Am I the Main Character at My Table? with Caldwell Tanner and Jasper Cartwright

A new podcast guest approaches! It’s the incredible artist and co-host of Not Another D&D Podcast Caldwell Tanner! He’s joining Eric & Jasper to answer questions about making fanart of your own character, resetting a game you spent hundreds of hours on, and the fear of grabbing the spotlight too much while you’re playing a TTRPG.


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Credits

- Host, Producer, & Question Keeper: Eric Silver

- Permanent Guest: Jasper Cartwright

- Editor & Mixer: Mischa Stanton

- Music by: Jeff Brice

- Art by: Jessica Boyd

- Multitude: multitude.productions


About Us

Games and Feelings is an advice podcast about being human and loving all types of games: video games, tabletop games, party games, laser tag, escape rooms, game streams, and anything else that we play for fun. Join Question Keeper Eric Silver and a revolving cast of guests as they answer your questions at the intersection of fun and humanity, since, you know, you gotta play games with other people. Whether you need a game recommendation, need to sort out a dispute at the table, or decide whether an activity is good for a date, we’re your instruction manual. New episodes drop every other Friday.


Transcript

CALDWELL:  I think all games are bad. Sorry that I had to break it to you this way, but that's just how it is. I don't think a single game has redeeming qualities.

ERIC:  You know, we've never done a cold open before.

JASPER:  Alright, cool.

ERIC:  I sure hope you're recording, because we've never done a cold open before and now I want to start with that.

JASPER:  Yeah. Mischa, you have to find that audio and you have to put it in. 

CALDWELL:  I stand by it. It's a waste of time, folks.

ERIC:  Yes.

[theme]

ERIC:  Hello, gamers. Welcome to Games and Feelings, an advice show about playing games, being human, and dealing with the fact that those games will involve other humans. I'm your host and question keeper, Eric Silver. And the way you unlock me as a secret character is to beat the campaign on hard while wearing the longer lumberjack beard cosmetic.

JASPER:  But you have to start with it on and if you take it off for a second you will not unlock Eric, it has to be on—

ERIC:  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JASPER:  —the entire time.

ERIC:  You can’t pause. You cannot pause once.

JASPER:  No.

CALDWELL:  You have to wear it through every cutscene—

JASPER:  In every cutscene!

CALDWELL:   —and it’s gonna look so bad.

ERIC:  Oh yeah. It looks really bad in the cutscenes. It like— it like doesn't fit properly on your face, so it's— in the right angles, you're like—

CALDWELL:  It— it clips so poorly.

ERIC:  —it’s floating an inch off your face. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JASPER:  Yeah, just glitching everywhere.

CALDWELL:  You’re— you're just chewing the mustache with your teeth the entire time.

JASPER:  Ew.

ERIC:  Alright, Jasper Cartwright, perpetual guest, and future married boy— 

JASPER:  Hey. 

CALDWELL:  Woah!

ERIC:  —how do you unlock y- how do they unlock you?

JASPER:  How would they unlock me? They'd have to give a speech on why diversity enriches games.

ERIC:  You have to like— you have to take a video and—

JASPER:  Yeah. 

ERIC:  —send it in to the developer—

JASPER:  Send it in to the developer.

ERIC:  —and then they send you a code.

JASPER:  Yeah, so you have to prove you're not a shitheel, that you enjoy diversity within games. That's the only way to unlock me.

CALDWELL:  That rules. I love that as a concept in general.

JASPER:  It takes a while - like most people don’t end up playing as me because it takes so long for the developer to get back to you—

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

JASPER:  —to say that you've unlocked it. And by that point, like the game— the second game’s already out, in which I'm just a permanent character. Like, you don’t even have to unlock me. So it's a process, but you know - that's how you get me.

ERIC:  Yeah. I like the idea that you've been nerfed and also you're white now.

JASPER:  Yeah exactly. That's—how do you think I got into the second game? Like, obviously.

ERIC:  The developers got bought and then they had to change ever—they had to change everything.

JASPER:  Yeah, yeah.

ERIC:  It came down from the top.

JASPER:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

ERIC:  Very funny.

CALDWELL:  You’ve got to play the original Jasper for the Melee GameCube. That's—that's the Jasper I like.

JASPER:  That's the one. That's the one.

ERIC:  Hel—hell fucking yes. Hey, it's Caldwell Tanner!

JASPER:  Woah! What’s up?

CALDWELL:  Hi!

ERIC:  Hold on, how do we unlock you?

CALDWELL:  I think that you’ve got to really do some— some Pokemon bullshit to unlock me. You’ve got to like play the entire game upside down or something like that.

JASPER:  Okay, woah woah woah, follow-up question. Are you— do you have—

CALDWELL:  Yeah?

JASPER:   —to be upside down? Or does just the Gameboy have to be upside down?

CALDWELL:  Yeah, I think that what happens is maybe I'm like a Vincent Valentine type character in the game, where like I—you find me like in a– in a vampire closet, and I'm upside down hanging like a bat.

JASPER:  Yeah.

CALDWELL:  So like if you play the entire game upside down, then like you go to the closet and I'm in there and I'm like, oh, was I asleep this whole time? And then I like jump down and I join your party.

JASPER:  And you’re the right way up, so it's fine. So you can just walk out. 

CALDWELL:  Exactly, yeah.

JASPER:  Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. Awesome. Alright. We’ll take it, we’ll take it.

ERIC:  I like that you've set this up like it's a JRPG—

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

ERIC:  —so you have to play this 50 hours upside down.

CALDWELL:  Exactly.

JASPER:  Yeah, yeah.

ERIC:  Jasper, it has to be upside down. You need to be upside down because you're— you're keeping the content from all the YouTubers—

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

ERIC:  —who have created like special rigs to— to trick the Xbox 360—

JASPER:  —Into thinking they're upside down.

CALDWELL:  Yeah, yeah. I think it's like— it’s like half JRPG, half Metal Gear Solid where like somebody's gonna comment on it too. And be like, “Oh, playing upside down, huh?”

JASPER:  I've just got visions. I've just got visions now of me trying to unlock Caldwell by getting some—have you guys seen Gravity, that movie with George Clooney and—

ERIC:  Yeah.

CALDWELL:  Yeah, yeah.

JASPER:  Like building a rig like they used in Gravity to just like [makes buzzing noises], and just like hang myself upside down for a couple of hours. Oh, man.

ERIC:  I feel like James Cameron would be a lot more interesting if he was into games instead of deep-sea diving.

JASPER:  Think of the depths that the—

CALDWELL:  Wow.

JASPER:  —gigabit depths he could have plummeted to.

CALDWELL:  Yeah, the first game built entirely on a submarine, incredible.

ERIC:  Incredible.

JASPER:  For literally no reason. It's just like a normal— It's like— it's like GTA 6, but they built— they coded the whole thing on a submarine for no reason.

ERIC:  Listen, I'm gonna say—I'm just saying and I know this isn't James Cameron, so come with me anyway. But I'm just saying that NieR: Automata makes a lot more sense if you think of it like Tennant and the other way around.

CALDWELL:  Everything is just backwards.

ERIC:  Yeah, incredible. Oh, absolutely wonderful. Caldwell Tanner, of—

CALDWELL:  It's good to see you.

ERIC:  Actually, Caldwell, I know so many things from what you're from. What do you say that your credits are? Where might people know you from?

CALDWELL:  Um, folks might know me most recently from— from NADDPod - Not Another D&D Podcast. 

JASPER:  Never heard of it. Never heard of it.

CALDWELL:  It's a— it's a D&D podcast. It's fun explaining it to people that know what D&D is. Because otherwise, normally it's like me explaining it to my parents or my parents’ friends, and just having to like reverse engineer so many steps of like, what the show is and why it makes sense. But yeah, that's a D&D podcast. I've also been on Drawfee - which is a YouTube drawing channel - for a bit. And then also I worked on Big City Greens, which is a show that you can watch on airplanes.

JASPER:  Big City Greens is so good as well. Like uh—

CALDWELL:  Oh, thank you. 

JASPER:  —we used to, uh—

CALDWELL:  It's good, and it—it— is only getting better. I've been able to see a little bit of what they're working on, and it's really great. But yeah, currently, and most prominently, I'm working on NADDPod these days. And I'm having a blast doing it, folks. You should really listen if you haven't yet.

JASPER:  It's a good show.

ERIC:  It's a wonderful show, from the— it's always fun, cause I also—I'm the DM of a Dungeon & Dragons podcast. And it's always fun just being like, oh, yeah, I was around in 2016-2017 when like, no one knew what this was, and it was really weird, and we were doing it and it was like, ‘hey, do you like listening to people make up stories? Well, there's dice!’ So, uh— big fan of the— big fan of the show. Because this is Games and Feelings, and we do talk about sports every once in a while. 

JASPER:  Yes!

CALDWELL:  Okay.

ERIC:  You did work on Big City Greens. Do you know what happened in the NHL? Re: Big City Greens?

CALDWELL:  I—so I'm not on the show anymore. I do—

ERIC:  Yes, yes - I figured.

CALDWELL:  —the occasional freelance episode, or like I pitch in if I can. But I had no idea what that was, and it was like so wild to just see it pop up in my feed and be like, oh, okay. Because for those that weren't aware, I think it was like a partnership between Big City Greens and the NHL, where they took a New York Rangers game I think it was?

ERIC:  Yes. Rangers—a New York Rangers, Washington Capitals game.

JASPER:  Uh-huh.

CALDWELL:  And they like put a 3D skin over it so that it looked like it was taking place in the world of Big City. 

JASPER:  What?

CALDWELL:  And the characters on Big City Greens were like commentating on it, I believe. I don't know, it's— it's a new era of tie-ins. I don't know. I think like, clearly, we're reaching a point where every sport is like, oh, no, all of the statistics about brain injuries are out there, and we are losing followers. How do we get new people to watch our sports? And it seems like maybe slapping a cartoon, basically, Instagram filter over it is going to do it.

JASPER:  Yeah. 

ERIC:  Yeah. 

JASPER:  Animate it, always animate it. That’s the answer. 

CALDWELL:  That's—yup. Just make it anime. Honestly, I—that's really the way to do it.

JASPER:  Yeah.

CALDWELL:  Don't animate it, just like— the NHL should just sponsor a hockey anime. 

JASPER:  Yeah. 

CALDWELL:  And get people in that way. 

JASPER:  That'd be great.

ERIC:  I mean, we end up getting into media crit a lot here at Games and Feelings. But I— you know, the reason why is that Nickelodeon has a relationship with the NFL. So they like take football, again, very much the brain scrambling sport—

CALDWELL:  Yeah. 

ERIC:  —and, and try to sell that to kids. And they simulcast it on Nickelodeon. So then Disney was like, ‘oh, no, wha—what do I do?’ 

CALDWELL:  ‘Shit.’

ERIC:  ‘Shit. We are—’ and then they did it for the NH— for hockey, the most regional of all of the sports—

JASPER:  Truly.

ERIC:  —here in the United States, which is wild.

CALDWELL:  I mean, hockey of all the sports I think has the ability to be most ascendant. I just went to a hockey game. I went to an LA Kings game- with Murph, actually. And it was so fun. Hockey’s really fun! And it's like so—

ERIC:  Hockey is the be—is the best type in person game. A 100%.

CALDWELL:  Hockey is like the one sport that like took all the notes. From like people that were like, th—they took all the crit. 

JASPER:  Yeah.

CALDWELL:  They're like, ‘okay, four quarters, that's too long, you're right. You know, we're gonna lose a quarter. And you know what, like, excessive violence, everyone's tamping down on that? Not us.’ 

JASPER:  Yes.

CALDWELL:  ‘No, we're just gonna let people get slammed up against walls.’

JASPER:  ‘The bit when you get annoyed because they— the ref comes in and stops them from fighting? Yeah, we'll get rid of that, like it's fine.’

CALDWELL:  It's also—the thing I forgot about hockey is that like, the sound carries so well. Every time they slap that puck you hear—

JASPER:  Ooof.

CALDWELL:  With like perfect resonance, it's so good. It is—it is ASMR-esque.

JASPER:  You have to go to a hockey game to really appreciate why the keeper has to be dressed like that. Like why the guy in the goal has to be dressed like that? Because as soon as you hit one of them pucks, get slapped, you're like ‘hell no.’

CALDWELL:  Yeah!

JASPER:  Like I can guarantee you now. For like— there is nay amount of money in the world that even with all that padding on, you would— would let you pump one of those things at me, no! It's almost certainly going to find a weak point—

CALDWELL:  Oh, yeah.

JASPER:  —or in between a pad, or just in my— in between my visor. I sudde— I'm gonna die. Like 100% convinced— 

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

JASPER:  —I'm gonna die.

CALDWELL:  And like every other sport they fill the ball with air, as a safety precaution, where hockey’s like, ‘No. An obsidian circle.’

ERIC:  This is a wonderful transition actually into the games that are giving us feelings.

CALDWELL:  Ohh.

ERIC:  Which is the segment we do first where we talk about a game that's giving us feelings. Doesn't have to be contemporary game. It can be any of the games on the game spectrum, we talk about here in Games and Feelings. And we just need to assign an adjective to it like we're doing a Live Journal post.

CALDWELL:  Hmm.

ERIC:  So I want to continue this conversation about minor league sports. 

CALDWELL:  Yes.

ERIC:  Go see a minor league hockey or baseball game!

CALDWELL:  Can't beat it. 

ERIC:  It's honestly incredible. We were just—hockey is I think the best sport and I love basketball, basketball is my sport. But hockey is still the number one sport I love seeing in person. I still have—my— my grandparents lived in Erie, Pennsylvania for a very long time.

CALDWELL:  Okay.

ERIC:  Which is just like it is the belt buckle of the rust belt. It is the cool cowboy on the belt buckle of the rust belt. And they had a minor league hockey team called the Erie Seawolves. And I pro— we went once when I was 10, and I still remember how much fun it was.

JASPER  Wait sorry, can we just clarify—

ERIC:  Yeah?

JASPER:  Erie Seawolves, is that the name?

CALDWELL:  Yeah, that's the name.

JASPER:  That's so cool.

ERIC:  The— yeah, like the Erie Canal… it was real— they didn't have a lot going on. 

JASPER:  That's so sick.

ERIC:  They just kinda came up with it.

JASPER:  That's a great name.

CALDWELL:  Is a Sea Wolf—is that a real thing? Are Sea Wolves like a thing? Are there like coastal wolves that are out there catching fish and I guess playing in the sand? Or is that just like a purely made-up thing?

ERIC:  I did Google it immediately. And apparently, there is a Netflix movie called The Island of the Sea Wolves.

CALDWELL:  Oh, hell yeah.

ERIC:  So I'm gonna go ahead and say yes and not Google anymore.

CALDWELL:  A unique strain of wolf that lives in the rainforest along the Pacific coast of Canada. I'm just really excited for these wolves. They're out here—

JASPER:  Yeah, right.

CALDWELL:  —you know what, they're getting wet and wild, and I'm really proud of them. 

ERIC:  And they're also playing hockey in between Pittsburgh and Cleveland. 

CALDWELL:  Yeah!

ERIC:  So no matter where you are, and this can be also in Europe because I mean, Jasper you—we talk about soccer all the time. 

JASPER:  Yep, mmhmm.

ERIC:  My favorite thing about soccer is the number of leagues there are and everyone's out here playing the sport.

JASPER:  Yeah, yeah.

ERIC:  And you can just go to your local thing. If you're in the United States, go figure out— 

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

ERIC:  —if you have a minor league baseball team, it's April— it's gonna be summertime—

CALDWELL:  It's season.

ERIC:  It's baseball season,  baby!

CALDWELL:  Uh-huh.

ERIC:  Baseball fever.

CALDWELL:  Here's the thing - if you're looking for a good place to eat a hot dog, you can't do any better.

ERIC:  Than a minor league baseball team. Than a minor league baseball game. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

CALDWELL:  Me—I— my main goal in life is just to find good places to eat hotdogs and like I’ve found no better than a minor league sporting event. 

JASPER:  Caldwell, I'm out in—I'm out in LA in May… we’ve got to go to a baseball game. I've never been to a baseball game before. Ever. 

CALDWELL:  You've never been to a baseball game?

JASPER:  I’ve nev—

CALDWELL:  We’ve gotta take you to a game.

JASPER:  —when would I have ever been to a baseball game? We have rounders—

CALDWELL:  I don’t know! 

JASPER:  —at like schools.

CALDWELL:  I—maybe they played cricket and got really confused.

JASPER:  Nah. No no. I— also I hate Cricket, cricket sucks. So I've been vocal about that on this show before and I won't back down from it. I hate cricket, it sucks. So I'm gonna see if baseball can do any better, because in my head they're basically the same, except for you have to just be careful where you hit it, which is dumb.

CALDWELL:  Right.

JASPER:  But whatever. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.

CALDWELL:  Okay, well let's—you know what, let's try it out. 

ERIC:  Caldwell, I would really like to challenge you because I know there's—

CALDWELL:  Okay.

ERIC:  —like seven baseball team— Major League Baseball teams in the LA area. I would love to challenge you to take Jasper to a Minor League team, because the first thing I thought of was, do they have a minor league team in San Luis Obispo? And yes they do - they're called the Blues.

JASPER:  Oh, okay.

ERIC:  So I'm challenging you to try to find one of the like, hour away from LA, Minor League baseball teams to take Jasper to.

CALDWELL:  Jasper, do you want to just have like a wine country weekend and take–

JASPER:  Oh, my– Caldwell, Caldwell, you're talking to me—

CALDWELL:  You're—

JASPER:  —in my la—my language, let's go.

CALDWELL:  Let's—what's more romantic than getting married and instantly leaving your wife to go on a wine country weekend with your boy?

JASPER:  The joke is I'm quite literally, I have 24 hours in between my honeymoon and flying to America, so it’s kind of not like exactly untrue.

CALDWELL:  Hey, you know what I want to say? Pass the honey, my man.

ERIC:  Take—take in that Blues game, baby, that's how we do it. The—the image is in fact a baseball that looks like a Bluesman. It's really—really good.

CALDWELL:  I—I got to check this out now.

JASPER:  I love it.  Absolutely.

CALDWELL:  Apo—apologies for the delay. San–

ERIC:  No, it's important because also my favorite thing about Minor League Baseball is the designs of the teams. I mean, I’ve said this about–

CALDWELL:  You're speaking my language.

ERIC: The—I literally just— so I just bought a ha—a new hat and they have a lot of minor league baseball hats that they sell through New Era which is like the hat company. I just bought one— so it's the Hudson Valley—the Hudson Valley baseball team it's a High A minor league baseball team. Very ver— it's not— it's really, really low, Jasper. High A is like near the bottom of the minor league—

JASPER:  But it's called High A.

ERIC:  —rosters. But they— a lot of the—yeah, yeah. So the—the—a new thing they're doing with New Era is taking like alternates of mascots, which is a thing—

CALDWELL:  Oh wow. Yeah.

ERIC:  —that minor league baseball is so good at doing like promotions, like it's a wrestling—like it's wrestling. And I got a apple cider donut hat for the Hudson Valley High A baseball team. It's coming - I bought it last night. I am excited about Minor League Baseball is I think the adjective I have to assign.

JASPER:  ‘Excited.’ I love it. 

CALDWELL:  I'm just doing some like word salad poetry in my Google search bar. ‘Hudson Valley, minor league baseball, apple cider donut.’

ERIC: Yes, they're the Hudson Valley Renegades and they— for the 2023, they're doing— like there's an apple cider donut mascot.

CALDWELL:   It's just incredible. 

JASPER:  That does sound incredible.

CALDWELL:  I love this guy.

JASPER:  I'm 100% down for that. Wow.

ERIC:  So, it's everything I ever wanted. One: upstate New York. Two: new hat. Three: apple cider donut. Bang, bang, bang.

JASPER:  Pew pew pew! Completed.

CALDWELL:  This rules. It's also worth mentioning that they're from Fishkill, New York. 

ERIC:  Definitely. Yeah, dude.

JASPER:  Fishkill, New York?

ERIC: Yeah dude.

CALDWELL:  Fishkill.

JASPER:  What?! So basically what happened is, the Americans got bored of taking all the names that we’d already done.

ERIC:  Yeah.

JASPER:  And then just picked— ‘I don't know, the fish. We kill them. Fishkill. Done. Move on, next one.’

ERIC:  We couldn’t do ‘Croton-on-the-River-by-the-Bush-that-We-Love.’ That was already taken.

JASPER:  And a part of it is already—this is the wild thing I found out that was like, for like every name in England of like— or like common name like for a town or something in England, there's quite literally probab—almost certainly double the amount in America.

CALDWELL:  Oh, certainly.

JASPER:  Which is so— like Man—there's quite a few Manchester's. There's like so many Manchester's in America, it’s wild.

CALDWELL:  Yeah, we got bored quick and then we just went to professions.

JASPER:  Fishkill. I want to go to Fishkill, New York. I—

CALDWELL:  Me too, I want to get the apple cider donut. I love an apple cider donut. 

ERIC:  It's in— it's incredible. 

CALDWELL:  I don't think I’ve ever had one.

ERIC:  Jasper, it's so good. I—unfortunately, it is a fall thing. So—

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

ERIC:  We can't do it when you're here. But if you're back on the East Coast during fall, I can make that happen.

JASPER:  Alright, I— I’ll— yep, I'll come back in October. I guess— that's what I'm doing.

ERIC:  Yeah, perfect. Yeah.

JASPER:  I mean, honestly, if I tell—if I tell my then-wife about apple cider donuts, 100% she'll be like, ‘okay, cool, so when we going? Let's go.’ 

ERIC:  Oh, sure.

JASPER:  She's a big fan. She's a big fan of the donuts. So like—

ERIC:  It's like, ‘alright, you know, Eric, from the podcast? He has this hat, right? And it’s this town called Fishkill…’ 

JASPER:  And at that point— and at that point, I can tell by the time I go— as soon as I go ‘You know, Eric from the podcast?’ she's already zoned out. Like she's already somewhere else mentally.

ERIC:  I have to meet Jade, so she doesn't tune me out like hearing country on the radio, like come on. 

CALDWELL:  Do they—when—when you get the hat, does it come with apple cider donuts in it? Is that like an option? Is it like, you know, when you—when you get fish and chips, and it's wrapped in the newspapers, it's just like, like the package deal.

ERIC:  Caldwell, for how much I'm paying in shipping, I wish. But no.

CALDWELL:  I just think that– that as a rule in general, we should be— I— because you—you buy a hat, and there's just so much empty space in there, you know what I'm saying?

JASPER:  It’s a bit  like giving someone a wallet with no money in it, you know what I mean? 

ERIC:  Exactly, yeah.

JASPER:  Isn’t it like a tradition, that you're supposed to give someone a wallet with like a, you know, at least like a pou— like you know, some currency of some sort in it.

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

ERIC:  Yes.

JASPER:  You should have a hat—

CALDWELL:  A little bit in there.

JASPER:  —and you should fill it with something.

CALDWELL:  Just feels rude. Like, yeah, just fill that bad boy with M&Ms or something like that. I don't know, this is a waste of space.

JASPER:  What a lovely surprise that would be when you just whack that thing on your head. And just M&Ms come raining down, that'd be great.

CALDWELL:  A little rainbow shower to—to break in your new hat.

ERIC:  Good, this is good, this is good stuff. 

JASPER:  This is fantastic.

ERIC:  Alright. Either one of you, which of you would like to—

JASPER:  I'll jump in very quickly. 

CALDWELL:  Please.

JASPER:  Mine, my game is Fox—The Fox in the Forest.

ERIC:  Yes.

JASPER:   It's a two-player, little card game. And pre-wedding, it's been— it's been nice to play a little card game, for just the two of us and try to forget about the stresses of planning a wedding. So we've quite enjoyed this. It's sort of like, it's a quite fun little— it kind of is like literally like a card game. Like it has like the same values on the— on the cards that you would. And basically, it's all about like collecting little tricks. But the idea is that only one person can win, like kind of a round, and you don't want to get too many. And you kind of get to a point where if you get like, I don't know, I think it's like 0 to 4, another person gets like 12 or higher or something like that, then— then they will lose. So you have to kind of like game it out, where you either get the most or you get like none. And it's really fun because you'll get a couple rounds in and you'll start to like, ‘oh okay, I guess this is the strategy I'm committing to, like, I have to now lose every single round.’

CALDWELL:  Woah.

JASPER:  And you're—and then your opponent will be like, ‘oh no, I need to lose now!’ And so it's quite a fun dynamic because you have to actually think about whether you're gonna win, whether you're going to lose... And a lot of the time you'll just kind of win because you just get dealt an insanely good hand, and you're like ‘okay, now I need to get— because I've gotten past a certain point, I need to now get three wins, otherwise I'm gonna lose.’ And so it's quite a fun little— quite a fun little game, which we enjoy playing. So yeah, The Fox in the Forest - and it's making me feel calm.

CALDWELL:  Ohh. Are all of the cards like animal themed? Or how does it—what is—what is like— the artwork like—

JASPER:  They're all like Fox Theme.

CALDWELL:  Oh, okay.

JASPER:  Yeah, it's like— it's like the really stunning like little intricate drawings of like different foxes with like, kind of like almost like differ powers. Like there's just— like different families basically. There's like a bell, I think a moon, and a key?

CALDWELL:  Okay, so there's different like suits?

JASPER:  I think? Yeah, it's kind of like— yeah, exactly, it kind of like suits. And then like on each one of them, it's got like almost like different like adventurers or foxes or like sometimes an item and they’ll all be able to do different things. I think like one is always like a swan. And that basically is like, if you play that one, you always then get to go next or something like that. So there's like—so like different cards will sometimes just normal, like value cards. And then you'll get like ones that have certain abilities attached to them and stuff like that. So yeah, it's—it's super, super fun. I think there's other iterations of it as well, where it's not just two player, but that one's a— a ton of fun. And it's just a lovely— it's a lovely two player game that you can pick up like super quickly.

CALDWELL:  That seems great.

JASPER:  Because we're always on the hunt for— for cool two-player games and ones especially that we don't have to spend like a long time figuring out how to play. We just kind of want to get into it. So yeah.

CALDWELL:  Foxes are great. Of all the forbidden dogs, I do love a fox. Most—first and foremost.

JASPER:  Especially those gray ones. 

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

JASPER:  Sorry, the black ones with the little gray muzzles. 

CALDWELL:  Oh my gosh.

JASPER:  Oh, they're so cute. Wow. 

ERIC:  I'm a— I'm a coyote boy myself.

JASPER:  Oh yeah.

ERIC:  If only because coyote— I am in the part where coyotes don't exist. And I'm like, ‘that's a dog.’

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

ERIC:  ‘I don't know what you're talking about, that's a dog.’

JASPER:  ‘Why are you worried about it? That's a dog. That’s a dog.’

CALDWELL:  ‘Yeah, you don't have to worry about one snatching your kid.’

ERIC:  True.

JASPER:  Speaking about forbidden dogs, they're back in the UK. We've got forbidden— we got the big ones. We've got wolves back in the UK. 

ERIC:  You've got wolves again?

JASPER:  They're being reintegrated. I think along with bison, which I was like, ‘What?’ Like we—we had those in the first place? That seems like a big— a bit too big for us here in England.

CALDWELL:  This is—you know what—

JASPER:  All our animals are very small.

CALDWELL:  I'm blaming those damn sea wolves, they commissioned a boat and they just came right on over.

JASPER:  Yeah, exactly.  They just came—they just came over. Yeah, no, but we're— we're reintroducing wolves into the wild because of— we're trying to control population of certain— I think I want to say ermines and things like that, that are just kind of—

CALDWELL:  Ohh.

JASPER:  —currently like—

ERIC:  Sure.

JASPER:  —like a lot of the ermine family are just like run around like thugs, like ‘yo what up, we own this food chain.’ Like and it's like well you shouldn't.

CALDWELL:  ‘My stomach’s too long!’ 

ERIC:  ‘I want to be on Love Island, can someone make that happen?’

JASPER:  ‘Get me to the villa!’

ERIC:  ‘I want to have some chat, I want to see some birds.’

JASPER:  Oi bruv, oi bruv.

ERIC:  Oh we killed Jasper. Jasper has to leave the vantage point of his webcam because he's laughing so much. 

CALDWELL:  I’m just picturing a little stoat with like a gold chain, like a flat Bill cap. 

JASPER:  It's like tanned as well, like it's like clearly meant to have white fire but it's just kind of like gone a bit orange. Oh man, that's funny, that's pretty funny.

CALDWELL:  Just going into a pub and seeing this little freaking weasel right there. 

JASPER:  ‘Love Island Villa’— like ‘Weasel Edition.’ Just a bunch of weasels walking around. Oh fuck.

ERIC:  ‘Yeah, I just want to get a Cheeky Nando's in the garbage outside of the Nando's!’

JASPER:  Eric, stop, please.

ERIC:  Yeah, we’ll stop. Jasper, we—I— Jasper, you can take a breath and breathe.

JASPER:  I can't have one.

ERIC:  Caldwell, tell us some games that are giving you feelings.

CALDWELL:  So, um, I feel like I've like mixed feelings on this one. But I started playing Fantasian which is like an RPG that came out for the Apple Arcade for iPad, or just like for Apple devices a while back. It's made by Hironobu Sakaguchi, who is like the original Final Fantasy creator. And like the whole kind of pitch of it, is that every background is like handcrafted. It's like all of these like handcrafted diorama. Not every background, but like a surprising amount of them were actually made. They're like little miniature sets. So like, you'll be looking, and you'll be like, oh like all of the trees in this are like that sort of fake model tree you'd see in like a fake railroad station, like in an miniature railroad set or something like that.

JASPER:  Oh, okay.

CALDWELL:  Or there'll be like a little bookshelf, and you can see like hand-painted details on all the little books and like hand-placed tiles. It's just this like beautiful labor of love with a kind of mediocre JRPG story pasted over it. But I feel like— despite it being you know— mediocre maybe makes it sound like I'm not enjoying it. It's not mediocre, it's more just like, standard. It's like it's got all of the— the tropes of a JRPG. We got like a villain who's got like extra arms and a big sword, and he's like, you know, clearly not even the main villain. He's some sort of like mid-villain that I'm going to team up with later. It's got like, all of the tropes in there. I'm like, the—the background art is like so gorgeous and is making me realize like how much I loved like that PS1 era of JRPGs where like all the backgrounds were these like beautiful, like pre-rendered sets. And yeah, it's just like something, it's like an aspect. The music is also by Nobuo Uematsu, so like it's pretty great as well. Yeah, it's just like making me focus on a detail of games that I didn't normally focus on. And it's like giving a little more—a little more shine, a little more spotlight to that. So I guess my adjective for it would be endearing, does that work? Is that—is that an adverb? 

JASPER: Yeah.

CALDWELL: Shit.

ERIC:  No that counts, that counts.

JASPER:  It’s fine. We play fast and loose here.

ERIC:  Listen, if you—much like on Live Journal, if you don't know what to say, you can just say quixotic, and we're fine.

CALDWELL:  Great, I'll just post a Death Cab for Cutie lyric and be on my way.

ERIC:  Caldwell's soul is leaving his body. But I have a follow-up question.

CALDWELL:  Yeah?

ERIC:  You know, there—there's like that artistic quote, I don't re— sometimes it's attributed to Tom York. But it's like a thing, where it's like, the restrictions of a particular art form then becomes—

JASPER:  Yeah.

ERIC:  —the thing that people love about the art form. And I kind of love where we are in video games, where we're calling back to specific eras of games. Recently, we went to PAX East.

CALDWELL:  Oh, nice.

ERIC:  And in order to get people, we were tabling and to get people over, I was making them play me on my GameCube. I still have my GameCube from— from 2000-2001, the one that my grandparents got me.

CALDWELL:  It's got the handle, it's easy to bring around.

ERIC:  It was wonderful, and it was— I'm playing Super Smash Bros Melee was like, oh, I like this, it feels so specific. And I know everyone plays Ultimate, and Ultimate is truly the ‘everyone is here’ of— 

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

ERIC:  But like, that also means it got flattened out in a way that things are in our modern world. So it's kind of funny that you're reaching, you're like, oh, I like this because it reminds me of 1999. 

CALDWELL:  Yeah, there's like limiters in place to kind of try and squeeze something fresh out of it. Yeah, it's just, they're gorgeous. And then like, whenever you hit like the pause button, it brings up like a full photograph of like the diorama and you can like see, like the full scope of it. 

ERIC:  Oh wow.

CALDWELL:  And it's like, yeah, it's making me realize something about like the type of games that I like. And I really like kind of artbook simulators, where you're just kind of like walking through and enjoying some good art. That's kind of why I like Pokemon games in general. I feel like a lot of times like the story and like the mechanics don't grab me as much, but like, I love seeing the little guys. I love seeing a collection of little guys. It's also why I like, I guess shows like My Hero Academia, where it's just like a bunch of different like, types of like drawings and arts and like explorations on a theme. And I always— always like seeing that. So yeah. And—and I feel like this is—this game has given me that in droves. 

JASPER:  Nice.

ERIC:  Hell yeah. I like My Hero Academia, because I like the idea that everyone has a thing. 

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

ERIC:  I kind of feel like I feel that way from like a—from a games perspective. And you feel that way from an artistic perspective. 

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

ERIC:  I like that. That's true, that's very true. I like that a lot.

[theme]

ERIC:  Hey, it's Eric, and I picked up some snacks for Games and Feelings. I have chicken tenders! Now, you might have remembered a little bit of— a while ago, I had chicken nuggets that were shaped in the you know, shaped like dinosaurs. But here's the thing, chicken tenders have to be from a specific place on the chicken, the chicken breasts tender, which is a little piece of meat that's like inside of the breast. While nuggets are made from ground chicken meat, including the breast and thigh meat, that's formed into nuggets. Now you might be saying, ‘oh, but what about chicken fingers, what is that?’ Well, here's the thing, all chicken tenders are chicken fingers. But not all chicken fingers are chicken tenders, because they're made out of full pieces of breast meat. But if it's not the actual tendy, then it doesn't actually count. And please don't even get me started on boneless wings and popcorn chicken. The point is, I have snacks, it's the mid-roll. If you like me coming up and telling you all about chicken fingers and the wonderful guests we have here in Games and Feelings like Jasper, but also Caldwell goddamn Tanner, you should support this wonderful independent content and join the Patreon at patreon.com/gamesandfeelings. We are redoubling our efforts over on the replay exclusive feed. We just recorded a bunch of episodes. And I finally figured out how Patreon’s scheduling actually works. So they're going to come out on every other Friday as they should. There are over 25 episodes worth of exclusive podcasts. So just hop on, it's only $5 a month. That's like less than what they would ask you for Twitter Blue. That's like almost 60% of Twitter Blue and it's going to someone who's not a garbage person - that's me and Jasper. We—we do pay Jasper because he's great and he deserves to be paid. And also shout out to producer-level patrons Polly Burrage, Kelsey Duffy, and Peyton, who let their little cousins have fun playing video games by giving them a controller to play with, even if it's not plugged in. But it's a funny memory for that cousin and brings you all closer instead of a resentful one. Think about how they were kind of fucked over. patreon.com/gamesandfeelings, be like Polly, Kelsey, and Peyton and the other wonderful people who are gamers and feelers. I think you should listen to the other shows on Multitude, I think you'd like Spirits. Spirits, it's spooky! You can listen to Spirits wherever you get your podcasts. We are sponsored today by Shaker & Spoon, a subscription cocktail service that helps you learn how to make handcrafted cocktails right at home. Every box comes with enough ingredients to make three different cocktail recipes developed by world-class mixologists. All you need to do is buy the bottle of that month’s spirit. And it might be a spirit you don't know. It's not just like tequila or whiskey, it might be Apple Jack, it might be mezcal. It might be Aperol. It might—there's so many different choices. And they make— they make it easy for you to become a mixologist and make 12 drinks at home. Now you might be thinking, ‘this is a box, obviously, it's going to be garbage ingredients.’ Well that's not the case. They are sending things like little tinctures that you use to mix in cocktails. They're sending things like dried blood orange peel. They're sending a full nutmeg nut. I didn't learn what a nutmeg nut was until Shaker & Spoon. They're blowing my mind and they can do that for you as well. And it's only for $40 to $50 a month, which is incredibly effective if you're going to turn into a cool mixology person. So invite your friends over, class up your nightcaps, or be the best houseguest of all time with Shaker & Spoon. Get $20 off your first box at shakerandspoon.com/gamesandfeelings. If you click the link, they are really nice. Shaker & Spoon is a wonderful company that shares a lot of the revenue of when you pay that first box with us. So let them know that you came from us by clicking the link and spend with them because they're a wonderful company. shakerandspoon.com/gamesandfeelings or check out the link in the episode description. And now back to the games.

[theme]

ERIC:  Well, I actually do have one question. 

CALDWELL:  Okay.

ERIC:  To start. For a start now we're doing the advice portion, where we can actually help some people.

CALDWELL:  Yeah!

ERIC:  And you know, talk about stuff. Caldwell, you professionally give advice on Not Another D&D Podcast as part of Dungeon Court, which is - not to dissmerch— besmirch the other things that are on that feed - my favorite episodes on NA—on NADDPod. Are you prepared, as a professional advice giver, to continue to give more advice?

CALDWELL:  Well you’re —you're misconstruing a little bit. I don't give advice, I give punishments. 

JASPER:  Yeah, yeah. That's very– that’s what I was gonna say.

ERIC:  You’re there when people give advice. That's right.

CALDWELL:  Yeah. There might be some advice mixed in, but like it culminates in a punishment. It culminates in them being punished for their misdeeds. Some people might get advice, if they are not, you know, in the defendant seat. If they're like you know, in the crossfire of the case, they might receive a little advice. But like, let's, let's— we're there to dole justice, the advice is secondary. 

JASPER:  Yeah, right. And yeah, they can either get a punishment or they can take the croissanting, though, that's very important to clarify to people.

CALDWELL:  Exactly.

JASPER:  People can take the croissanting if they choose.

CALDWELL:  Always an option.

JASPER:  Always an option. 

ERIC:  I like now that Games and Feelings is like the community management version of dismantling the Dungeon Court industrial complex.

CALDWELL:  But you know, yeah, I'm not wearing my robes right now. I'm not taking the bench so I can give a little advice. 

JASPER:  Eyy!

ERIC:  Wonderful. I would love to start with a question. Again, when we have someone who has very specific expertise, I really want to ask them very specific questions.

CALDWELL:  Okay.

ERIC:  Because we have you here, because you know, I'm looking at my notes here. You can draw good is what I wrote down. But I know that sometimes you post fan art of your own PCs, your own player characters—

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

ERIC:  —you've been playing on NADDPod. And also do fan art of lots of stuff. How does it feel drawing fan art of something that you came up with from your own mind?

CALDWELL:  It feels good, therapeutic almost. I feel like it's like part of the process for me. And I’ve realized, I don't often do it until like, after it's happened. I rarely do like fan art leading up to like character creation. It's always like, something that occurs like after a specific like benchmark or like, if I'm trying to like process, like a change in a character or like a story decision. And I feel like it helps me like unwind a little bit and like kind of focus on decisions that have been made. Like most recently, I switched subclasses, and I did like a drawing to like, illustrate that switch, because I was like, trying to figure out how I wanted to visualize it. And specifically, how to, like describe that change when I'm playing. So I just needed to like commit it to paper. So yeah, for me, I guess it is kind of like a— specifically it's like a kind of reflex in the process. And I'm glad that you said fan art as well, because like that is fully what it is. I think like one of the best parts about being a podcast is like, people can interpret it however they want. And I always try to like call it out as that where it’s like whenever I'm drawing something like this is fan art, this is like my take on it. Like we—we do this as a podcast for a reason. So yeah.

JASPER:   I—I have a question, a follow-up question, which is that, in your mind, do you see—

CALDWELL:  Yeah?

JASPER:  —your characters like in the art style that you draw in? Because I've always been fascinated by this by artists like whoever says like quite a specific style, like how do you visualize it? And then because does that mean that you can draw it really specifically to like exactly what you pictured? Or does it change into your art style because you picture it differently? 

CALDWELL:  Unfortunately, yeah, it's just— it's cartoon brain all the way down.

JASPER:  Yeah, I thought so. I assumed so, like having—having spent some time with you. I was like, I think it's cartoon brain like mine is too. I think we’re almost the same.

CALDWELL:  Yeah. That's kind of the exciting thing about like, seeing fan art and reactions to the show is when I see people's drawings that are in a different style, like oh, yeah, that's better, huh?

JASPER:  No, no, no, no, it's just less colorful.

CALDWELL:  I think— I don't know. Just from like, working in like an artistic field and storyboarding stuff like that, the animation brain rot is just too deep. The worms are fully set in so like, I can't see it any other way. 

JASPER:  Yeah, I—I feel that.

ERIC:  So I gotta make them a circle, So they look like a friend. That’s the–

CALDWELL:  Exactly, yeah. This one’s spiky, don't touch!

JASPER:  Go do big teeth.

ERIC:  Yeah. Look I—

JASPER:  There's no other way.

ERIC:  Look, I drew it on two’s. Look, it's on two’s. Did I, did I, did I say it?

CALDWELL:  You did it!

JASPER:  You did the thing.

ERIC:  I know as much about animation as Cartoon Network, I nailed it.

CALDWELL:  Wow. Get—get this man an X Sheet.

ERIC:  I don't know what that means. I'm giggling. This is great. Alright. Let's go to the—let's go to the question.

CALDWELL:  Please.

ERIC:  It would be great. Wonderful. Okay, let's—so these are real people who write in and sometimes we give them fun, like advice column names, very ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ names, but sometimes—

CALDWELL:  Ohh.

ERIC:  —they write it themselves. And this is from ‘Modest Main Character,’ she/her. “Hi!” Hello, Modest Main Character.

JASPER:  Hi, Modest Main Character.

CALDWELL:  Hello!

ERIC:  “My question is - what is the ultimate cure for main character syndrome?”

CALDWELL:  Huh.

ERIC:  “I play a variety of table top RPGs with the same friend group. We all get along great, and we’ve never had any real issues. However, I recently realized I may be suffering from a severe case of MCS - Main Character Syndrome. A real ‘Caul is coming inside the house’ moment,” which is what they wrote. Very funny that they wrote that. “I never talk over others or interrupt someone else's roleplaying moment, but I realized compared to the others, my characters have a lot more interactions with important NPCs and when we split the party, my character always gets the A story, while the rest of the party sort of hangs out waiting for me to return. No one’s said anything about it and our GM seems to encourage it. But I feel bad potentially hogging the spotlight.” 

JASPER:  Ooh.

ERIC:  “On the other hand, I feel like if I'm not speaking, there's some awkward pauses. How do I encourage the others to be also become the main character they were meant to be, and give them ample opportunities to shine?”

JASPER:  I just want to say before the advice, I’ll let Caldwell jump in first, but what a lovely person to like, actually seek advice.

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

JASPER:  The rest of us are out here just being like, ‘I'm the main character, move out of my way.’ So like—like we don't— truly don't care.

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

JASPER:  Like so I just want to say well done to you.

CALDWELL:  I love nothing more than going home to my wife and being like ‘dude, I fucking kicked ass tonight.’

JASPER:  That’s what I mean. Congratulations—

CALDWELL:  It’s all about me.

JASPER:  —to this person for being so self-aware. 

ERIC:  I think that I Hannibal Lectered myself. Because I know how dangerous I am, which is why I forced myself to the beat of the DM. So I distribute this amongst all the other NPCs.

CALDWELL:  And honestly, I think you might have stumbled on a something there, Eric, which is like this person, they might be ready. They might be ready to take the reins. This might be like a sign that you like— the growing pains you're feeling about main characterism, you might be ready to step into the DM seat. Because then you—you like your essence as a main character, you become so full of characteristics that you need to split those out. You need to divest those into a series of NPCs.

JASPER:  Yup.

CALDWELL:  You're ripe, my friend.

JASPER:  You're ripe. Pick—pick of yourself and become the fruit that you were destined to be. 

ERIC:  As we always say on the show, just do it, it's not that hard, I promise. Just do it.

JASPER:  Just do it.

CALDWELL:   Yeah. 

ERIC:  I also want to start out with a— another like caveat here. You don't have main character syndrome if you're writing this in.

JASPER:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. True.

ERIC:  You don’t.

CALDWELL:  True.  

JASPER:  Yeah, yeah.

ERIC:  You are self-aware and you're being very nice. And it sounds like you're more extroverted than your friends. 

JASPER:  Uh-huh.

ERIC:  Which is fine, but you are not a bad person. 

CALDWELL:  I will bet that your DM is grateful to have you.

JASPER:  Yes, that’s exactly what I was gonna say.

CALDWELL:  Cause it sounds like you are the person that like interacts with the people like moves the story forward, is always like investigating and inquisitive in a way that like helps the DM like get to the next pages of their notes. So yeah, I guess like the only advice we can really offer for like how to, you know, encourage the other players to act out more, is just to like, I guess give them— give them time to shine. I don't know what class you're playing. I don't know if they said, or even if it's like D&D, or if it's some other game. 

ERIC:  I'm—they did not say specifically, they play a bunch of different tabletop RPGs. So I think they're also concerned that this happens over different games too.

CALDWELL:  Uh-huh.

ERIC:  Like this always happens. 

CALDWELL:  Yeah, it's a little—I mean, like maybe again, this all goes back to you being ready to DM you're just— your— your tree is— is full of fruit. But I think that maybe you could start like asking the other people at your table like questions that are like, DM adjacent being like, ‘what do you think we should do?’ Like, ‘how are you feeling about this?’ Like, you can ask it in character, but you can kind of like, delve into that and use that like that DM tool and be like, ‘how are you feeling in this moment?’ Like, ‘what do you think— what do you want to do here?’ Like kind of take a step outside of the story, but while still remaining inside of it. Yeah. 

JASPER:  And I'd say like, if just on a mechanical thing, something that I quite enjoy doing is if I—if I noticed that like, I didn't have a proficiency in something, but I'm aware that I've been talking a lot, I might say, like, hey, does anyone— is anyone else like particularly good at like with nature, or with religion, or whatever, I'll help you. So instead of me doing the roll, I'll assist you in doing the roll. You'll get advantage, and then you get the moment, you get the information. But like—

CALDWELL:  That's really good.

JASPER:  —it kind of guarantees, you're probably going to do okay, like, if you've got advantage, and I'm asking someone who has proficiency, or you know, whatever that adjacent is. Like that from a mechanical point of view is something that you can do even if you're not a support class. You can just say, hey, I'm not too good at, you know, Arcana stuff, you know what I mean, magic isn’t my jam. But I reckon there’s probably something to investigate here. You know, that is arcane. So anyone that's good at that, jump on in and I'll help you out. And then—

CALDWELL:  That's brilliant.

JASPER:  That DM should give you advantage. Should give them advantage because you're using the help action. And you get to roll twice and all that good stuff. 

ERIC:  Yes. I would love to buttress that for Jasper, to just— to just continue to build the seawall up to keep the Sea Wolves away of this point.

CALDWELL:  They're coming!

JASPER:  [Howls]

ERIC:  They have crossed the ocean, they're in the Chunnel! 

CALDWELL:  Oh, fuck, where did they get those jet skis? No!

ERIC:  No, they're using the Chunnel to go to France now. No!

JASPER:  No, not the Chunnel!

ERIC:  Not the Chunnel! All that is to say I use the channel to mean going from the United States to England. 

JASPER:  Sure.

ERIC:  To abuse Jasper. 

JASPER:  Yeah.

ERIC:  So I just want you to know that I know what the Chunnel is. I'm just being intentionally stupid.

CALDWELL:  We—we can all dream. We can all—

JASPER:  Main lines from Manchester to New York. It actually main lines from my house to Eric's house. That's actually—I think that's Games and Feelings, uh Games and Feelings canon and lore now. 

ERIC:  I assume that's how the Internet goes.

JASPER:  Yeah.

ERIC:  It goes through the Chunnel that connects our houses. 

JASPER:  Yeah, yeah. 

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

ERIC:  I want to support this point by saying I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this person consumes actual play content. And in my head, the say— doing the thing that Jasper said, feels a little gauche. Like ‘oh, I got to do the whole scene, and now oh, I actually can't roll can somebody else roll for me, so that I roll high?’ And I think that I want to— and I want to put—and I don't know if that's my own thing, if that's just like, because I've been doing this for so long I—that's in my head. You can do whatever you want because no one's watching. Like, do that.

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

ERIC:  The best parts of not recording a game—

CALDWELL:  Relish it.

ERIC:  —is that you can just do that shit. And I don't think it's weird, I think it's you are just— because again, if you're not all willing to be media creators, like some of these people just might feel a little I don't know subdued and that's cool.

JASPER:  Yeah.

ERIC:  So I think offer— telling them to do that thing. But Jasper suggested you should do that, and don't feel like you are pulled back on this. I also have this idea that you are also on Reddit too much. Because you think you have main character syndrome. I think you're overcompensating when you do stuff like this.

CALDWELL:  It's true like if the cameras aren't rolling, like just use it to blow off steam. I've—I've been getting to play—

ERIC:  Yes.

CALDWELL:  — in a home game of late for the first time in a long time.

JASPER:  Oh, what's that like?

CALDWELL:  We spent like an hour just trying to compose a text. We spent an hour trying to compose a text to someone, and it felt so good because we were just like throwing ideas around, there was like no need to like move things along. Its just meander, meander my friend.

JASPER:  Meand— What I wouldn’t–

CALDWELL:  Go forth and meander.

JASPER:  –give to meander in a game. I truly— I have tru— I've scheduled and canceled more games in the last year that I have played in. Like it's really upsetting.

ERIC:  Jasper, when you're in New York, I will run a rules-light game for you.

JASPER:  Please! No, no, no, give me all the rules, give me all the juicy rules. Let me just like live in a world and a bath of dirty filthy rules that I can min-max the shit out of, and not worry that anyone's gonna come at me on the internet because I did too good a job and I kicked everyone's ass. That I can just do whatever I want. That's— I wanna main character syndrome the shit out of it. 

ERIC:  Jasper, we don't even have to play D&D. We'll play Masks. We'll play Masks, man, it'll be great.

JASPER:  Yes! Yeah, perfect. That’s what I want.

ERIC:  Yeah, that's just what— that's just what I wanted to say to that. Does anyone have any other ways? I think another way to the specific question that they asked is ‘how do I encourage others?’ - when you split the party, grab another character and pull them with you.

JASPER:  Oh yeah.

CALDWELL:  Yeah, I mean, to follow the sitcom rules, where it's just like who was I paired with last? Like we— oh, we haven't been together in a while, like let's see what happens when we mix these people up. Yeah, absolutely, that's— that's great. Chandler and Phoebe, what are they going to talk about? 

ERIC:  Yeah, well, it's not— wow, Chandler hasn't really rolled a lot for the last few episodes. I'm gonna pull him with me and do the—

CALDWELL:  Could my sword be any bigger? Come on, please, please. 

ERIC:  We were in Initiative!

JASPER:  I was desperately trying to think of one for ‘how you doin?’ and I got nothing. I came up with nothing. 

ERIC:  How about just ‘how you doing,’ and I roll charisma?

CALDWELL:  How about ‘how you two-ing,’ and you rolled a two?

ERIC:  There you go. 

JASPER:  Hey, ‘how you two-in’?’

ERIC:  That's good.

CALDWELL:  That one’s specific, but it might come up. That's good.

ERIC:  I was rereading the question and just going back to what Caldwell said about your GM likes it. Let me read a let—a line from your letter back to you. 

CALDWELL:  Okay. 

ERIC:  Modest Main Character. “No one has said anything about it, and our GM seems to encourage me and has even said they enjoy giving me the fun storylines because they know I'll run with it.”

JASPER:  I mean, that's your answer right there. Like come on, yup. Don't take the DMs toys away. Like you're good. 

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

JASPER:  Like, let— let— be good. 

CALDWELL:  Yeah. You're helping your DM, who I imagine is your friend as well, have a good time. So don't feel too bad about it. 

JASPER:  And I wouldn't even be surprised if the other players are sat there like loving your— like, if they're not naturally outgoing people, they're probably loving seeing this very outgoing person, like have a bit of a main story or whatever it—do you know what I mean, maybe?

CALDWELL:  Yeah. 

JASPER:  And then them kind of stepping into and around that, do you know what I mean like, I definitely enjoy doing that. Like I love just sitting back and watching people just roll, like yeah.

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

JASPER:  Yeah, this is sick.  I'm cool. I'm gonna, I'm just gonna chill back here and drink a whiskey. 

CALDWELL:  I'm really worried that the next case is going to be all the other people at the table saying that they feel like they're not getting enough time. 

JASPER:  The next one is just like, ‘so we've got this player at our table and they definitely have main character—

CALDWELL:  Sucking up the air.

JASPER:  —they just have main character syndrome. They—they keep sa—like they keep saying how the DM likes it and encourages it, but the DM cries every session because they just hog all of the limelight. 

ERIC:  So I have a question here from ‘Knights of the Introverted Table’ pronouns they, because it's multiple people…

CALDWELL:  Okay.

ERIC:  Okay, great. Wonderful. Okay. Yeah. You're in your head, you're fine, you're fine. Alright, I have another question here about being a little precious about— about your Animal Crossing Island. This is from ‘New New Horizons’ pronouns also she/her. “At the beginning of the pandemic, I logged over 400 hours on Animal Crossings New Horizons.” 

CALDWELL:  Fuck yeah. I was right there in the trenches with you. 

ERIC:  Yeah. That— Joe Biden gave us that, that's why no one wants to work. We're playing Animal Crossing. “Naturally, I burned out on the game. I didn't touch it for a year and a half.” Fair.

JASPER:  Yeah.

ERIC:  “Recently, I've had the itch to go back, and I think it could be fun and refreshing to start over. But I'm unsure if it's worth losing all that data. As I run around the island, I can see the hours I put in making custom designs and all my cute areas. Plus, Animal Crossing is one of those games where you can get a ton of quality-of-life improvements the more you play. Should I just say fuck it and start over? Or should I compromise and pick up a game like Stardew Valley, which I haven't played? XOXO Animal Crossing girl.” 

CALDWELL:  I mean, absolutely play Stardew Valley, I've heard amazing things about it. It looks really fun. But I feel like you don't have to be too hard on yourself. You could just like, the Switch allows you to create multiple profiles. Like you could just have—you could have your main profile, and then you can have like another profile, that's like, you know, say—what—what was their name again? 

ERIC:  New New Horizons. 

CALDWELL:  Yeah, you could have a ‘New New Horizons’ and then you could have ‘New New Horizons (dark mode)’ or something like that. Or like—

JASPER:  Oh, ‘Boo Boo Horizons’, New New Horizons’ evil cousin, you know what I mean?

CALDWELL:  ‘Two Two Horizons.’ 

JASPER:  Yeah, ‘Two Two Horizons.’

CALDWELL:  There's variations here.

JASPER:  So many profiles you could make.

ERIC:  I would love to encourage the Stardew Valley thing you said. Again, I haven't played it. My wife Amanda plays it a lot. And every time she tells me something that she's doing in Stardew Valley, I'm like, that's in this game? Like there's a wizard in there? There's like forest spirits called Junomos, there's a lot going on in that thing.

JASPER:  Woah.

CALDWELL:  Yeah, woah.

ERIC:  So I think it might be worth it to like dive in and see what else is there. I think that like Animal— everyone assumes all games are Animal Crossing, that's in like this farming thing. But it's like there—there certainly are layers. I mean, you could also play the—the ha—so basically the Harvest Moon people can't call it Harvest Moon anymore, but then they're calling it a new name. And it's— and there's a new one coming out. It's— but like you can also do the Disney one. You can— there’s—

JASPER:  Yeah, yeah.

ERIC:  —this genre is everywhere. So I think that maybe if you are feeling conflicted, do the thing Caldwell said because that was the answer. But also, like definitely play some other games. Yeah.

JASPER:  Yeah. And I think also it's okay to acknowledge that like, starting a new game is fun. I'm a bit of a new game-like person, like I'll ki—I enjoyed the starts of games a lot more—

CALDWELL:  Yeah, yeah.

JASPER:  —than I tend to enjoy the middle or the end. And like, sometimes I feel guilty about it. I'm like, ‘just complete the game.’ And I'm like, ‘nah, I want to play it again from the start.’ And I'll just do that.

CALDWELL:  Buddy, I just spent 80 hours in Octopath Traveler, and I will never finish that game. 

ERIC:  Oh my god.

JASPER:  Yeah.

CALDWELL:  I got 80 hours logged, everyone's leveled to all hell. 

JASPER:  Yep. 

CALDWELL:  And I'm just not going to finish it. And like, I've made peace with that, and you just need to do that.

JASPER:  You just need to do that sometimes.

CALDWELL:  That's the way to live your life. 

JASPER:  Yeah, exactly. I can't tell you how much I hate the feature where it tells you how long you've played a game. Like it's the least—

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

JASPER:  —my least favorite development on—of the gaming industry. My Steam tells me how long, my PlayStation tells me how long and I hate it. I'm like, why, I don't want to know.

CALDWELL:  I don't need to know this. 

JASPER:  I don't need to know this. Because let me tell you, I'm glad this wasn't always a thing. Because if Fallout Three had a damn hour counter—

CALDWELL:  No.

JASPER:  —it would be hideous to have seen—

CALDWELL:  It'd be over.

JASPER:  — how much time I invested into that game? Like now I'd look back and be like, cool, I would work out and be like, oh, I wasted half a year of my entire life. You know what I mean? Like, like not wasted, but you know what I mean like I was sat there playing this—

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

JASPER:  —game for half a year of my whole damn life, was just playing that one game like… 

CALDWELL:  If you're— if you're like itching for Animal Crossing, this kind of loops back to what I was saying before about, like, enjoying a specific aspect of a video game. Maybe just throw on the soundtrack. 

ERIC: Oooh, that's a great idea.

CALDWELL:  Honestly just throw on some of that low-fi soundtrack and that might scratch that itch for you. Because like, again, I'm never going to play Octopath Traveler ever again. But I do listen to the soundtrack like once a week because it fucking kicks ass. It's so good.

ERIC:  Go to a community garden and have —and have a K.K slider go [makes trumpet noises]  in your head and you're doing it, you’re there.

CALDWELL:  Yeah. 

JASPER:  Done.

CALDWELL:  Oh man. 

ERIC:  The game that I was thinking of is called Story of Seasons.

CALDWELL:  Ohhh.

ERIC:  That is like the—it's— it's Harvest Moon but basically they lost the name of Harvest Moon.

CALDWELL:  Right.

ERIC:  So—but there are new games coming out called Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is coming out summer 2023. 

CALDWELL:  Okay, yeah.

ERIC:  So If you want to be on the—on the farming tip and go back to where all this came from, just hop on that.

CALDWELL:  Either that or I mean, you mentioned Dreamlight Valley if you want to like give Olaf some corn. If you want to do that.

JASPER:  Can I—can I offer another one, which is you could also—

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

 ERIC: Please.

JASPER:  —jump into Goat Simulator. 

CALDWELL:  Ohh.

ERIC:  Oh yeah.

JASPER:  It's a real game.

CALDWELL:  Can you farm in that?

JASPER:  It's a real—I don't know. But I feel like it's adjacent enough. And I've never had an excuse to bring up Goat Simulator in a public setting before. And this is the on’—this is the closest I've gotten. I think you just play as a chaotic goat who's just a bit of a shithead. But like, play Goat Simulator.

CALDWELL:  I really like the idea of an asynchronous multiplayer game where one person is the goat and the other person is desperately trying to grow their crops. And then you're just trying to fuck up their crops.

JASPER:  Woah. That's kind of like reminds me of a—what's the Untitled Goose game? 

CALDWELL:  Yeah!

ERIC:  Yes, I was just thinking that.

JASPER:  You’re just there and try to ruin people's day. That's fun. That's a lot of fun.

ERIC:  Yeah.

CALDWELL:  But imagine if one person is trying to have a normal day and then they are up against their nemesis, the goose.

JASPER:  Yeah.

CALDWELL:  And then you’re playing simultaneously. I guess I'm just pitching this to people who make games.

JASPER:  I have a fun kind of goose-related story, but it's just very brief. My friend basically got to play Untitled Goose Game every single day for a year and a half. Because he played the goose in the show that I did—it's a play called Warhorse, which uses these really big fancy puppets. And—

ERIC:  Oh, yeah, yeah.

JASPER:  —one of the puppets is a goose. And it basically runs around the farm. It's very articulate, like its head and its neck and it can peck and all this kind of stuff. And effectively his job on the stage was just to put all of us off. And to like— just like come and peck at your laces. Or like chase you out of a door, or like—and just basically steal the whole entire scene, and it was quite fun—

ERIC:  Of course.

JASPER:  —because then what Untitled Goose game came out, I think like, on the day that it was released was whilst we were on tour, and he got sent it on WhatsApp by like 10 members of our company being like you have to play this, this is your game. And he was like ‘please stop sending me references to Untitled Goose game. I get it guys.’ 

CALDWELL:  Did—did your friend have to honk? 

JASPER:  Yeah. Oh yeah, fully. Yeah. 

CALDWELL:  Wow. 

JASPER:  He honked through whole thing.

CALDWELL:  I'm looking at this goose now. This the— the goose in question is amazing. Because it's like, it looks like some sort of like steampunk villain. 

JASPER:  Yeah, yeah totally, its got little wheel feet.

CALDWELL:  Like a minor villain, a minor enemy in a steampunk game.

JASPER:  Yeah, yeah. It's got a little wheel feet like where its got—

CALDWELL:  It's got a wheel. 

JASPER:  It's got three feet and then they all—like on a wheel which then rotate, so it kind of looks like it's walking. It's quite cool.

ERIC:  Oh yeah, I love that thing in Metal Gear Solid when they were like ‘metal goose’. 

CALDWELL: ‘The secret weapon.’ 

ERIC: If you plug in your controller into the third slot you get to play as a goose.

CALDWELL:  If you crack an egg into your PS1, you unlock the goose.

JASPER:  That's how you unlock the goose.

ERIC:  The guy's a genius. He’s a genius.

JASPER:  He knows what he's doing.

CALDWELL:  ‘Snake, are you hungry? I saw that you cracked an egg!’

ERIC:  Jasper, I truly thought that this story was gonna be like ‘my friend was the— was living this in real life because there was a goose tormenting him in a small British town.’ 

JASPER:  It just attacked him. It just attacked him.

ERIC:  And that's how we unlock Jasper.

JASPER: Yup.

ERIC:  You unlock Jasper in that game.

JASPER:  Yup. Yup, yup. No, that to be fair, that probably could be and would be true. There's a canal that runs through the center of Manchester. And if you walk along it at the wrong time of year where all the geese have the little— little, little, little what are they called the geese children? Geeselings?

CALDWELL:  Ohh, goslings?

JASPER:  Goslings, there we go. They have all the little Ryans—

CALDWELL:  Yes!

JASPER:   —running around and like they—they get aggressive, like they will just fully hiss at you and run at you and I see people nearly falling into the canal it's a nightmare down there. So— it honestly it is true. That does happen. 

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

JASPER:  Geese over here are— do not give a solitary fuck. Like I genuinely can't—

CALDWELL:  No.

JASPER:  —express to you how little fucks geese give. They just— they want to mess with you— they want to mess with your day, 100%. All the time.

CALDWELL:  Yeah. Geese are like the half-casters of the animal kingdom because they're like very aggressive and they have good attack but they also have spells like they can cast Grease and make you slip in shit. So like, they're really good for battlefield control.

ERIC:  They're their own Cast Steed. They're always trying to tell you about your deity which they pledged to.

CALDWELL:  The Eternal Honk.

JASPER: It turns out it's just a swan that doesn't give a shit about their existence. It's just a swan.

CALDWELL:  It's a swan boat.

JASPER:  It's a— it's a little swan boat with the little peddlers, with the two seats in them, yeah. Really.

ERIC:  It doesn't matter if— it doesn't matter what they do. They're all oath breakers because they're fucking geese, they’re doing—

JASPER:  Yeah, they're just the worst. They’re just the worst.

ERIC:  They have no code of conduct—

CALDWELL:  They’re just the worst.

ERIC:  —just honk. Oh god. Okay, really quickly, let's go back to the question.

JASPER:  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ERIC:  So, okay—

CALDWELL:  I'm already building the character sheet in my head, go on.

ERIC:  Yeah. Goose paladin, nailed it.

JASPER: Goose paladin.

ERIC:  We're all gonna be silent for 5 minutes while we work on our character sheets. Yeah, let's go ahead to the answer— listen, I think Caldwell was right. Just make a new profile. Because I mean, I do want you to do a new one. I think Animal Crossing—

JASPER:  Yeah.

ERIC:  I know—I know and— that the tutorial of Animal Crossing sucks. But like, just because Tom Nook introduces you to capitalism again.

CALDWELL:  Uh-huh.

ERIC:  In a thing you're trying to do for fun. But like, I think starting over and redoing stuff is— isn't that though—I feel like that's the whole point of a—

JASPER:  Yeah.

ERIC:  — very, very good video game. Right?

JASPER:  I love it—yeah, my favorite. It's my favorite thing to do. The excitement of a new adventure. 

CALDWELL:  You get to meet Isabelle all over again.

JASPER:  I think especially—anything that's like resource collecting and stuff like that. It's like, the excitement of doing it over is like because you can go— you can go to a whole different strategy, a whole different kind of like, do you know what I mean? So the game can genuinely feel very, very different, I think. Versus like—

CALDWELL:  Yeah, oh true.

JASPER:  — a more linear game where starting again, you're like, ‘ah, the same level I gotta beat the same dude, and I kinda know how to do it.’ Like there's a lot of repeatability with like simulation style, resource gathering, those kinds of games.

CALDWELL:  Yeah, maybe treat this one almost like a horror game where like you know that K.K slider is coming and you have to prepare for him.

ERIC:  It's Resident Evil 2, K. K slider will bust through your house at some point during the—during the game.

CALDWELL:  You don—you don't know when, you just have to make every possible preparation for when K. K. appears.

ERIC:  Mr. K, to you.

CALDWELL:  Mr. K. Ha-ha!

ERIC:  That's real new horror movie trailer of you. That like there is a slowed-down version of K.K. Sliders' song coming, played in a minor key.

JASPER:  Yeah.

CALDWELL:  [K.K Slider impersonation]

ERIC:  Haaaa! Haaaaa! Haaaaa! You know the one thing you don't lose when you restart a game? Your knowledge. You don't have to like relearn how to use flowers. You don't have—

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

ERIC:  —you don't lose your custom designs. You just gotta like re-enter them, and now you can probably plan your stuff better, and you'll do it faster. 

CALDWELL:  That's very true.

ERIC:  I’m sure you have to like re— reset your island at least once when you're— with your stuff. I've been kicking myself about this a lot. Because like, I played Elden Ring for the first time last year because everyone, it's an incredible game. And I never played a Soulsborne game before.

JASPER:  Woah. Woah.

ERIC:  And so I just kind of threw myself into it. I loved it. It was great. I got stuck on one boss, on the fire giant. Because I hadn't optimized my character. I didn't know what I was doing. Of course, those games are so incredibly arcane. You gotta look up like five Wikis to do it.

JASPER:  Yup.

ERIC:  What I really wish that I had done is like min max my character so I could have beaten the game. 

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

ERIC:  But I had to reset my entire thing to do it. And I was like, 30 hours in.

JASPER:  Yeah.

ERIC:  But if I had just pushed through, I might have had a better time getting there. 

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

ERIC:  But I mean, like, I also might have not like found all the stuff that I had. So I was kind of kicking my—that's why I didn't do it, and I kind of just stopped playing. But you know, you keep that knowledge in your head, which is why New Game Plus is fun. And why so many people do it.

CALDWELL:  Yeah, it's good to be good. It feels—

JASPER:  It does. It's—yeah. Especially with anything that involves like some sort of feats of like strength or skill or whatever. Like, if you're a normie in real life, and by a normie I mean like anyone who's not like an elite athlete or something.

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

JASPER:  Then being dope with a sword is— it's probably going to be fun. Like it's probably—that's probably the reason you're playing this game. 

CALDWELL:  You—you get to be Billy Madison, but you have a giant sword. You're just like—

JASPER:  Yeah, boom.

CALDWELL:  —going back to a low-level area and passing all the tests.

JASPER:  Exactly. If you only got as far—

CALDWELL:  I guess the Billy Madison analogy doesn't perfectly make sense because he was stupid and didn't know anything. But like, imagine that you like a college graduate, like go back to like a second-grade class.

ERIC:  Imagine if Happy Gilmore was in—

JASPER:  Yeah, there you go.

ERIC:  —Billy Madison. 

CALDWELL:  Perfect. 

ERIC:  He's playing golf and owning fourth graders.

CALDWELL:  I'm not up on my Happy Madison lore.

ERIC:  Alright, just—imagine we cut an hour of talking about grandma's boy and we're back.

CALDWELL:  Okay, yeah.

ERIC:  Caldwell, it is so nice to have you. Thank you so much. 

CALDWELL:  Thank you for having me.

ERIC:  I'm so glad— if you need to fulfill the itch, is there anyone you want to punish? Or are you—are you off the clock?

CALDWELL:  I'm off the clock. These people, they're all fine. They're all doing great. 

ERIC:  Okay.

CALDWELL:  These questions were like so nice. I feel like we get some real like, drama-drenched questions on D&D court. But these are just like folks trying to be like, ‘am I doing my best?’ And friends you are.

JASPER:  And the answer is yes.

CALDWELL:  Yes, you're doing your best.

JASPER:  Yeah on D&D Court, it just like this person is the fucking worst, and let me tell you why.

ERIC:  It's like alright, hey, here's my— here's my cousin, he fucking sucks but I still said he can play in my very important to me Dungeons and Dragons game.

JASPER:  Yeah.

CALDWELL:  My stepdad won't stop cooking fish while I'm trying to play D&D. He's got the grill going right in the corner.

JASPER:  In the same room.

ERIC:  I told him, this is important to me, but it's still okay if he keeps making fish, and he kept making fish!

CALDWELL:  He's grilling haddock everywhere, and it's his turn.

JASPER:  And two of my players are allergic to seafood. They keep going home, it's a problem.

CALDWELL: And also I'm related to one, and I'm married to the other.

ERIC:  And they keep telling me, ‘tell your stepdad to stop making fish.’ And I keep saying, ‘he's trying his best, but I’m suspecting he’s not.’

CALDWELL:  He’s trying his b— He said he wanted to make his character a fishmonger. So I understand. But like you don't have to go that far. 

JASPER:  He's just got like a portable barbecue that sits on the table that he could grill at. The temptation for me to actually write this question out, send it in to Dungeon Court, so that one day, it might get read out and Caldwell will know and the others will have to answer like it's a very earnest question is hilarious.

CALDWELL:  I’ll take it to my grave.

ERIC:  ‘So I fina— so I finally talked to him and we compromised and he said that he would use an electric grill, but then he came back and he charcoaled the next session.’

CALDWELL:  ‘It set off the CO2 alarm and now my house is ruined.’

ERIC:  ‘And my wife is very upset, what do I do?’

JASPER:  ‘Wha’—yeah, ‘what do I do?’

ERIC:  And then Jake's— Jake's like, ‘I don't know. Sounds coo—sounds like a cool guy.’

CALDWELL:  I mean, yeah, it really comes down to how good the fish is.

JASPER:  Yeah, honestly, if it’s really good. I had a salt bake—salt baked sea bass once. If you get me fish that quality, then you can stay. Wow you ca—  I don't care.  You can stay. We'll get new players, I don't mind.

CALDWELL:  Yeah. You can get new players, you can't get that good of fish. 

JASPER:  Exactly.

CALDWELL:  That's a rarity.

JASPER:  Exactly. Exactly.

ERIC:  Of course. Of course. Caldwell, I'm sure you have stuff to go do, so we're gonna let you go. 

CALDWELL:  Okay.

ERIC:  We can literally do this for a whole another hour because again, we spent that whole hour talking about grandma's boy.

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

ERIC: Caldwell, where can people find you if they liked what we're doing—

CALDWELL:  Ohh.

ERIC:  —If they loved you here.

CALDWELL:  You can find me on Twitter @caldy. And then again, NADDPod is a NADDpod.com or patreon.com/naddpod. So yeah, check me out there.

ERIC:  Hell yeah. Hey, Jasper. Where—after getting married, can people still find you, is that okay? 

JASPER:  Yeah, like you're not gonna find me for a minute but then I'll be back with a vengeance. I'm gonna come back swinging so hard because I'm gonna be on like two back-to-back breaks away from home.

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

JASPER:  That's when I get my most Instagrammy. So if you want to follow me at my most Instagrammy follow me @JW_Cartwright. I'm on Three Black Halflings. I'm on the Performance Capture Podcast. Sometimes I'm on NADDPod, that happens.

CALDWELL:  Yeah.

JASPER:  Some stuff with me on it.

CALDWELL:  I could see you coming over to this— the ‘twodio’ while you're in town.

JASPER:  I—I’m probably gonna—I’m probably gonna be like ‘hey, bruv, family, can I crash at your place again?’ So I'll probably sit in the ‘twodio,’ wait for you to start recording, and then just refuse to leave.

CALDWELL:  That's the strategy.

JASPER:  That's honestly the way I’d do it. That's how I got on the last Dungeon Court. So, I’ll just do the same thing again. But yeah, Eric where can people find more of you on the internet?

ERIC:  Oh me, who me? 

JASPER:  Yeah, who you.

ERIC:  You can find me on social media @El_ Silvero. EL _ SI L V E R O. My name if I was lucho libre wrestler. Keep send— keep sending your questions in to Games and Feelings. We love answering them and we've helped some people, as you've seen. Also, hey, go check out  Join the Party, that's the other show that I do that I’m the DM of. 

JASPER:  Yes!

CALDWELL:  Hey!

ERIC:  It's real—It's real fun. If you didn't know, our current campaign is a pirate story set in a world of plant and bug people.  And we're having a really fucking good time.

CALDWELL:  That sounds great. That sounds great. Well, I need— I have so many questions. 

ERIC:  Caldwell, it's like One Piece meets Redwall with some Plants and Zombies— vs. Zombie story. It’s really fun stuff.

CALDWELL:  [Groans] I’m biting my finger. 

ERIC:  Yeah. And also, your—hopefully you'll see me on Dungeon Court as well when I ask Caldwell if I can come on. So hopefully that will happen.

CALDWELL:  We agreed to do that after the show, man. 

ERIC:  Oh, ok—Oh, shit. Oh, no.

JASPER:  Oh fuck, oh uh, oh no!

ERIC:  No, no, no, now I’m never gonna go. 

JASPER:  It's okay, we edit the episodes, we can take it out. We can take it out! 

ERIC:  Take it out. Mishca, take it out!

JASPER:  Mischa!

CALDWELL:  Thank you. Thank you so much for having me again. This wa— this was a blast.

ERIC:  It was really wonderful, this was so much fun. And as always, there's nothing in the instruction manual about putting an egg in your PS1. It’s a secret, just do it.

CALDWELL:  An egg?

[theme]

ERIC:  Games and Feelings is produced by Eric Silver and edited and mixed by Mischa Stanton. The theme music is ‘Return to French Toast Castle’ by Jeff Brice. And the art was created by Jessica Boyd. Find transcripts for this episode, and all episodes, at our website: gamesandfeelings.com. Until next time, press X to enjoy the podcast.


Transcriptionist: KA

Editor: KM

Proofreader: SR

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Mamoswine and Golurk Are Eric Silver’s Favorite Pokemon

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Derek Jeter Doesn’t Like My Boyfriend! with Amanda McLoughlin