054: Growing your TTRPG Interview podcast with Derrick of How Not to DM

Courtney: 2:28

I am super excited to now introduce y’all toDerrick, the host and producer of the, How Not to DM podcast. Hello,Derrick, how are you tonight?

Derrick: 2:38

So good Courtney, thanks for having me on RPG. Great name by the way. And I love the logo. I love how you incorporated each of the parts of the words into it. You know, the roll has the dice in it, the play, and then the grow with the leaf. Masterclass. Love it.

Courtney: 2:54

You know, I would like to take credit for that, but I have to shout out my logo slash videos slash everything designer Caleb Carroll. He’s actually somebody that works with us over on a Warcraft Radio. And I knew that I was like, Hey, I’m doing a thing and I want something and make it for me. And yeah, he’s pretty clever like that.

Derrick: 3:14

Shout out to Caleb.

Courtney: 3:15

Absolutely.

Derrick: 3:16

Yeah, I’m doing well. But like you said, I am the host of the, How Not to DM podcast. I’ve been going about as long as you maybe a little bit less time. I started in April of last year of 2021. So I just hit my year mark a few episodes ago. Yeah. You’ve got a few more episodes than I do as well. I took a bit longer break in the fall, but yeah. Things have been going really well, I’ve had a lot of fun guests. And yeah, I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve heard of your show as well. So I always love checking out other podcasts that people are doing. I love listening to other people interview because it gives me ideas for how to, you know, improve my show too. So I, I listened to as many interviews as I can when I’m not listening to actual plays or whatever.

Courtney: 4:03

I mean same. I had the idea for this, like about a year and a half before I actually did it. And then it was just trying to figure out the niche and so it was like, oh, there weren’t like a whole lot. And then by the time I started, I was like, oh, there’s a lot of interview podcasts. It’s fine.

Derrick: 4:19

I did the same exact thing. We’ll get into that in a bit, but it’s funny. I like your, your niche that you found though. I, I feel like a lot of the people I talk to, like, there’s some, definitely some overlap, but I loved hearing from like store owners and that kind of thing. And those are kind of people that I haven’t really broken into trying to talk to. So yeah, it’s, it’s great to hear all the different perspectives from the community.

Courtney: 4:45

Yeah. Well, I’m glad you’re enjoying it. But please tell us a little bit more about yourself. You know, where are you from? How’d you get into gaming? All that fun stuff

Derrick: 4:55

Yeah. So I live in the great state of Utah. I grew up in Colorado. These are both in the USA. They’re right next to each other in the Rocky mountains. So kind of spent my whole life in and around the mountains. it’s not my whole personality, but it’s a big part of it. So yeah, that’s where I live. I’ve been gaming specifically, tabletop gaming, since probably end of 2018/ start of 2019. So a lot longer than I would think. But yeah I’ve been doing it for awhile. I got into it because my coworkers were playing D&D and I thought it sounded really cool, already big into fantasy and into Sci-fi and that kind of thing. I think it permeates the pop culture at this point. So even if people aren’t tabletop gamers, you know, they’ve seen Lord of the rings or they’ve read the Harry Potter books or, or whatever it might be. So yeah, luckily we live in a time where it’s, it’s more of the norm than it is like, oh, these are the weird people in the basement, you know, kind of thing. But yeah started playing with my coworkers. We started a Curse of Strahd game. They invited me. I think we, I ended up playing like two or three sessions with them and then it didn’t really go anywhere, which is okay. But two of the coworkers we decided we would all start playing at lunch. So we invited other people from our department and we started a Lost Mines of Phandelver game at lunch, and we’d play two to three times a week for an hour. And that that’s kind of like where I really got into it. And then about halfway through that game, I thought to myself, oh, this DM-ing thing can’t be that hard, right? Like I could easily write my own adventure and, and run games. And so I started writing my own adventure, ran it for my coworkers and the rest is history.

Courtney: 6:40

Okay. So tell me about a two to three time weekly, hourly session.

Derrick: 6:45

Yeah. It’s tough. Especially when you’re mid combat, you know combat could take the whole lunchtime. And oftentimes if we like had to wrap it up before combat was done, trying to remember whose turn it was and like how many hit points everybody had. It was all a little goofy, but we were in conference rooms. And so we had the whiteboard up on the wall and that was our battle map. And you know, someone was playing like some music on their laptop. We just had a good time. So it was, it was a lot of short bite-sized sessions, hard to keep track of, but it turned out. Okay. And yeah, that’s, that’s really how I got started

Courtney: 7:20

Honestly, it’s really funny that you talk about doing that. Cause I had a one-on-one with my manager today. I just started a new job and I just met everybody in person a couple of weeks ago. Thanks. And while I was meeting everyone in person for the first time, they all wanted to know like, so what is Dungeons and dragons? And so I spent like the course of an entire dinner having to explain it to three different people at different times. And it was like, I just want to eat my steak, man. And now today my manager is like, so do you think we could do it as a team building activity? I’m like, why, yes, yes, we can.

Derrick: 7:55

Oh, that’s how you get them. That’s how you get them. Honestly, the more people out there to play games with the better, that’s. That’s great. You’ll have to let us all know how that turns out.

Courtney: 8:06

Yeah. I need to think of a very tame starter adventure.

Derrick: 8:11

Something that you can get done in a one-shot.

Courtney: 8:14

yeah, that’s always the challenge. Isn’t it?

Derrick: 8:16

It is. You’ll probably have to put together the character sheets for them too. I, when I first started running my own game, that wasn’t for my coworkers. It was like some old college roommates and my wife and my brothers, I sent them all, one of those like 20 question quizzes. That’s like, what class and race should you play? And so that’s how I got them to like, figure out what character they would be. And then I built all the characters for them. So it takes a lot of time, but it’s totally worth it if they play, you know?

Courtney: 8:47

Yeah, no, that’s a really good idea. Like I’d already thought about, okay, I’ll make characters for them, but getting some actual input would be nice. So they get more invested.

Derrick: 8:56

Yeah. And maybe you have them taken a few times. That way, if you get duplicates because you don’t want like three Druids in one party. Like you could do it, but you know, it’s just more fun if there’s variety.

Courtney: 9:07

Although one day I definitely want to play on a campaign where it’s, we are all bards. We can be different subclasses of cards, but I just, I want to be a band on tour and I think it would be awesome.

Derrick: 9:19

Have you ever listened to bomBARDed?

Courtney: 9:21

I I have not.

Derrick: 9:22

It’s a, an actual play podcast. So they did that. It’s a band they’re from Dallas Fort worth area and they all played bards and then they just multi-class into a few other classes, but they’re all going to like Bard school together. And that’s the, that’s the premise. Yeah. So you should check that out for some inspiration.

Courtney: 9:40

That sounds great. I will take note of that.

Derrick: 9:43

Yeah.

Courtney: 9:44

So we’ve gotten to the story a bit, about how you got into gaming in the first place. At what point did you think about doing this podcast? How did that come to be?

Derrick: 9:54

I was driving home from holidays, like winter holiday break. And I was talking to my wife in the car and I was like, I just, I feel like I need to do something. Like I need a new hobby and I don’t know what it’s going to be, but I want it to be related to tabletop role-playing games. Cause I love them and we kind of bounced ideas off each other. And I settled on I’m going to do a blog and I’m going to send people a list of questions and they’ll fill them out. And then I’ll just publish that as an article and it’ll ask them, like how they got into it, what they like or dislike, blah, blah, blah. And then my main focus was like, I wanna, I want to know what mistakes they feel like they’ve made so that we can learn from them because something that I love listening to or, well, I love listening to actual play shows and watching streams and stuff because I love watching the DM run things, you know, I’m there partially for the entertainment, but I’m also there to get ideas and to get inspiration from the way people run their games, because that’s what I do most of the time. When I’m, when I’m playing it’s it’s, you know, as a DM or a GM. So I really wanted to like find a way to get inside the head of all of these DMS and GM’s that I love and figure out what makes them tick, why they do the things they do. And then also: what big errors, they feel like they’ve made, blunders problems they’ve caused and how I could avoid those myself. So like, Hey, if you ask 20 different people, all the mistakes they’ve made, that means that’s 20 different mistakes. You’re not going to make yourself sometime in the future. So that, that was kind of the premise. I don’t know why I thought a blog would be a good idea in 2021, but I thought it might be so I started doing it and then I reached out to a local show here in Utah called Knocked Prone. Cade, the DM is my first podcast guest. If you go all the way back to listen to episode one. So I was chatting with him and I said, Hey, do you want to do this? And he said, yeah, but we should just record it. And then you could get a transcript later and publish it. And I thought, all right. Yeah, I’ll give that a try. And so I did it and then I had this recording in my hands. How hard is it to just publish this as a podcast? I am one of the people who I was just listening to your episode with Emil today. And he was talking about Nate from reckless attack and how opposite Emil and Nils were from Nathan and the Reckless Attack crew. One was like, well, we’re just going to do a podcast and then get better as we go. And the other Reckless Attack is like way good from the start. So I’m definitely in the first camp. I was just like, I guess I’m going to publish this and see what happens. And I have slowly gotten better. So yeah, improved my quality, better recordings, better editing, better producing you name it. It’s a work in progress and I’m learning and growing, but it’s a lot of fun. So yeah, stumbled into it, stumbled into podcasting and just have been trying to get better and learn as much as I can about it since. So there’s still times where people are talking about it and they’re like, what about this file thing? Or what about this audio editing technique? And I don’t even know the words cause I, I can’t make them up on the spot. And I still like hear people talk about stuff and I’m like, I have no idea what they were saying. I do the same thing they do, but I don’t know, I know none of these words, so I, I definitely still learning about all of it, but I really enjoy it. And it’s been a ton of fun this past year. So.

Courtney: 13:17

Yeah, I think that’s really cool how it started as an idea for one format. And then it just made sense to convert like quickly.

Derrick: 13:27

Yeah. I never thought of myself as a podcast person. You know, people always make jokes about millennials and getting into podcasting, but here I am.

Courtney: 13:37

Yup.

Derrick: 13:39

Yeah.

Courtney: 13:41

What else were we going to do during COVID? Let’s be real.

Derrick: 13:43

Honestly, honestly, I can only play so many hours of Skyrim before my brain falls out of my head. So here we are.

Courtney: 13:52

I like just got Skyrim again. I haven’t played it in a very long time and. Yeah, that’s definitely a spiral I’m trying to like be lightly going down,

Derrick: 14:03

Yeah.

Courtney: 14:03

not working too well.

Derrick: 14:04

Yeah.

Courtney: 14:06

So for that first episode, since you had no plans to publish it, what were you recording on?

Derrick: 14:11

I had just my Mac book and I was using the Mac book microphone; honestly, it sounds okay. Like the microphones, this is a Mac book pro the microphone on it is not too shabby. Then I started recording on these. It’s a headset for no one who can, or for everybody who can’t see just a JBL headset, not a good mic. Then I bought one for like $10 from Amazon. Also not a good mic, but slightly better. Then I decided to quote unquote, get serious. I looked on Facebook marketplace and found a snowball, a Blue Snowball for like 30 bucks used, bought that. That served me very well. The only reason I switched to this Blue Yeti that I’m recording on now is because I found one for 60 bucks on Facebook marketplace used, so I bought it. So I have spent less than a hundred dollars total on microphones thus far. And I feel okay about that. You know, and I’m keeping the Snowball around just in case I ever get a record in person with somebody. I don’t know if that’ll happen, but don’t know why I’m keeping it around, but I am.

Courtney: 15:14

Hopefully will last for awhile, but it could fail eventually. And then at least you’d have a backup.

Derrick: 15:19

Yeah, everyone tells me I need a spring for like a $300 one. Just haven’t done it yet. I don’t know. I, I don’t know about you, but I just don’t make a ton of money off of this. It’s mostly for fun. And I prefer to spend money on books for games and stuff instead. So we’ll see if I ever spring for one.

Courtney: 15:37

Yeah. You know, like getting rich off of podcasting. That that totally happens, right?

Derrick: 15:43

Yep. Yep. We’re all. We’re all getting rich guys. Join in, join in on the fun.

Courtney: 15:50

Oh, one day maybe. Today is not that day.

Derrick: 15:53

Nope. Tomorrow’s not looking good either.

Courtney: 15:56

So we talked about your mic upgrades over time, but what about the rest of your process? Like, as you started to say, oh, I think I could do this. How has that changed over time?

Derrick: 16:08

Yeah. Again, like I said, still learning a lot of stuff. I’m still very low tech as a podcast goes. I started recording. I want to say it was discord to start using Craig and Giarc, his evil twin brother. And that served me fairly well for a while. And then I found Zencaster, which you use as well. It’s free right now and super easy to use, like from the guest’s point of view as well. I had a few guests who were wizend and, you know. They were a bit higher level than me and just making sure that they understood how to get onto discord and like record at the same time was sometimes a struggle. So Zencaster has been nice. As far as editing goes, I’ve just been on GarageBand. I dabbled with a tool called DaVinci Resolve that one of my guests recommended to me. And every once in a while, if I have a really bad audio problem, like fan noise in the background or something, I will break that out to just try to minimize the noise there. But most of the time, and especially as my guests have been more experienced, my audio quality has just gone up because they don’t have a bunch of noise in the background to deal with too. And you know how that is. I’ve just been using Garage Band to edit. Currently I’m part of a new studio called The 4th Culture. It it’s been around for a year and some change, but Ramji the DM of the show, decided to kind of put together a group of people of the creators that he wanted to work with. And so I’ve been using their editors to help edit most of my new season, which has been really nice. I do a little bit of work here and there and then, they kind of handle the bulk of it. So that’s been a nice upgrade to my editing process. But yeah, hopefully a lot of cool stuff’s going to come from that collaboration. We have some ideas for short run streams and podcasts. Some new game shows and other stuff like that. So be on the lookout for, for new content featuring me or featuring other people from The 4th Culture.

Courtney: 18:15

How did you get hooked up with them?

Derrick: 18:18

Yeah. So Ramji was one of my first guests. And he was running a stream out of Singapore. So he and his four players all lived in Singapore ,and I thought it’d be cool to chat with someone who his game is based in a homebrew world based on Asian folklore and myth. So yeah, I wanted to chat with someone who’s kind of doing something different than ye olde European based you know, fantasy campaigns. Like a lot of us are used to, so yeah, chatted with him then kinda just kinda was in contact with him here and there. And then he reached out I kind of at the end of 2021 and said, yeah, I’m putting something together, like for you to be a part of it. So yeah. I guess that falls under networking. Yeah, the more people you meet, the more likely it is that someone’s going to have an opportunity for you sometime in the future. So make friends and keep your promises and be a good person and good stuff will come of it, hopefully.

Courtney: 19:15

Yeah, definitely. I guess, let’s talk about equipment. So you’ve got the Blue Yeti now. And then I can see some other things around you. So for our listeners, what other equipment are you using?

Derrick: 19:24

Yeah, I just have some foam pads for my wall to try to keep the echo noise down. My sister-in-law actually bought this for me for Christmas. We did kind of a round Robin, secret Santa deal. And she was like, oh, you’re doing a podcast. Now you, you want this? And I was like, yeah, sure. That’s great. I love that. So yeah, she got me those I have a boom arm for the mic too, that I bought. It was the cheapest one you could find. And it served me very well, and it’s nice. Cause I can move it out of my way when I’m actually working at my desk and not recording. Other than that, that’s kinda the only tech I use. I do have some stuff I use for like social media posts and whatnot, but we can, we can dig into that later if you like.

Courtney: 20:04

How well have those foam things been working for you?

Derrick: 20:10

I, I think they’ve been working well? To be very honest, I don’t know if I have nice enough headphones or sharp enough ears to tell. But so far they seem to be doing the job.

Courtney: 20:23

I’m honestly asking you because I’m debating getting some myself.

Derrick: 20:27

Yeah, I’ll tell you what my buddy, Navarre, who runs the Secret Nerd Podcast. He showed me a picture; I’m sure he doesn’t mind me sharing this, but he showed me a picture of his little setup. He built this cage, basically a box out of PVC pipe and then has surrounded himself by blankets and towels. And that’s what he records in. I think it’s all in his garage too. It might, might get a little hot in the summer, but it would be great sounding, no echo, you know?

Courtney: 20:54

It’s true. And I know there’s some other people that’ll just record inside their walk-in closet.

Derrick: 20:58

Yes. With all the clothes hanging, right? Yeah. Not a bad idea. They’ve been working well so far, I think.

Courtney: 21:05

Oh, that’s cool. Yeah. And you know, it’s a fun conversation starter when you’re on camera too.

Derrick: 21:10

Yes, usually. What is that? And then what are all the books behind you? Yeah.

Courtney: 21:15

Yeah. That’s fair. I guess I want to know more about the timeline at this point of you recorded your first episode with no intention of turning it into a podcast and then you thought, Hmm. How could I turn this into a podcast? So did you just publish that episode by itself without anything else lined up or like, walk me through how you moved on from that first interview into actually starting this podcast.

Derrick: 21:41

Yeah. So I, I looked around, and I found Anchor. I’m not on Anchor anymore, but it was great. And I had no qualms that I’ve just moved over since this we moved to the studio thing. So I found Anchor. I was like, wow, it’s free. And you can start off with an Anchor ad and they’ll pay you a cent and a half per listen if you just run their ad and I was like, well, that’s probably more money than I’m going to make from anyone else for the start. So yeah, I found Anchor. I found out it was super easy, published the first episode, and as I was publishing it, or as I was like editing it to publish it, I began looking for other people to then interview. I figured, Hey, yeah, I’m going to do this podcast thing. I did stop doing the transcriptions because I did it for the first episode. And it was so much more work, especially for little payoff. I’d love to get back into it. I’ve kind of been putting that off, but I found a few automated tools online that say they’re pretty good at picking up what people say. So I might look into it in the future and especially because I’d love to have it out there, just so people, if they wanted to read could, or if they’re hard of hearing or whatever, You know, and it, it being accessible to that audience as well would be great. So yeah, maybe someday I’ll get to it, but yeah, recorded that episode started editing it thought, yeah, I could probably keep doing this. I’m going to start looking for more guests. So I did and I just started DM-ing people on Twitter, reaching out to them on, on discord, whatever it was. Finding people I thought were interesting who were doing cool stuff, whose work I really enjoyed and just reached out to them and asked them, I figured I probably should set up an email account right after that. So set up an email account, logo and that kind of stuff to seem official. And then it’s just the, the, the GIF of, I don’t remember which loony tune, but they’re like putting the railroad tracks out in front of the train as it’s going. And that’s exactly what it’s been ever since. So I was like, ah, yeah, I’m recording these episodes, and then I got to September, October. And I was like, should I do a season? Should I just call this my first season? Yeah, I’m going to do a season. And so I’m going to call that my first season, and now I’m going to do a break and then plan for my second season. So I finished, I think my last episode published in the first or second week of November. For my first season, I took a break, but during that time, so I wasn’t recording much, but I was reaching out to a lot more people to kind of set up my second season. And then I started recording kind of holiday time to get ready for that. So I usually like, like you do usually have like four to six weeks worth of interviews at any given time. Just in case someone has to reschedule or whatever it might be. It’s just nice to have some, some lead time like that. And so, yeah. Then I started my second season and that’s what I’m right in the middle of. And that’s, that’s kind of how it’s been going as far as like figuring it out. Like, like I said, I just slowly was like, oh, I should do this, and I should do that and I should have a break. And so, yeah, I’m kind of, I’m kind of getting into a rhythm. I think I’ll have another break late summer, and then I’ll start season three and keep going. So yeah, things, things are working out though. So far, I’ve learned a lot of things. I’ve made a lot of blenders, but so far,

Courtney: 24:53

Oh, that’s awesome. And I’ve definitely, really enjoyed listening to your show, and I really do enjoy like the game segments that you have now. So yeah. I want to dive into that. So for the sake of our listeners, and they’re not, if they haven’t yet listened to your show and they are totally going to go listen, after this episode, then yeah, tell me about what that segment is, and then let’s just dive into that.

Derrick: 25:17

Yeah. So like I said, I took a break in November and December of last year, and I had a few goals. I wanted to get a bunch of guests for season two. I wanted to redesign my logo and stuff. Just to make it more interesting. It used to be a gray background and kind of boring. And so I looked for other ways to spice it up and then I wanted to look for ways to kind of change and make the show more interesting as it was my new season, you know, so I went and found new intro and outro music. I Was looking for ideas for segments. And I talked to a guy who produced podcasts for NPR for a lot of years. So he did a lot of the editing and production for a lot of the shows that NPR converts from talk radio to podcasts, or just make specifically as podcasts. And so he had a ton of great ideas. So shout out to Steve, if you’re listening really appreciate all that help. Yeah, so his suggestion was to think of some kind of like way to break up the interview and to make it fun and interesting. I don’t remember the exact guidelines, but he was just basically like, think, think of something that you could put in there, that’d be fun and interesting and random related to the topic of the show and would interest people. So I created Quickfire Chaos. It’s never the same. And by that, I mean like each week I might do a different version of it because the guest I have on has a specific set of skills that I want to showcase. But there’s always some kind of random element to it. So for example, the first version I did, I had Johnny Stanton on who is a professional American football player. And I thought we should do a fantasy football team. Uh, So we’ll like make a team and we’ll pick races and classes and what position they’d be good at and why like what, what skills they have and stuff that would make them good at that position. So we did that. A lot of the time I’ll have the guests roll dice on some random D 100 tables I pull off Reddit to like make up a. Little fetch quest. And then we’ll do like a quick two-minute role-play between us, where I pretend to be like a, an adventurer looking for some quests. They give me the quest, but it’s, it’s totally random. Right? Like I just tell them, okay, roll the dice. K. You’re going to be a beekeeper. And you want me to go look for the heart of a nymph and you’re really gruff. And so they have to like on the spot, pretend to be that character and then send me on that quest. And we just kind of have a little back and forth and it just shows how well they can think of things to spice it up on the spot. The other side of that for a lot of like game designers and adventure writers, I’ve done a version where we rolled dice to pick like a setting and a goal. And then I let them kind of noodle and think about what a cool adventure would be, that would fit into the random thing that we’ve picked. So yeah, it’s, it’s always randomness and it’s always meant to just kind of showcase the guests skills around whatever it is they’re good at. So whether they’re really good at role-playing and voices and being creative, or they’re good at thinking of ways to tie stuff together for adventure arcs or whatever else. So yeah, just, just to kind of a fun, random thing to throw in the middle of the episode and to be a little different every time, but to always show off the cool stuff that my guests can do.

Courtney: 28:31

Have you ever had any of those guests balk at whatever the activity was?

Derrick: 28:35

Every guest save one has been totally game. The only one who didn’t Tim Roven from tabletop audio, he didn’t balk. He just said he hadn’t run games in a while and didn’t really want to. And I said, that’s okay. And honestly, that meant to me, like I was going to make him role-play, but what I should’ve done was think of a better way to play to his strengths and like, think of some random encounters. And then he would tell me what kind of music he would score. So if I had the chance, I would go back and do that, but you know maybe I’ll have him on again someday and I can do that. But yeah, it, it was more of a, of a personal failing than him not being good at something. But yeah, every other guest, I learned from that experience and have thought of a better way to showcase what they can do when, what they’re comfortable with and then make sure that it works out.

Courtney: 29:23

Yeah, I think it’s really cool how you personalize it to each of them. And it, I mean, it always makes it interesting cause you never know like what exactly is going to happen every episode.

Derrick: 29:33

Yeah. And, and we don’t either, like I said, it really is them rolling and we pick it from random tables. So there’s no, like. Hand-waving or me giving them like a three-day headstart to prepare something it’s always on the spot. So, yeah,