused and really kind of a clear understanding, not of what's directly in front of us, but what our ultimate objectives right now are. Very crystal clear and I love that. So I guess let me start with, that. So I guess let me start with we arrive, we meet all these, these elves, pardon me, and one in particular who

stands out as an astronomer, someone who lets us know it's official that we're on Castrovel. So that was a fun moment to be able to reveal that. Finally, even though we had suspected it for a while, and then to learn that there might be a way home. And of course, of course, the person that knows how to get us home is infected by the Shadewither Key itself. So really cool scene. Just immediately incapacitated. Immediately incapacitated epic scene. Can you talk to me about that in terms of, I know

you usually don't like to talk about this, but I'm just curious, like, is the book like she grabs the Sh with her kid? Like, it was just kind of strange. Is this something you came up with to kind of move it along quickly? Yeah, no, in the book, that's kind of where they want to get you to, and Zephyr had offered it pretty early. She was like, look at my key. And what you don't want to do is like have her be incapacitated without like giving the

PCs a chance to form a relationship with her, however small, and make it clear that your only hope of going home is her. Her knowledge. And then when she gets incapacitated, it's all of a sudden like, well, shit. Because as great as the other ones may be in what they do, she has had a breakthrough recently communicating with someone else from Galarian. How convenient. She's been studying that connection. She thinks she may be able to

get you back. If she just gets capacity right away, you don't get that moment. When Zephyr very early on was like, look, I was like, oh, wow, we'll get to that in a second. Let me tell you so many things. I'm excited. Yeah, so it was a really cool moment. Yeah, it was a really, really cool moment. And I really loved, well, let's get to this in a second. Yeah. After she goes down and we have the interaction with, I forget the guy's name, or he doesn't identify as a man. Yeah, that's right. That was a really interesting conversation because they sort of brought forth the mythos, right? The legends of this curse in a way that's completely different from our understanding of it, though its effects are

the same. So that to me was a really cool cultural moment where you see they've identified this thing as something we don't use the same terminology for it, but it is the same thing in the end. And so that was really neat. And then at that point, you let us level up, which is very, very exciting to finally get to third level and you want to do it on air. So that was, talk me through the decision to, we have never done this before. Like we've done highlights on air, but we've never raw found out that we're on air. And then at that moment had to just start our typical off air discussion of batting

around what we might want to do with our level up. Yeah. I knew we'd leveled up on the show before, but I wasn't a hundred percent sure. I just feel like I never sprung it on you guys that like, all right, you're leveled up now. I always give you a little warning like, hey, sometime in the next few episodes is a good chance you might level up. So start thinking about it.

Yeah, so start thinking about it because then we can do it. I thought it'd be more fun just to kind of surprise you with it, especially where you have been wanting this level up for so long. Yeah. I kind of wanted to put you on the spot without like holding you to anything, you know, because I know that there are people who really get a kick out of hearing the level up. So hearing that raw thought process and the collaboration between all of you as you decide like, oh, if you're going to go this way, then I'm going to go that way.

I thought it'd be a nice fun change of pace. Yeah. I think that it went really well. There were a lot of great comments on YouTube about people really enjoying the, seeing the nitty gritty of how we kind of talk through all these things. And Professor Eric, I'm glad we did it

because Professor Eric had comments on it. And that's really gonna be the focus of We Are Stupid this week, because we didn't have a combat, we didn't have blow-by-blow mechanics, but what we did have was our, showing everyone else our understanding of how we approach a level up.

And so he had some insights into that. So we'll get to that in a second. But yeah, ultimately by the end, well, first of all, it's just hilarious. The whole, the whole cliff pooping thing was so amazing. I mean, just an off the cuff comment that ended up being hilarious. Barnes being like, I'll join you, and then Huber doing it. I mean, it was just hilarious.

But outside of all those laughs, what I love that we come away with here is a crystal clear mission that's ahead of us that we haven't really had in a while. Things got a little bit clearer after we walked through the gate, ended up here and said, well, look, we have to get to that civilization.

But we had no idea if it was a civilization. We had no idea if they could get us home or where we were or any of that stuff. Now everything's a little bit more grounded. You have this woman who can help get us home, but she's been incapacitated. We have to get the cure. In order to do so, we have to travel to the ancient vaults of this Elven settlement community, whatever, and go to their memory cache and try to defeat whatever guardians may be there, or not defeat necessarily, but be deal with whatever guardians may be there in order to get the cure, to bring her back, to get ourselves home, to our home planet, to get ourselves home, to our home planet, because we're not even on our own planet.

So huge turn that I did not see coming, and what a cool, I mean, this adventure is nothing like what it started like, right? Like what we're doing right now is, it was still in book one, and it is just nothing. Yeah, it just keeps moving. And that's what attracted to me in the first place. Yeah, it was awesome.

So let's listen to, let's talk through a little We Are Stupid. We are stupid. Can't even sing it. Thank you, Nicholas. Yeah, We Are Stupid is, yeah, not so much corrections as much as clarifications and just kind of talking through things. So Professor Eric, as a planetary scientist himself in his own way, in terms of his one

of his majors in college, was a little taken in by our conversation of what lore or what knowledge recall knowledge would we use to recall knowledge about the solar system. This was an interesting conversation that we had during the episode trying to kind of pinpoint it. And basically to sum up his thoughts, it just sort of lays out that the main thing he wants to point out here is that the absent... lures are designed to further specify within the already existing

skills and to give you a chance at maybe a lower DC check because your lore is so specific. But there is no such thing the way he approaches the game at least as a lore that you must have in order to know something. Like everything falls under one of the generic things in one way or another, even if it happens to be a higher DC, it still falls under those things. And so he said if he had to make a spot ruling regarding planetary whatever knowledge, it could come under occultism for what he would call astrology, right? Like obscure philosophies of the cosmos and space. That would be occultism.

Or it could be nature straight up for physics and astronomy, or society for stories of civilizations of other planets, whatever in the solar system. So we could see it being any one of those three, and it's all about how you set the DCs and stuff like that. But the main takeaway he wanted us to remember is lores are designed to further specify a line of knowledge within a skill, not to be a standalone thing you must have in order to attempt to learn something. Everything fits in one way or another within those skills.

It's just about how as a GM you interpret it. So that's sort of his take. Here's a question I want to throw. We were talking about, did we talk about this at lunch or maybe it was one of the Lyft rides I brought it up and it's like me, you, Jared and Skid were in the car. And I said, because we're talking about, you know, the stinginess of knowledge checks and with some of the monsters were running for the gauntlet, we were convincing with each

other. And I said, like, if you roll a success on a knowledge check and a creature has nine immunities and it's just a regular success. Do you give them one immunity, two immunities, all the immunities if that's what they ask for? I'm curious what other GMs do. I'm curious what the, you know, people who play a lot of PFS, how they tend to run it. You know, let's assume a monster that has several different bullshits. Like they got immunities, they got resistance, they've got weakness, they've got some death rows, like cool powers that you'd want to know about. If you're like, immunities, if you're like, well, and you look at all these, they're like, immune to bleed. But there's also nine other immunities. I'm curious.

Yeah, Professor Eric has weighed in on this before and says the top, not this specifically, but he's weighed in and said the top thing that people typically ask for is what they call IRW, Immunities, Resistances, Weaknesses. These are like the key things that people want to know in a recall knowledge checkup on a creature during a fight. And I, yeah, so let's further specify, Professor Eric, and get us your thoughts on this. Does that mean you can get, you could ask for just the immunities, just the resistances or just the weaknesses as part of a successful check? Or is it like you ask, what are its immunities, resistances, weaknesses? And then you can kind of pick

one. Do you, if they just pick immunities, do you give them, oh, they're immune to death effects, they have poison, bleed, whatever. Or do you pick one? I remember what I said in the car is I give them one, potentially two, depending on how high the role is, that I think are directly related to their PC's abilities that they would normally use in combat. That is what I do. I kind of give them the most valuable of those immunities and weaknesses and resistances. Sometimes it's hard for you to know, though.

You don't know all of them. No, no. You don't know the PC skills well enough. Like I don't know what Aldo's got up his sleeve during the live show. And if you guys face a skeleton that's immune to bleed, death effects, disease, mental, paralyzed, poison, and unconscious, I can't just think like what are the two things that would be most relevant here? Sometimes I can.

But I'm curious like if what's the, I don't think as written it's clear. What's the standard in, especially in like a PFS. Yeah, I'd be curious to know like what's kind of the standard. Because if you get all the immunities, if that's like the standard, that would be the one that I would rock. I would just be like, tell me immunities. Because it's rare that they're resistant to 10 different things or weak to 10 different things. But oftentimes certain creatures have tons of immunities

and knowing that is clutch. Yeah. All right, real quick, going back again to the Thaumaturge, Matthew didn't do anything wrong. He said Matthew was correct that exploit vulnerability is not a recall knowledge with esoteric lore and therefore unmistakable lore would not apply to the check against a creature.

However, he can use esoteric lore as a general recall knowledge check, albeit at a minus two for any other knowledge skill that's built into the class. However, when he takes unmistakable lore, which if you recall, that means whenever he critically fails at a knowledge check, he just fails. So he never gets incorrect information. He just doesn't get, you know, so he has unmistakable lore, which means he can't get it wrong. He can only just get nothing. But he also combines that with diverse lore, which is built into the thaumaturge.

Diverse lore allows you on a failure to get one piece of correct information and one piece of incorrect information as part of a failure. So Professor Eric is like, if you line all of these things up, this is something that really the GM needs to think about and discuss and come to a decision to on how it's going to play. Because to quote Professor Eric, when you combine dubious knowledge, which is you get one correct and one incorrect on every failure, unmistakable lore, which means every critical failure is a failure and the minus

two penalty from esoteric lore, meaning you're going to fail more often than not probably, is that you're going to have an exceptional number of triggering dubious knowledge, one correct, one incorrect, which can annoy some GMs, to quote him. So like, that really does like combine into something that could get super irritating. So it's just something to think about and discuss with Matthew how you guys want to approach like, are you going to come up with a fake correct answer every single time he fails, which by the way, is going to be more than 50% of the time and every critical fail is also a regular fail. So he always gets one piece of correct information.

It's like it's a very strange combination of abilities that are frustrating on Gia. I was just letting him pick another ability. There you go. I mean, it's just like when I think of all the things I like about the games, that's like that's one of the things that just doesn't interest me at all as a game master or a player is like, here's some vague knowledge. Yes, I hate it too.

It's hard enough for players to know what's going on, period. Now you got to lead them astray. You know what I mean? Whenever I've done it, it always has you guys being like, well, a couple of episodes ago, Troy said this and I'm like, I wish I hadn't even said it. You know what I mean? It's like. Yeah.

Yeah. It really is. And it's very, I'm a hundred percent with you. The one thing that I'll say on the other side is that for me, I am typically, I very much so love realistic situations in gameplay. And when those real feeling situations arise in my fantasy game, I like the game a lot more. This is a very real feeling situation in not I'm sorry this dubious knowledge kind of thing and the way it's combining is just too much, but the idea that you would confidently think you know something that's completely wrong is very realistic.

But from a meta standpoint, I just I don't like it in gameplay because like you said, it's hard enough for players, even when you give them the correct information to come to the right conclusions. Like to lead them astray is just gonna frustrate everybody and extend your game in ways that are not fun. Now, is there occasions on which incorrect information might lead to really great stuff?

Absolutely. But I mean, you're talking about, you know, once every great stuff. Absolutely. But I mean, you're talking about, you know, once every 10 sessions, you know what I mean? You're not talking about like twice a session this happens. It would be brutal, be brutal. So I'm 100% with you on that. All right, getting back to Professor Eric, we discussed general feats versus skill feats in terms of, you know, because this is a general feat level that we got to and should we wait and take something as a skill feat, et cetera. Professor Eric pointed out something that I never realized or put to words that I sort

of noticed but never all clicked. All skill feats are available as general feats with very few exceptions. So all skill feats are general feats. They almost all have the general trait. However, there are several general feats that are not skill feats. It doesn't go the other way. So there is some reason to when you have a chance to take a general feat, to take a general and not a skill because you'll get more opportunities to take skill feats. However, and then he shows a couple examples of some specific builds that might need extra skill feats and so you would want to use your general for that. But anyway, just a little comment on the way the game is built that you

that all skill feats end up coming up under general with few exceptions. And then yeah, and then the last one was his suggestion that I talked about taking reach spell for my fourth level class feat. He was suggesting that I take an ancestral paragon, which would allow me as a skill feat to take another ancestry feat, which would allow me to take natural ambition because I'm human, which allows me to take another class feat. That basically means that I could get another way to get reach spell earlier and then free up my fourth level class feat. So that basically means that I could get a, you know, another way to get reach spell

earlier and then free up my fourth level class feat. However, I've already taken natural ambition. I talked about the character creation. I already have it. I'm already using it. What it has built into has not been mentioned much on show. There's reason for that, but hopefully one day it comes out. But yeah, that was a great suggestion. And that's all I had. So thank you so much, Eric, for laying out the analysis of our level up discussion. That was some good insight there. Let's talk a little listener mail.

OK. All right. We're not going international this time. We are going two questions. Well, not two com, one comment, one question, all in the Atlantic division. I call it Atlantic because we got one from Maryland, one from Pennsylvania. Let's get to it. Matt in Nanjamoy, Maryland. Nanjamoy. Never heard of this. Nanjamoy. I can't be right. Maryland. Just wanted to say a quick thank you to the whole GCN crew and the nation as well for

putting on such a great retreat in Nashville. It was the most fun I've had in over a decade. Looking forward to future retreats, which I'm assuming will continue for years to come. PS, it would be awesome if the Galt Knight character sheets were posted somewhere as a GCN Iconic style package. Yeah, we've talked about that. We're working on it. That's something we're definitely considering. So thank you.

Do you know how many emails went out yesterday to start planning the next three retreats. Yeah, it was just too much fun. Too much fun. Pretty excited. Pretty excited. All right. Juicy question here from Stephanie in Norristown, Pennsylvania, where one of my best friends

lives. I know Norristown very well. What's up, Stephanie? Hi, guys. I've just finished running a long time campaign at level 20. While I'm satisfied and glad that I saw it through for so long, I can't help but look back at the things I feel I could have done better or things that didn't go as I hoped they would.

I'm trying to reframe these things as lessons for the next time around. Are there any important lessons either of you have taken away after the completion of a big game that didn't go exactly as you'd hoped?" It's a chunky question. Completion of a big game and it didn't land basically? That or just even if it did land at the end, things that you learned during it that are that you're like, I'll never do X or Y again, because I didn't like how that went. It doesn't necessarily mean the campaign had to end poorly, but that during the campaign

something was just not the way you want it. I mean, one that comes to mind to me and I've talked about this before, this is a very quick one, my campaign in Council of Thieves ended like I wanted it to. I was happy it ended how it did, but it did end very fast. And we got to the sixth book of the AP and it was over in like two or three sessions because it was a bit of a sandbox. You could cut right to the end. And the reason that they could, and they pretty much trounced the final encounter, which they were all thrilled with and whatever, they were having fun. That was the most important thing. But the reason they did it is because I gave them too much treasure along the way. And it really was, it was like death by a thousand cuts. Like I wasn't seeing it coming during the years I was playing it. I would

be get excited and I would just change an item in the AP that was a really powerful greatsword to a really powerful dagger because we had this two-weapon fighting rogue. I did that a few times so that they'd get really excited. Well, in time, that ended up unbalancing. I also had five players, I think. That also unbalanced things to the point where they were so unbeatable. Like I was buffing every encounter and it just made my life harder and it made their life less challenging.

And so all in all, I was like, going forward, I will never, I will be much more strict with treasure in the future. I will not give so much. That's one big takeaway I remember from one of my long-term campaigns. I rarely change shit like that because I feel like you're not supposed to use every treasure. So the difference is like- You can adapt and change and be like, that's fucking cool. You know what? In a couple levels, that's going to be my weapon because I'm going to change my character to fit that. But then you'll

want something else. There was something I changed in Giant Slayer because I was just like, thematically, I like this. And it was Fabian Blix's oh yeah the butterfly pendant yeah it wasn't he was like Sarenrae but I was like the only like God that's relevant right now in our group is desnus so let's make it a butterfly pendant but for the most part I don't I don't like to change treasure but I also don't give out a lot of treasure yeah is there anything that comes to mind for you, Troy, or have you always run every game exactly how you want it, top to bottom? If there's something that I do where I'm like, I wish I had done that, I have like a thousand

more chances to correct it. I do so many episodes. Nothing is like coming to mind right off the top of my head. I learned so much doing Giant Slayer, 300 plus episodes that I've tried to bring that into Gatewalkers and into my other stuff. But I can't think of a specific example. I'll tell you another thing, and this is something we've talked about before. You've talked about this a lot in the last year or so, like prepping less. Another thing that I'll say is during some of the campaigns that I run ran, I did a lot of writing dialogue and writing like long monologues of NPCs so

that I said everything perfectly the way I wanted it to be said. And then they never met that NPC or I wedged them in, in a way that felt forced. So I would definitely say like the less prep thing is not just us being like, hey, just chill out and have fun and not do less work. It'll be more fun. Like there is an element of that to it, but there's also like, it's not just that it's more fun in a lot of ways. It's that it's a better game. That's the argument.

And the reason is that you don't force your players into doing things because you have prepared this cool event that they're supposed to take part in. If you keep things a little bit looser and make that event a little bit more malleable, maybe it can come up in a couple different ways. That way you can place it wherever you want, whenever you want. It's just less work and it gives the players more agency in the overall storytelling. So that is something that I've done in the past that I won't do again because I put in a lot of work and they would not do the thing that I planned for. And I would feel like irritated. And at the table, I could feel myself getting irritated.

Or you'll force it in. Right, or I'll be like, really? Really? You're going to go down there when there's this, that, and the other thing, give them all the reasons why it's stupid to do what they're going to do. Like, the stairs are right here and you hear somebody crying for help up there, really?

You're not gonna go, like that kind of shit I've done in the past and it just makes me feel sick thinking about doing it. So like, it's just like, you gotta be, you can't do it anymore. You gotta be over that, you know what I mean? So that's another big takeaway. But yeah, Troy's made no mistakes.

You heard it here first. I am, I'm a mistake for it. No, I mean, I just don't remember them. Yeah, there's so many and you've evolved so much over the years and changed so many things. So yeah, but that's gonna do it. Thank you so much, Stephanie, for writing and I really appreciate it.

And thank you, Matt, for being at the retreat, part of the greatest weekend of all time. That was just amazing. I really hope- It was wonderful. I really hope it can get, it can happen again and get better and better because it's a real high bar to start with. But yeah, that's going to do it for today's FOD. Thank you guys so much.

We're off for two weeks. Two weeks, no FOD. We will return July 17th. And no Glass Cannon next week either for 4th of July week. Everybody's on vacay, including Francis, CJ, the production team. Everybody's on vacation. So we're not going to be doing an app next week but we'll be back the week after and then a five the week after that on July 17th so thanks everybody I hope you have a fantastic 4th of July and we'll see you

after as we head into San Diego Comic Con and Gen Con later everybody take it easy bye it's time to make your membership official. Become an official member of the Naish today at JoinTheNaish.com. That's JoinTheNaish.com, where you'll get access to exclusive podcasts and live streams you can't find anywhere else. See what everybody's talking about and join the Naish today at JoinTheNaish.com.