Dan Clegg

(Copied and Pated from our 1/10/23 email correspondence)
So my interest in D&D started in my late teens, mostly from a love of stories and their creation. I never found anyone interested in playing though so I had settle for Salvatore books and the like. From then until now, I’ve played in two games and DM’d two others. All four of those endeavors went the way that casual things do and only lasted a few sessions.

In 2013 started another casual group that mostly struggled with scheduling issues and over time I made a few new friends that were more of just casual social hour TTRPG players. So in early 2019 I made a conscious decision to make D&D my primary avocation. This attitude shift involved me deciding that I get to be picky about who gets a seat at my table. This sounds selfish, but mostly this just meant a longer conversation with potential players about what’s expected and what kind of environment we’re trying to create to see if our expectations align.

One of my favorite examples is comparing D&D to an intramural sport, where if it’s game time, I need my quarterback to show up ready to play, rather than cancel last minute because a better social engagement turned up. Another is explaining the difference between collective, competitive collective, and individualist types of campaigns and how it’s important that all players are on the same page and in agreement with the play style.

Conversations like this have been met with good support and it wasn’t a huge leap to make this shift in focus. I joke that my wife is my talent scout because presently every member of our group resulted from her social circles and organization involvement. From then until now I have had players quit, but it was always an amicable departure with the understanding that if a group isn’t a good fit, then forcing it will almost never work out.

I think I mentioned that at some point I realized that my note taking ability was crap so I plopped a condenser mic on the table and viola, no more in the moment note taking. This eventually manifested in session transcripts which turned into some fun things to read.

The semi-produced nature of the podcast was an interesting step as well. I use a screen on the table for visuals and there was a point that I was relying too heavily on my visuals as descriptive content. I often overlooked creating flavored text that would normally get read to the players for the sole reason is that I don’t like to be read to. I made a comment on a DM facebook group I’m a part of, and someone suggested that I record the canned text I wrote and play it so I can watch my player’s reactions. I thought that was a great idea and wrote a few visions I wanted to present and then thought, “hey, why not throw some background music on it?” I had recently stumbled upon Monument Studios and their sound content from a Black Friday sale and found a track I thought fit, and boy did it fit. It was just coincidence, but all of the swells and hits landed almost perfectly. This ultimately resulted in my discovery that I really enjoy the SFX and music aspects of post-production.

We continued to play and there was talk of maybe someday we’d do a podcast. Then one day, I was caught up on all of my podcasts and went looking for something new. I stumbled upon a D&D real play podcast and realized that one, our production quality was as good if not better. And two, they started their first episode in the middle of their campaign. These observations led me to the conclusion that if I kept waiting for things to be good enough and once they were, start another story, it would never happen. So I pulled the trigger.

You can definitely tell that teaching myself sound engineering has been a journey. But it has been a fun one for me and it’s really cool to hear how far the production quality has improved from episode one to where we are now (episode 10). I hope that if you are listening that the early on distractions don’t detract from the story too much.

It’s been super fun for our group and it’s also super fun to see that RPing is something that you get better at with practice and some of the things my players have come up with have been delightfully mind-blowing. We know that the primary goal will always be to get together and tell a great collaborative story together and if it ever becomes anything else, we’re doing it wrong.

At any rate, my journey has piqued my interest in all manner of things pertaining to D&D as I try to get better as a DM and a podcaster.