073: Leading a touring Actual Play with Russell E Welch III of D20 Tales

Courtney: 0:08

Hello and welcome to Role Play Grow, the podcast for tabletop entrepreneurs, creators and fans. In this show, we dig into processes, challenges, tips and really look at how to grow a business in the tabletop role-play gaming space. Sit back and join in as we learn from the creators behind your favorite brands about who they are and how they are turning their passion for gaming into a career. Welcome back, friends. It is so lovely to be back after yet another surgery. I’ve had three surgeries since the show started, which has certainly put a damper on getting episodes out as often and consistently as I’d have liked, but I am finally feeling mostly human, am happy to bring the show back and hopeful that I will be done having surgeries on my sternum. And yeah, I also have a pretty fun surprise coming soon too in how the show will be taking on a bit of a new format in every other episode. Let’s just say we’re still going to be having interviews on a bi-weekly basis, but there’s going to be something a little different in between those longer episodes. Stay tuned. Alright, we have another repeat guest today. I am welcoming back Russell E Welch III, the DM and CEO of D20 Tales, a company putting on some very high quality D&D actual plays. Russell was last on the show in episode 53, which was released back in May of 2022. It was pretty fun to come back over a year later and chat about how things have evolved for D20 Tales. Also, I got to hear some really fun stories about how they’ve been touring their actual play in live shows at certain conventions and it was a pretty fun conversation. If this is your first time tuning in to Roleplay Grow, hello, this podcast is a part of Lightheart Adventures, which is a small company I co-founded with my husband. We also do blogs, one-shots, maps that you’ll find over on our website, lightheartadventurescom. I get to chat with so many amazing folks across a wide spectrum of industries within the TTRPG scene, so be sure to subscribe to Roleplay Grow on your favorite podcast player. One way you can support the show is by checking out our affiliate links, which we have compiled for you over at lightheartadventurescom. You’ll find information about some of our favorite tea, dice, coffee, podcasting equipment, email marketing service and more the only link to things that we personally use and enjoy, so you can grab yourself something awesome while helping support the show. Again, go to lightheartadventurescom. You can also find links to our favorite trinkets to learn more. I am super happy to be back. I hope you enjoy this chat with Russell. Hello friends and welcome back Russell. How’s it going?

Russell: 3:01

It’s going splendidly. Greetings and salutations one and all. I am Russell Eugene Wilts III. Yes, that is in fact my real legal name. That’s why I use it, because it’s probably the most interesting thing about me.

Courtney: 3:16

There’s a lot more interesting things about you as well. I mean, you currently are setting and you have a dragon basically on top of your head and you are surrounded by dragons and I’m going to be very distracted this entire time. I just need you to know that.

Russell: 3:30

I was going to make a joke about it being like a confusion spell, but then I couldn’t muster any of them from D&D to mind, except for the one for fairy lights or whatever, but I couldn’t remember quite what it’s called, so I guess that joke died on the vine.

Courtney: 3:48

It isn’t very good to have you back, Russell.

Russell: 3:52

Thank you. It’s glad to be back, then, since last time, according to my inability to track time.

Courtney: 4:01

Yeah, no, to be fair, I looked it up earlier today. It’s been like how long has it been? So the last time that I dropped the episode was May 20th of last year, 2022. So it’s been over 13 months since that released. I don’t actually remember how long it was between when we recorded and I released probably like a month, I don’t know 13 months. Yeah, you had just rebranded to D20 Tales. In fact, you were still spawn of chaos when we recorded, but by the time the episode was dropping it was going to be D20 Tales, so it was like right in that transition.

Russell: 4:38

I remember this Fuck, I thought that was like six months ago. I’m getting old too fast. It keeps every year that I get older, I get older faster, and then I’m like damn it.

Courtney: 4:50

I think it’s just that it’s been a really weird couple of years where, on the one hand, it feels like some things take way too long and time is stretching on forever, and then, on the other hand, I’m like, oh, I mean, I saw you in person, like we hung out and that felt like a week ago and it was not.

Russell: 5:07

That was great. It was so. You helped me discover an awesome ice cream place, so that was pretty great.

Courtney: 5:16

Yeah, that was so. When I was a week out recovering from surgery, I got to meet Russell and Rose in person in Michigan because we were staying with my mother-in-law and realized that they were only like 40 minutes away. So we got some beer and ice cream.

Russell: 5:40

Yep, it was pretty great. Unfortunately, more of the Michigan crew wasn’t available at the time because Paige and Caleb previously occupied, I think, had gone like tubing or something occasionally like that, because we have lots of water here in Michigan.

Courtney: 5:57

I haven’t been tubing in a long time.

Russell: 5:59

I think I’ve been tubing since I was a kid. I should Like I live around all over the Great Lakes, but you know I’d have to stop working and go outside for that to happen.

Courtney: 6:08

In the like two months where it might actually be warm enough to do.

Russell: 6:12

That too. Michigan is like Michigan. Michigan will trick you. I’m not even talking about TTRPGs, but let’s talk about Michigan for a second. So, like there’s like three weeks, anywhere from three weeks to three months per year, it’s completely indiscriminate how much. Where the weather is just to drop dead, gorgeous, beautiful and you’re just like I love it here. This is amazing. I could live here forever. This is heaven on earth. And then the rest of the year the weather is like I hate you, Suck. You should suffer. How dare you live here? Did you think this place was hospitable? Yes, it’s hospitable, but you’re going to suffer because it’s going to be annoying.

Courtney: 6:49

Yeah, the first time I went camping, like outside of youth trips or like school trips growing up, was actually in August in Michigan and we went to the Upper Peninsula and it was like, all right, it’s August, it’ll be great. It was like a high of 50 the whole time, yep, very cold and windy and wet and like kind of miserable.

Russell: 7:14

And a lot of bugs up there, a lot of bugs you know besides me.

Courtney: 7:20

So it’s been 13 months since you came on to role play growl and a lot has happened. A lot has happened. A lot has happened. I would love to dig into what’s been going on in the Detonetales world. Like I know that you’ve got, like Planeshriders, a whole new series. You’ve got other fun things that we’re going to talk about, but just talk to me about the last year.

Russell: 7:48

Shoot where to begin. So we’re going to do the heavily cliff noted version. So we’ll start with the new campaign. Since you mentioned it, we were running Herald’s of Way in Our Anemisers the ancients two campaigns at the same time very ambitious and we were recording all of them online and they both had big casts because characters came in and out and we swapped them around and then we were in between the two shows. I think total, we had something like 20 plus people in the cast and then two shows to edit and release back and forth. It was a bit too much. It was a very ambitious endeavor. It really was my fault because when I first held auditions, there was too many people who were too great people, who were too talented and I wanted to give them all recognition and give them all a shot and I wasn’t willing to like cut enough people and let them go because they were just, they were great people and they were so talented and I wanted to work with all of them and so I did and I bit off more than I could chew and so we essentially burned up most of our capital running those shows and then I was like, ok, I need to do something a little bit more realistic and sustainable. So we switched to plain striters. We took all the lessons we learned from our previous content and we moved to recording in person, which was the right decision, because, as much as the content before was near and dear to my art and I loved it and all the people playing it, there’s just you just can’t be playing in person like playing in person is just, it’s just electric, it’s just powerful. And especially when you have people who from our previous cast, people who had now a year plus experience working with and playing with each other and building chemistry Phenomenal job also with plain striters we took way more time building up to it. We took, I think it was three or four months before we recorded the first, even practice, session of like actual taping where the cast sat down and built their characters together and we built the campaign and the characters together. Obviously, I withheld most information from them, but I drew inspiration from how they were building their characters as a team and building their chemistry off of each other, which, just for anybody listening, I would. If you can with a group, I would recommend it. I would recommend trying, as a party, building your characters together with a shared backstory or a shared history, or just collaboratively working, not just to like, balance the party or anything like that, but to be truly invested in each other’s storylines and share a storyline and share that investment, that the role play, the story, everything else it’s phenomenal, it’s just next level. It’s crazy what you can do when every single player is deeply invested in the world and each other.

Courtney: 10:42

So you say you spent like three to four months like building the characters, building that campaign, without giving much away. But what did that look like? Like how often were you guys meeting?

Russell: 10:56

So the whole group would meet once to twice a week for anywhere from two hours to more hours, depending on how much time we had available, but I would also throughout the week. We had tons of other meetings that were several hours long, plus between all the different people, where I would just every single different pairing of the cast members is I would have them sit down with each other and work out between the two of them, because essentially Plain Striders they were raised by a pirate to be pirates. They’re like Robin Hood-esque pirates in space is basically what Plain Striders is, and they grew up together. So I would have them, as a group, like work out stuff like that that done as a group, shared history that they had like things that had happened together. But then we had tons of extra meetings throughout the week with all of the other characters where it’s like here’s the history that you two have together, here’s stuff that two of you have done without everybody else. Everybody had like story and back history that they had with all of the other characters on a personal level, on an individual level too, things that they had done together, adventures that they had had conversations We’d have conversations with. Like here’s what do you guys like and what do you guys not like about each other’s personalities? Like when the two of you face conflict. How do you respond to it? How do you respond to it? Let’s role play it. What does your character not like and not like about how this other person deals with conflict or doesn’t deal with conflict? And it just really dug into so deep into how they feel about each other. When we started playing the show, it truly felt like that these characters had known each other for a lifetime and grown up together, because they just like bicker and act like siblings.

Courtney: 12:43

I think that is really special. You can tell when watching or listening to like the first episode of an actual play and being like this is your first time ever playing together versus like oh, I feel like I’ve missed some part of the story, like there’s because you’re just so connected already.

Russell: 12:59

Yeah, and credit to all of them. They worked their butts off and they did a phenomenal job and they really wanted to be invested in each other’s like stories In back history. It wasn’t something where it’s just like a DM, as I was, like I back in, like you will get along. You will like you will be invested in each other’s characters in the story. No, they wanted to do it, they liked it. It was a thing that we talked about as a group of like for lessons we’ve learned from our last campaign. What do we want to do to take our new one to the next level, not just for the audience Like, obviously we want to create content for the audience that’s engaging and fun but for ourselves too, like to just have more fun and really enjoy it. Like what something we could all do. And the thing that everybody had said before is is that everybody wanted to know more about each other’s characters and everybody wanted to have more of a shared history and chemistry that they could work off of. Like, the angle we came from with Harold’s and Emma’s series is that everybody came from like totally different parts of the world and totally different backgrounds and we got to experience them having like cultural and philosophical differences where, like, everything was like a clash and a battle and they bought up about it, which was a lot of fun and exciting. But we wanted to go in the other direction and try something else, do something that, as far as I’m aware, I don’t know of anybody else who’s done, an actual play that I’m sure someone has and I just don’t know of it. But I don’t know of anyone else who’s done an actual play that spent that long, everybody as a party building kind of the story and the characters together. Then I get to have the pleasure as the DM, of just running with all the stuff that they created for their character and that we established for the world and the environment that they grew up in, and then making a story out of that and then making a bunch of secrets.

Courtney: 14:52

I think it’s always the best part. So you’ve mentioned lessons learned a couple of times now.

Russell: 14:58

Yes.

Courtney: 14:59

So, in addition to just wanting to like, have more of that character connection ahead of time, like what are some of the other things that y’all you know either liked or didn’t like about what you did the first to go around, that you kept or changed as relevant this time, so the biggest lesson that I learned this is the thing that I would change, if I was going to change anything if I went back in time is that and that’s.

Russell: 15:23

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with our content and we did something bad. But for anyone else who’s trying to create a TTRBG or is just curious about a TTRBG, or May, in the future, any kind of actual play, I will tell you don’t start with video. Do audio only for a year. Master your audio. Master the process of getting content out. Master the process of wrangling a cast in a production. Master a process of figuring out your socials and your posting schedule. Figure out, like your branding. Figure out your voice as a DM. Figure out your creative process. Figure out your editing for the audio side of things. Figure out your pacing and distribution as a team and really just also hammer out your chemistry as a group entirely, not just as creative people who work together, but also the most fun part, in my opinion, which is the sitting down at the table of the actual playing, of the actual play. Do audio first. Don’t add video. Video makes everything a lot more work, and jumping in editing two video shows where we had to remotely record everybody’s audio and video from all over the world in multiple time zones and then patch that together from such a big cast. Too ambitious, too ambitious. Just do audio first. Master your audio, take it in baby steps. There’s nothing wrong with not doing everything all at once. So do what I say, not what I did.

Courtney: 17:04

Yeah, I can definitely see that this is an audio only show and I don’t know if I’ll ever feel like doing video, and it feels like even just audio editing takes a lot of time, especially if you do have people all over the country in different time zones.

Russell: 17:22

Yeah, we had people in Germany, we had people in Australia, we had people in South America, we had people in the UK. We had several people in Europe. It was interesting.

Courtney: 17:34

I did not realize there were that many countries in time zones. Yeah, that would be really hard to wrangle.

Russell: 17:42

Yeah, everybody worked their asses off to make it work to their testament. There’s such a great group of people. If I had a hundred million dollar budget, I would bring them on full time in a heartbeat, bring them all back, but I barely have the budget for what I’m doing right now. But yeah, some people on the team, though. On that note, it was pretty funny because a couple of people on the team would joke that the sun never sat on the D20 Tales Empire because we had virtually every time zone represented. There was always someone awake working on D20 Tales around the clock. I was like maybe we don’t want to compare ourselves to the British Empire, but I understand the joke. I think it’s a clever joke that some of the team members came up with, but maybe let’s not compare ourselves to the British Empire.

Courtney: 18:30

Talk to me about what it’s like to record in person now.

Russell: 18:34

It is both way more work and way less work, but the work that is there, the new things are things that you can actually control. It is so nice for me to be able to actually like touch everybody’s mic and camera and lighting and actually, you know, control all of those aspects. Not to make me sound like a control freak, but you know you do have to do a good job on a show. If people are poorly lit, poorly mic’d and poorly taped, it’s not going to go great. So being able to actually touch all of the equipment and make sure it’s set up right and work with everybody directly and them work with me directly, made it a ton just so much easier to run operations than trying to do all of that and juggle it remotely with a much bigger cast. So that was great. The not really downside, but the additional thing that we ran into that was a lot of extra work is that we had to figure out what we were going to do about a table and we had to figure out what we’re going to do about a big space to fit everybody in, because it wasn’t people sitting in front of their computers anymore with just their dice on the table in front of them. We made some attempts, but integrating a VTT into an in-person recording can get a little bit clunky and also pull away from immersion. I’d rather do theater of the mind, but I wanted to, partially just because I’m selfish and I’ve always wanted to have physical maps and miniatures and terrain. We haven’t gotten to the terrain part yet, but we have minis now, which is great. I’m actually holding one right now, a little skeleton like Weird Horse. But yeah, the nice thing about that was that we had a partner, misty Mountain Gaming, who sent us a giant box of miniatures. I think it’s like that second or third time they’ve sent us a big box of minis, so I’ve just been frantically painting them. If you’ve watched any of our socials, then most of our posts because I’m bad at making social posts the past few weeks have just been tons of minis that me and Rose have been painting because we have army now of minis, but unfortunately we didn’t have time to paint them before recording season two. So in season two we don’t have painted minis, but that was a new thing to adjust to. But it was good and it was cool. It wasn’t bad by any means because I now have minis. I’ve always wanted minis.

Courtney: 20:56

I mean, minis are just cool man, Minis are cool. I have more minis than I could possibly ever use now, but they make amazing decorations and it’s really fun to look at all day, every day.

Russell: 21:12

Yeah, I mean you throw them all on a shelf and it makes for a badass shelf.

Courtney: 21:18

Indeed, where do you guys record, like, where’s the studio set up?

Russell: 21:24

It’s not set up. Currently. We set it up and tear it down because it’s big and it has like an overhang thing, rig that we hang all the mics from, and then we have the lighting kits and then we have the like fake walls. We created like a bunch of like fake walls that look kind of like stone, where we like carved styrofoam and then painted it like for patterns for stone stuff with a little moss in the cracks. It’s cool, it looks good on camera. It doesn’t look real, but it looks cool.

Courtney: 21:53

Okay, I did not know that was styrofoam, Like that’s cool.

Russell: 21:59

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I hesitate to tell people when they ask how we did it though we do have BTS videos on our YouTube that show how we did it but let’s just say we did things that are not recommended. When you buy styrofoam, do the styrofoam that involve a blowtorch and a well-ventilated area, but so, yeah, those pieces are dirt on plywood that we carved that on. So those are 4′ x 8′, obviously, and then they’re like unstealed up above the ground and then they have stands behind them that you have to sandbag, and so those things are about 6, 1 1⁄2 feet tall, 8′ long and about 5′ deep, because they’re pretty deep in the back. Their feet, their stands, go out in the back because they can’t go in the front where our setup is. And then we have the big rigs and then we have the things that the lights go on. So we set it all up and we tear it all down. The first season we play we set it up at House Rules in Grand Rapids. They’re a really cool board game house and lounge, not sponsored by them, just plugging them because they’re really cool. They like gave us a great deal. They were like you can record here just buy everybody a couple of drinks each night and run up a tab, and so that’s what we did, which we were like great, okay. So I just like told everybody every night we had a budget on D20Tals and they all ran up a tab. They had a great time recording. They were like this is great For second season of Plain Striders. We recorded it actually at Tabletop Makers where they create. So Tabletop Makers lent us a table for season one and then built us a custom table for season two, which was exceptionally generous and crazy. So we have a big, giant, cool-ass, like, shield-shaped streaming table which is just super dope. So if you haven’t seen any of the footage from season two, like the small little like but really cool table that we’re using in season two, we have one that’s like two, I think three times the size of that table, much bigger table. That’s super cool. Seat seven players I guess you could see actually almost 10 if you wanted to get a little crowded, but for recording purposes comfortably seats seven that you can easily record People. So we had a lot of great recordings and we had a lot of great recordings and we had a lot of great people, including the DM. But yeah, so Tabletop Makers who built us that table lent us their shop for a whole week. They shut down operations. Let us set it all up in their shop, record it, and then we tore it all down and then they went back to work. So we obviously couldn’t move that up, but that was extremely generous and cool of them, so we are partnered with them now. It’s pretty crazy. Here’s a second lesson for anybody who wants to know what you need to know about Tabletop Makers. Don’t be afraid to ask, because both Tabletop Makers and House Rules. We just went and we were like hey, like full transparency. We don’t have a lot of money, we’re not a big production, but this is what we’re trying to do. Are you interested in collaborating or doing anything cool? A lot of people said no, but it only takes one person to say yes to get the yes. You need Not give, always give, give first and then ask if you can.

Courtney: 25:13

But yeah, just ask, that is super cool and very generous, so did you record the entirety of Season 2 in that one week.

Russell: 25:24

Yes, so Season 1 we recorded in two and a half days and Season 3, sorry, no. Yeah, season 1 we recorded in two and a half days. Season 2 we recorded in about five days, but we recorded for seven days. But we recorded some additional bonus content. We recorded some mini series DM’d by Jay from Play your Role and Phil from Tulok the Barbarian Both of them joined us and they’re actually guests for the first half of Season 2 as well of Plain Striders. We flew them out and they played us two tables. They had great chemistry. It was a lot of fun adding them to the cast and they DM’d some mini series that we had at some point go out on our YouTube channel as well. But yeah, we just we sit down, we record all day. We do all of our Season are the whole arc in one run through not in a day, obviously, but in one run through which. There’s a big upside to that and a big downside, but I think the upside is worth the downside. The downside, obviously, is that when you just record in a big chunk, you don’t have as clear and strong episodes start and stop places. So the places where episodes start and stop can be a little bit harder to find a great place because you’re just going, going, going, going and keeping the momentum up. But the upside of that is that you keep the momentum up and that people stay in character and are super invested in everything that’s happening. So everything is lightning fast, everything’s on point, everything has super high energy in the characters and the players stay so well in the emotions of their characters because everything’s being recorded back to back to back so they don’t have to get back in character after being away from it for a week and reinvest in. Okay, what does my character feel from last time? They’re just just keep the camera rolling.

Courtney: 27:17

It’s like you also don’t get the time to be like, ooh, I did that thing, I wasn’t expecting, and now I need to like shift and have a plan. You just have to keep going.

Russell: 27:29

Yeah, that’s an interesting thing for me is that the DM2 is that the upside is that I don’t have to prep week after week after week after week, every week after, but then the downside is that I don’t have the flexibility because I have to do. I do just months of prep before the next campaign and then I roll up and then I just have to have. In some ways I have to be a lot more rigid because I don’t have time to adjust and other ways. I have to be incredibly flexible with what the players bring my way and just work really hard, not so much to build a precise and exact story but to build a really robust world that gives them options, and then just be flexible with what they throw at me. But I tell my players, my job is the DM isn’t actually to tell the story. It’s your job as the players to tell the story about your characters. I’m more like Costco I provide all the ingredients and y’all bake a cake, and you can bake any kind of cake you want. But the stipulation that I will say is we’re baking a cake or we’re baking a pie, and there’s a little bit of communication ahead of time. This also happens for live shows too, is that we obviously don’t want to ever script anything, but what we do do is we agree on an objective that we want to accomplish, like, for example, for a live show. We’ll be like okay, we want the message of this live show, we want to accumulate a place where we tell a story that teaches a good lesson about like friendship or companionship or being there for somebody or just not judging something by its appearances or like anything like that, like we’ll and of course, obviously things go off script and I would say about a third to half the time we don’t end up telling that story, we end up doing something else instead. But we tried. But that’s kind of the angle that we come from is we just establish as a group, we talk about the message we want to send and then we all work together to try to tell that message. But how we do it, well, none of us know until we get there.

Courtney: 29:35

Okay, well, speaking of the live shows oh right yeah, I want to talk about Fan Expo and what’s been going on with that and kind of future plans for our listeners that aren’t aware. What live shows have you been doing, russell?

Russell: 29:51

well actually. So we were last year. We were doing Fan Expo, we did Fan Expo Dallas, we did a live show and we were talking to Fan Expo about doing a whole tour. But interesting new development fairly recently Galaxycon offered us a much better deal, so we’re actually touring with Galaxycon instead this year right now. We might come back to Fan Expo next year, it depends. I don’t know what Fan Expo versus Galaxycon is going to offer us in the future, but right now Galaxycon really fucking took the cake. So we did a live show at Galaxycon Richmond in Richmond a couple months ago and in like I think like 40 or 30 days jeez, it’s coming right up we’re doing one or two live shows at Raleigh their next big one. But yeah, we actually we’re going with Galaxycon instead of Fan Expo this year because Galaxycon just offered us like the whole fucking platter, like they just gave us a great fucking offer that we couldn’t say no to. It was so awesome.l