How Dungeon Masters Went from Basement Weirdos to Legends | Original Geek | S1E10

Dungeon Masters used to run games quietly in basements. Now some are paid performers with massive audiences.

In this episode, we explore the evolution of the DM — from Satanic Panic days to professional game mastering. We discuss storytelling, improv, monetization, and whether paying a DM changes the game.

Topics include: Dungeons & Dragons, Dungeon Masters, tabletop RPGs, paid DMs, geek culture.

Welcome to Original Geek—the podcast for anyone who rolled their first d20 on shag carpet, waited hours for a comic book JPEG to load on dial-up, and wore the label “geek” back when it got you mocked, not monetized.

Hosted by stand-up comic Steve Scarfo and Forever DM Jeff Shaw, we dive deep into what it meant to be a geek in the '70s and '80s—and how that underground culture became the mainstream multiverse we live in today.

🎙️ Subscribe for weekly episodes on Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, comic book chaos, geek court debates, and critical hits from your childhood basement.

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 If you ever hid a Monster Manual like it was porn, you’re not alone. You’re an Original Geek. Welcome home.

Transcript

Steve Scarfo (00:20)
All right, welcome to The Original Geek. It's the podcast for anyone who rolled dice in basements, waited all night for comic book covers to downloads, and proudly wore that label of geek back when it could get you shoved into a locker. Each week, we're gonna dive into what it meant to be a geek in the 70s and 80s and how that compares to today's pop culture multiverse. We are your hosts, two of the Gen X survivors who didn't just watch geek culture evolve, we lived through every awkward phase. Hi, I'm Steve Scarfo.

Jeff (00:48)
And I'm Jeff Shaw, and we'll be your quest givers at today's tavern table. But before we can give you your quest, we have to do a canon correction. It'll be a quick one.

Steve Scarfo (01:07)
before you do again, I just, I'd love for us to get through one episode. Lately it seems like we have a correction every time.

Jeff (01:16)
no, ⁓ no, this, we had to do, we have to do this one. So, ⁓ in our last episode, we had talked about our ⁓ football trophy, our fantasy football trophy being the Orca trophy, and we incorrectly identified the creature on that boat as a shark.

Steve Scarfo (01:22)
Yes. no, we have to for sure. I just wish we wouldn't make the mistakes.

Jeff (01:43)
And it's not, it's an orca, it's a whale. A whale is not a shark. yeah, thank you, Kristen, my wife who helped found that league and create that trophy and obviously knows a thing or two about sharks, so should I. It's just been a while since I've seen the trophy personally. I haven't won it in while. So, you know.

Steve Scarfo (01:55)
Hey

yeah, same. I haven't seen it in years.

Jeff (02:11)
thought it had a shark, know, Jaws. ⁓ well, it's an orca.

Steve Scarfo (02:15)
For the record,

I think it's gonna be even longer for me before I see that trophy again, because we're in week three and I am doing Dismally. ⁓ But today, we're gonna try to wash away our tears from our latest correction. And we're gonna jump into, ⁓ I think a fun topic. ⁓ We're gonna talk about how being the dungeon master for a Dungeons and Dragons group.

Jeff (02:24)
Yeah. All right.

Hmm.

Steve Scarfo (02:45)
⁓ And I'll even maybe expand it to Game Master because it's not just D&D these days. ⁓ But it went from being just the leader of the group who was making the game to becoming a professional job. You can actually do this for a living.

There's platforms out there like Roll20 and Start Playing where DMs can actually earn income. ⁓ Yeah. Now Jeff, I think we might have said this a few times while we've done this show. Jeff was our DM. There are a few of us that poked up and did special appearances, ⁓ some to better effect than others. ⁓ Myself being one of the worst, but Jeff was the guy, so.

I'm gonna toss this over to you,

Jeff (03:30)
Yeah, so ⁓ in our friend group, I do not recall you DMing once, so maybe before my time. ⁓ So I got to know these guys in high school. So I started playing D&D before that. But ⁓ in one of our topics today as we talk about how they're professional DMs. ⁓

Steve Scarfo (03:38)
That's how bad it was. You were there.

Jeff (03:54)
It was hard to find even people to play D&D. It was geeky, was nerdy, didn't even want to actually ask anyone. So it was kind of hard to find someone to play the game with. then because, you know, it was difficult, I remembered I would be the DM. And when I first started, my uncle taught us to play and he was the DM. And then, ⁓ then I became the DM.

for our friend group and I remembered like the next in line for how many who often I got to be a player character was Boyd and then Dave. But that's it, I don't remember UTMing. So.

Steve Scarfo (04:33)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

So,

so yeah, there was one time I was like, I was so enamored with the idea of being in control of the game. And I, I think it lasted one session, everybody rolled up a character. Maybe you actually weren't there. I thought you were, but I was so frustrated. I don't know how you put up with us for as long as you did, because I was so frustrated by, I had done all of this prep work and anybody who's ever been a DM.

This is like light touch for you, you know, but I done all this work and I did all this prep and then immediately they effed everything up. Like it was nothing that I had planned and I was not prepared. think I was, you know, middle teenager, 14, 15. I wasn't prepared to like be an improv guy at the time. I wasn't trying to like think on the fly. I had shit written down. I wanted to use what I wrote. So that's why it was one session. It was quite literally one time I tried to DM.

How old were you though when you started DMing?

Jeff (05:39)
So I would have been 12, I think, but for our friend group, 14.

Yeah, because I was a freshman in high school. So we were, when we first got to know each other and found out we liked D&D, I think I would, I think I don't remember if I DM'd first. I have a distinct memory of being a player character in Dave's, Dave Tuft's house. And we hardly ever played there. So maybe he was the DM.

I just remember there was like a vampire scenario, so it might've been Ravenloft. ⁓ And I think like just about all of us died. And I'm like, okay, I'll just DM. And I I liked the storytelling aspect of it. I liked the whole creative endeavor. then, but I will admit, know, cause I think.

Steve Scarfo (06:23)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff (06:39)
you know, in part for this episode, I was doing, you know, that start playing. was like looking at all these professional DMs or people who get paid to DM. And yeah, I'm wondering if they're creating original content. And I'm not saying that I didn't, but I did like to use a module. I mean, because the, you know, the complexity, yeah, as if you could see the module. I've got, I've got something for later, a critical hit.

Steve Scarfo (07:05)
Mm-hmm

Jeff (07:08)
a module that I loved. ⁓ It's like 80 pages long with like seven point font. Like it took long enough just to create like, so I was more like tweak something that already exists. ⁓ And then ⁓ you have to be flexible, but you also have to keep riding the guard rails. So, hey, the adventure doesn't work if you don't.

Steve Scarfo (07:18)
There was a lot of detail.

Jeff (07:36)
do at least a little, know, kind of follow a pattern. Otherwise, we gotta call it quits, so.

Steve Scarfo (07:44)
Yeah, so that's a great question though. ⁓ And we can top it here and then jump in later too, but do you think to be a paid DM, you have to create all original content? Because the idea, and before you answer, I'll say, when I think about it, the dungeon master, the game master to me is really the person who does the heavy lifting. They set the stage, they run the world, they're every NPC.

And we can talk about the voice acting thing that's been going on too, but.

To me, that's more important than the originality of the content. Now, for some of these more popular, huge groups that are presenting material on like Prime Video and stuff, obviously they need to be original, because they're presenting it in multiple ways. But when you're just running a game, do you think you could just grab Ravenloft and say, hey, we're just gonna run Ravenloft standard, and I'm just gonna be the one maintaining the mechanics? Is that okay for someone who's getting paid?

Jeff (08:46)
So, mean, it's a good question. When I look at some of the people what they're charging, like Jesse the Elder charging $20 per session. The amount of time it takes to create original content, that's not, like why are you even bothering charging? 20 bucks? it would take hours and hours and hours to create the content. So.

being paid $20 per session. I don't even know how long a session lasts. one thing, know, today, when we played back in high school, we started sometime early evening and sometimes we didn't stop until the sun came up the next day. So like we played for hours and hours and hours. ⁓ I don't know how long these sessions last. ⁓ So let's say it's three hours. ⁓ It'll take a while to get through a module in three hour chunks.

Steve Scarfo (09:31)
yeah.

Jeff (09:44)
So if I was to do this, I would want to say, okay, we're gonna go through this Ravenloft module. It's gonna, in three hour sessions and it'll take 20 sessions, like just drawing an estimate. So that's what I would do. I'm not a professional DM, I don't get paid. And we just do this for fun, so.

Steve Scarfo (10:08)
Yeah, I agree. think if to me, what was it the elder there? The guy you just mentioned, Jesse the elder. ⁓ It sounds like for 20 bucks an hour, he's probably just pulling content from somewhere else and running established campaigns or maybe he's chat GPT campaigns and he's making original stuff, but it's stuff he's not putting a ton of time into because I agree what for the amount of time to be good.

Jeff (10:15)
Jesse the Elder.

Steve Scarfo (10:36)
20 bucks an hour. I mean, even if you have six players, what's it 120, 20 bucks an hour or 20 bucks a session.

Jeff (10:42)
20 bucks a session.

Steve Scarfo (10:44)
So even if it's a three hour session, which I don't know why you would play for less than three to be quite honest, because sometimes a battle can take a half hour, ⁓ then even with six players in your party, you're not making very much doing

Steve Scarfo (11:09)
All right, so back in time, back to the original, back to being an original geek, Jeff, in the 80s. Again, I'm leaning heavy on you in this episode. You were the DM, so I don't have a lot of, like again, my only flashback for being a DM is exactly how bad I was at planning and prepping, so.

Jeff (11:12)
Yes.

Yeah.

So in ⁓ your prep notes to me though, you put in the thankless DM era. Always blamed, rarely praised. So tell me a little bit more about why you put that note in there before I share something.

Steve Scarfo (11:51)
Yeah. Well,

I mean, I'll be honest with you, especially as I look back, I never would have said it when we were 16, 17, whenever we were playing, right? But again, in the one time I did it, I didn't even have the self-reflection at the time of the wherewithal to realize this sucks, but Jeff still keeps doing it, right? So you...

Jeff (12:11)
Ha

Steve Scarfo (12:13)
were the one person in our group. Now granted, Dave did some, Boyd did some, but they were sort of the one hits here and there, or two or three sessions. ⁓ I don't think any of them that they did lasted more than a month or two, even when we were playing like every week. Your stuff. We ran for years. I mean, the Rudar Party has a name. It's like a moniker that should be etched into a mountain of our history because these characters lived for years.

Like four, five, six years, we played the same characters, slowly leveling up, no big huge jumps. Like you made us earn every, but I don't ever remember any of us going, hey, Jeff, thanks for all the work. Hey, Jeff, thanks for doing this. You know what I mean? And when something went wrong for us, boy, were we pissed off. God damn it, Jeff, why would you put that? So yeah, it really was a time when we kind of took advantage without meaning to.

Jeff (12:53)
No.

Ha ha.

Steve Scarfo (13:11)
of your dedication. So I wanna be formally 40 years later, the first to say thank you for all of the time that you put in because damn, it was a lot. It still is, it still is a lot.

Jeff (13:19)
You're welcome.

So

I found this basement treasure. It's probably going to be hard to see. But Bill Dunbar and Jim Hutchinson liked to draw and actually were pretty good at it. So this is one of their characters, John Barleycorn. And I don't know what these stains are. But but what I want to point out as I found this this morning.

Steve Scarfo (13:32)
my God, I remember that. Was that a gym?

Remember John Barley corn.

That's okay. I guarantee you it's a barbecue sauce.

Jeff (13:56)
to your point of the thankless DM is this character is saying kill the DM. This one is rushing in with an ax that's got a swing motion in it. This is me, the DM says right here ⁓ pointing up this is very John Hughes ⁓ using this insult in the 80s, fag DM. That's me as the DM. This is a giant like orc kill the DM. This is

Steve Scarfo (14:04)
Ha

That was Jim's

character. He was a half-orc.

Jeff (14:27)
This is, ⁓ yeah,

the half-orc. Yeah. This is ⁓ a snake launching at my throat to kill me. And I'm saying, ⁓ wait, ⁓ wait, we haven't rolled initiative yet. Bros. So it was funny that I said the word bros at that point. So yeah, so this is, this is everyone killed the DM. ⁓

Steve Scarfo (14:55)
Yes, well, let's face it, when we played, like you were the gate, you were quite literally the gate key between us and virtual riches and untold fame and fortune, right?

Jeff (14:56)
and a drawing.

Yes, but it was reciprocal. I did my best to mess with you guys. It was actually part of the joy was the highs and lows. So you got some awesome thing and then I took that awesome thing away from you as best I could. ⁓ So in this ⁓ flashback as a DM, ⁓ thankless perhaps, but I actually, I got a kick out of this and that's why I still have.

I was not in any way insulted by this. thought it was funny. This is And I don't know whether it's because we're New Englanders famously giving each other shit. That's what we do We're friends, but we insult the hell out of each other. So ⁓ But that was ⁓ Yeah, so I did not I would have liked to have played more but I loved DMing. I thought it was

Steve Scarfo (15:56)
yeah.

Jeff (16:07)
I was in control. I spent a lot of time when we weren't playing thinking of things coming up with ideas of wouldn't it be cool to do this or that and ⁓ yeah, so I loved it. So I didn't feel it that way.

Steve Scarfo (16:24)
Well, and we talked, go ahead, sorry.

We talked at the beginning too about ⁓ the originality of it, and even when you used a module, you never just used a module. I don't remember you ever taking a module and using it stock. Like, you always found some way to personalize it, to be even silly with it. You've created crazy magic items that matched us as a group more than the module, but that fit. ⁓

Jeff (16:49)
Yeah. Well, we had a

unique style. ⁓ know we're going to talk later about different styles and the modern style that people are watching on YouTube and other platforms with these famous DMs and their storytelling and their acting and performance. Our style was a little bit more, you roll in the dice and you're ⁓ kind of figuring things out. ⁓

not as much about like we had kid really distinct characters, ⁓ but we weren't like imitating voices or voice acting as much but ⁓ and we were really wildly inappropriate. We.

Steve Scarfo (17:36)
Well, I think it

goes back to the bunch of teenage boys in New England thing too. we, all the stuff you said about how we like to give each other shit, like we're teenage boys. We were, you know.

Jeff (17:48)
Yeah, so I

think some people outside of our friend group would never get. Play with us and then they get scared and like we want nothing to do with this. This group there like either they're mean or they're weird as far as and I mean weird like because we're being wildly inappropriate. ⁓ The tales from the Magic Tavern podcast, if anyone's heard that, that's more like what we were playing.

⁓ that, ⁓ just like they'll say something, you know, really, ⁓ hypersexual or, ⁓ just like, like, yeah, like come chode, like summoning a magical horse. That's really thick and short, a short, thick horse named chode. I mean, that's, that's our humor. And that's what we like.

Steve Scarfo (18:17)
yeah.

completely rude and inappropriate.

Yeah

and somehow named Chode.

Jeff (18:46)
and you could summon your thick short horse named Chode by the words come Chode.

Steve Scarfo (18:53)
Yes, and we're not

gonna speculate on the spelling of Kamcha.

Jeff (18:56)
So, I mean,

that was our style. And it wasn't until Tales from the Magic Tavern that I realized, hey, we weren't the only ones who were playing D&D that way.

Steve Scarfo (19:07)
God no,

no. But I think we started talking about it, but it might be ready to jump into our segment here, a little geek court about the ins and outs of getting paid.

Jeff (19:31)
All right, yeah, geek court and I know our geek evolution segment is gonna go a bit long as we have an interview, they always do when we talk to Boyd. So we can keep this one tight and I will present the argument for a DM getting paid. Of course I am a DM. Man, if I thought about the money I would have made off you guys if I made you pay me. I mean, that would have been amazing. I wouldn't have had to wash dishes or do some of the other crappy jobs I did.

⁓ I could have just made money as a DM. So I think that's fantastic. I think that ⁓ it's great that there are platforms. know, you know, one's called Start Playing, for instance, where you can find a DM, pay 20 bucks, 30 bucks, 50 bucks a session, whatever they might be. And then like all those famous, you know, DMs making money off of doing it. So I think it's fantastic. I think that

It was, I just remember for us way back in the eighties, how hard it was to find someone to even play D and D or be a DM. And now you have ways to find someone to do that. So I think that's fantastic.

Steve Scarfo (20:46)
Yeah, traditionally taking the other side of these arguments. So I'll put some effort into this, but then I'll couch it a bit. So, you know, when we started, was a game that we played. And I will say, I've mentioned it a few times, it was completely unbalanced, the amount of effort you put in. So there is a part of me that's like, you probably should have been paid, right? Just for the work. Because it was hours, hours and hours. Now, granted, even back then, think minimum wage was three or four dollars an hour, right? So even at minimum wage.

you would have been making plenty of money ⁓ because of the amount of time that you put in and then we put in playing together. But it was supposed to be a game for friends to get together. Like for me, Dungeons and Dragons was more about being with you guys than it was about the game, right? I love the game, but I love what we did ⁓ because it allowed us to get together and hang out. There was no effort, right?

Sometimes as outgoing and gregarious as I am now, when we were young, I was super socially awkward and never knew what to say to people. And so when we could just say, hey, when are we playing? We get together and we were just characters hanging out and our friendships all grew and grew stronger. was nice to be able to be like, okay, these are just people. And I don't have to think really about, should I have said that? Should I not have said that? You know, the normal social awkwardness of being a teenager.

was just gone for us. For me specifically, I remember ⁓ just how comfortable it always was. Like we could always just hang out and it was never a problem. And I think that was built on the back of Dungeons and Dragons and playing this game together. ⁓ You know, of course, as time went on, it wasn't just about that base, but that's, I think it was built from these types of interactions. Like we congregated around a topic and a thing.

and then we grew from there. And as you said, there are people who came in and left because they were like, nope, these are not my people. And that's okay. ⁓ But then I'm, you so I'm gonna officially take the argument against, but ⁓ I actually think it's a great progress for the art of being a DM. And I do think if you are a Mulligan or a Mercer, we'll talk more about them with Dave in a bit. ⁓

Yeah, why wouldn't you want to get paid to put in that effort? We've had this conversation before, before we even decided on this episode. I'm surprised you haven't looked into it. I know it's a lot of effort, a lot of time, and I just don't know what kind of time you have, but you are really good at doing this. yeah, I think you could make a nice little side hustle out of it.

Jeff (23:30)
Maybe I will. Maybe I will.

Steve Scarfo (23:31)
I think you should.

So I think you might have already dropped into basement treasures with your reveal of the thing, but we'll drop in and do a quick treasures and see what else we got.

Jeff (23:55)
So I found that drawing in my old DM screen. This, I don't know. Yeah, so I, and it's funny, because when our very first episode, I brought up these ⁓ critical hits table that I could not find, but then found it. And then with this one, this is my original, it actually had it. like I switched, there's my DM screen back there ⁓ that I started using.

Steve Scarfo (24:00)
Holy crap, you still have that?

Jeff (24:24)
more recently when I couldn't find this. I dug this out of someplace. It's got the original good hits, bad misses from Dragon Magazine, which I talked about in our very first episode. And this little handy tab here explains why any round of D&D could take a long time to play. Because at that time, you had to do 10 things. Like what's your distance away from your opponents? Any spells you're gonna cast.

Then you roll for initiative and then who's avoiding depending on whether they get an issue or voting combat parlay. Why was parlay the actual conversation? This kind of goes to the point where role playing bottom like we're going to talk about the fight first. Then do you have anything to say? OK. And then you get to discharge your missiles and then you get to charge and then you get to set your weapons for charge. Then finally striking your blows.

Steve Scarfo (24:59)
Mm-hmm.

Hey, real play.

Jeff (25:23)
And if you're grappling or holding, that's the very last thing. ⁓ That was old school second edition rules. That's what this is all about. And it had a lot of other tables on it. Like ⁓ if you hit someone in the arm, then you could roll on this other table and some other horrible thing would happen. Like it's broken or chopped in half.

Steve Scarfo (25:43)
Flip that back around. I want you to show everybody that's maybe watching. ⁓ Nope, the other side, the inside, because what you're showing them isn't the original screen. What you're showing them is the stuff you added to the screen. So Jeff always had, yeah, all of the original screen is still there, but you would have to, now, were they stapled at the bottom? I thought you could lift them up. ⁓

Jeff (25:52)
⁓ that's correct. Yes, there is no original screen left. It's gone.

⁓

I stapled them actually Yeah, so I stapled them because There's like layers here, too Yeah, so I could have made them more functional by stuff in one spot like then I could flip these up yeah, cuz there's like weapons and ⁓ yeah, this has got the thief the illusionist like different like character types and classes and stuff. So

Steve Scarfo (26:13)
They were replacing other stuff, yeah.

He he.

And anybody who's played this game knows that the DM screen is just a magical portal into data and information that the rest of us wish we knew, but can't have access to.

Jeff (26:44)
But I mean, that's interesting that you point that out, like that I covered it up with where all the damage is gonna go, and how much damage. ⁓ because that was a lot of our focus was on the dice rolls and the damage and killing.

Steve Scarfo (26:52)
Yes.

Kind of the mechanics, right? We always ⁓ called ourselves Hack and Slash or Monty Hall. Like it was about the battle and the brutality. ⁓ We had a storyline, you always had a storyline, we always followed the storyline. ⁓ But I think that's just key to us being, you know, focused on the game mechanics, which, you know, I don't know. We always found the most fun.

⁓ As we're sitting here, I had a treasure I think I was gonna use, because I used to doodle as well, and then I've left it upstairs. So I don't have it.

Jeff (27:44)
Well, we'll touch upon D&D again, I know. So, can dig that treasure out next time.

Steve Scarfo (27:47)
So I'll have to bring out my stuff

because ⁓ I think ⁓ the key there for me is every round took a long time and there were six of us, seven of us, right? So there were times when I wouldn't play for 20, 25 minutes. I wouldn't have anything to do because a round would start, my initiative would be last because my character had crappy dexterity and it would literally be ⁓

Jeff (28:02)
Yes.

Steve Scarfo (28:17)
Jim, Bill, Boyd, Bill Ponder's, Dave, then me. Right? if when Greg was playing tip and usually the monsters got to go before my initiative is always crap. So I always had like 20, 25 minutes, even in round one. And then nine times out of 10, my first role would be a one and that would be it. I have nothing to do. So we always had this time in between. And I guess in fairness, everybody had that same amount of time until their next turn.

Jeff (28:24)
and then all the monsters, potentially.

Steve Scarfo (28:45)
So we would doodle and bullshit and do other stuff, but I love that picture. I remember that axe overhead. I remember that from when we were kids. So for you to still have it is phenomenal.

⁓ But I guess now we should drop into our evolution ⁓ and our friend Dave Tufts is gonna join us here in a moment.

Steve Scarfo (29:16)
All right, well, we are now joined. If you're watching, can see him by our buddy, Dave Tufts. We've talked about Dave a few times on this podcast and Dave is one of our friends. ⁓ Jeff was mentioning Dave earlier as one of the only other DMs in our group. ⁓ But Dave has some unique perspective on the business of being a DM. Hey, Dave.

David (29:40)
Hi there! Thanks for having me.

Jeff (29:41)
Hey Dave, yeah, so

you're welcome. Yeah, and essentially we really wanted to be part of this segment because of the evolution. So went from being, you know, hard to find anyone who even played even more difficult to find someone who'd be the DM for your D&D group to now you're like, there are people out there who are DMing for hire. And that's one of the things that you do, right?

David (30:11)
yes, ⁓ but a couple of us went to school together and believe it or not, paid DMing actually started a long time ago. ⁓ It just never really took off. A lot of, I was on a, in college on a,

gaming society at the University of Southern Maine and they used to have gaming conventions every year. I'm not sure if you remember them, Jeff, or not. They weren't really big events. They would have them in the campus center.

Steve Scarfo (30:59)
Hmm, I don't remember this.

Jeff (31:00)
I don't remember them.

David (31:02)
Well, the only reason why I really remember them is I was part of the society and we would pay DMs $25 for each game they ran.

And so it.

Jeff (31:17)
Thanks for paying me.

Steve Scarfo (31:23)
No, Jeff, he meant

Jeff (31:23)
But not

that guy. Not that guy.

Steve Scarfo (31:24)
real DMs.

David (31:26)
Um, so

it has been around a while, but it really didn't take off till maybe 10 years ago or so.

Steve Scarfo (31:40)
So just for context for people that are listening, this is late 90s, right? USM, oh yeah, no, because it was 94 that I, yeah, so 92, 93, somewhere in there is when you first started getting paid.

Jeff (31:46)
Early 90s? Well, I mean...

David (31:48)
Early 90s.

Early 90s.

Yep. depending on what game you were running ⁓ would depend. We had kind of a tiered system. Some of the, actually some of the lesser known games would actually get paid a bit more. They're like Vampire the Masquerade.

⁓ Cyberpunk 2020 and at that time some of the lesser-known games would actually get 35 or 40 dollars a game just to kind of

give people something different than just D&D.

Steve Scarfo (32:49)
So why

do you think the lesser known games would get more money? Just because they were harder to find?

David (32:54)
⁓

Just they were harder to find, and it would kind of give people a chance to experience something new. ⁓

Steve Scarfo (33:08)
So there is less

supply means more demand, right?

David (33:12)
Yeah.

Now, you've got, if you go at some of these websites advertising paid games, you've got every type of game under the sun. ⁓ Like I was talking to Jeff, I've got a couple of paid games going right now. And actually one of them is at a local hobby store.

and it's called Monster of the Week. And it's by a small little indie role-playing company that unless you know them, you don't really hear much about them.

Steve Scarfo (34:01)
What's name of the company? Yeah, give us the name. Let's get them out there.

Jeff (34:01)
What? Give us the name.

David (34:06)
⁓ I'd have to go grab the book. ⁓ cause, my books are in my other office. ⁓ but the games called monster of the week, it's on a system called apocalypse are powered by the apocalypse. And it's, if you go to a gaming convention,

you like packs east or if you get lucky and get to go to gen con or some of these other places you'll see you'll see a bunch of these indie companies set up together ⁓ for me the local hobby store ⁓ pays me to dm a game of monster of the week

every Wednesday. And players come and pay $20 for the night. The hobby store keeps $5. And I get $15 per player.

Steve Scarfo (35:20)
Pretty cool. So how many players do you usually get?

David (35:23)
⁓ I cap it at six. Jeff, having DM'd before, you probably understand that a table can get overloaded really quick. And even with a simple system, things can slow down.

Jeff (35:42)
Yeah, just like people are waiting so long to get back to their turn because it takes so long for each person to say what they're doing in any given round. So I looked it up and it's ⁓ Evil Hat Productions does the Monster of the Week and it's kind of like ⁓ Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Files type worlds, right? Okay. And it's.

David (36:05)
Yep. yes.

Steve Scarfo (36:06)
Monster

of the Week. All right, I get it now.

Jeff (36:08)
It's played on

two six-sided dice instead of 20-sided dice.

David (36:15)
It's a very rules-like system, and so things don't bog down a lot. And it's just, ⁓ to me, kind of a fun system.

Steve Scarfo (36:29)
That's cool.

Jeff (36:30)
Yeah, and the Monster of the Week concept is actually, well, I mean, it might have been before the X-Files, but I know that was an X-Files thing. basically, ⁓ it kind of makes sense if you're trying to do a single adventure in an evening, because that's kind of what that was, is the X-Files was a series with a lot of interconnected storylines, but then they had a Monster of the Week. And it was just...

You have this flash in the pan episode. You'd never see that monster again. Nothing that happened affected anything before or after it. And so it was just, you it wasn't a campaign, right? Is that what we're talking about? You play your, you play your character, you play your adventure, and then you might be, you're onto something new the next week.

David (37:09)
Yeah, yeah, and

Yeah, and it, and sorry to interrupt you, Steve, and it works really well for having it at a hobby store because the players change week to week.

Steve Scarfo (37:19)
Yeah, that's...

Yeah, that's exactly where I was gonna head Dave. It's good because then you don't have to worry about we always have to have these six. So if somebody can't make it, it doesn't mean you can't run the game.

David (37:38)
Yep.

Exactly.

Jeff (37:41)
Yeah, because

our.

our friend group that we were all playing and we're playing consistently and we're in the middle of a Ravenloft campaign got paused like two years ago because one of our friends moved to Idaho and is in a different time zone. And then he doesn't work traditional work hours. And then we have another friend who El Boyd who you've seen on this where he works really early in the morning and also two or three

nights a week is working a second job. like the windows of opportunity are so small for all of us to play. then weekends aren't good for other people. So yeah, you know, having a little more flexible would probably work for us too. Like, we'll just do a monster. I wouldn't do this system because I do I do want to keep playing D&D.

Steve Scarfo (38:36)
Yeah.

Jeff (38:42)
or get back to playing D&D, having a little more flexibility would be good.

David (38:44)
Well.

Steve Scarfo (38:46)
Well, we are running through our time here pretty quick. I do want to ask you a couple of questions, because there's a couple of things about being a DM. This is for both of you guys, actually. And in an earlier segment, we talked about how I did DM one time, and that was it, because it was horrible. ⁓ Boyd's obviously DM'd too, but ⁓ one of the things that changed the most, as far as I can see, from the outside of the DM world, right, is when we played, Jeff was...

Jeff (38:47)
Nice.

David (38:52)
Yep.

Steve Scarfo (39:15)
Jeff always had a balance for us. I think you did too where it was, when we had character interaction, it would be Steve saying to Jeff, hey, I have Gruul, ask the bartender this question or that question. We didn't necessarily role play voices. We didn't voice act or story tell ⁓ in a streamlined way. We weren't doing a bit as it were. But then we obviously loved our hack and slash too. We'd go through direct, you know.

castles and dungeons and kill as much as we can. And I think your campaigns were the same, but one of the biggest evolutions has been this kind of evolution of the way the stories are told. And I think the more paid the DM, lately the bigger groups like the role 20s and the critical role groups, right? They are more storytellers than game players. So I don't know what you guys think about that effect.

David (40:14)
Personally, it.

I think it was good for the game, but I also don't think every DM is that style of DM.

⁓

I'm not, I try my best to lay out a story and

I'm not very good at voice acting, so I don't get into the roles of my characters very often. But I think like Brendan Lee Mulligan from Dimension 20 and Matt Mercer from Critical Role, they've brought a lot of people.

Steve Scarfo (41:08)
Matthew Mercer.

David (41:17)
with that style of playing into the game that might not have been there before. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Steve Scarfo (41:29)
Just let's look at the idea that we say the names Brennan Lee Mulligan and Matthew Mercer and we know them at least in our world because they are DMs who have gone on to add more and create fame for themselves, right? We've talked a lot about hiding our books and these guys are, saw ⁓ there was a clip online, ⁓ Critical Role is doing their next.

big campaign and Matt Mercer's not gonna be the game master, he's gonna be a player and they're bringing in Brendan Lee Mulligan to be the game master. So it'll be a great kind of crossover of those two audiences and groups, but they made the announcement in a Comic-Con style room that had to have two or 3000 people in it and they were losing their minds. Like, you know, again, we're all about the evolution of being a geek, but we went from hiding books to stadiums where the dungeon masters are the celebrated

Jeff (42:03)
Hmm. Wow.

Wow.

Steve Scarfo (42:28)
Celebrity.

David (42:30)
and having been to a lot of Comic Cons and multiple Gen Cons, multiple Paxes, it's changed a lot. ⁓ When we were playing,

Jeff (42:30)
That's wild.

David (42:59)
or when we started, ⁓ you didn't really want to admit to playing the game because you know you could really, ⁓ you're worshipping the devil.

Steve Scarfo (43:16)
Ha ha ha.

David (43:16)
If you remember that period of time during the 80s.

Jeff (43:20)
course.

Steve Scarfo (43:23)
yeah, we've talked a lot about it.

Jeff (43:26)
All right. Thank

you, Dave, for joining us today. And then we got to move on to our next segment, but we really appreciate it. Thank you, Dave. And happy birthday.

Steve Scarfo (43:33)
Yeah, thanks for jumping in with us, Dave. Yes, happy birthday to

David (43:35)
Thank you.

Steve Scarfo (43:37)
Dave. All right, we're gonna jump into our next segment here.

David (43:37)
Well,

Jeff (43:46)
I and I know this is to the new generation, but really this is to anyone maybe new to role playing games. Um, in preparation for this episode, I was looking at just knowing that Dave is a professional DM and how do you even, you know, get, how does that happen? And when I Googled it up, I found start playing and start playing. You can find a group, you can find games, you can find game masters.

And so there's this website and it's not the only one. mean, there are others out there, but this one seems like a robust way to find game masters and where the price point isn't too intimidating. I mean, some game masters only charge 10 bucks. How, you know, amazing is it? Well, I mean, there's also reviews, there. So, you know, there's a lot of five star reviews. So I, don't know. Yeah. That's always a little sus when they're all five stars.

Steve Scarfo (44:43)
He

he he.

Jeff (44:44)
But ⁓ you know, you're into it for too much money and you get to find out do you really like this kind of tabletop role-playing and another thing I love was some of the ones I looked at like they have like 3d You have virtual miniatures and I think that can really enhance the game. I always keep a camera on Real miniatures and try to do miniatures. I think that really can help with the visualization of the game. So

Yeah, mean, start playing. That's the message to all of you.

Steve Scarfo (45:17)
Yeah.

Yeah. And Dave brought up a point during our evolution talk to about ⁓ COVID being a catalyst. And it really was a catalyst for online everything. Right. If you work in an office, you got to work from home. If you I started doing it with a group of comedians that I play poker with, we start playing online like everybody. And we were already playing D&D online just because people live in different states and we still wanted to do it. But the capabilities of the software have become

so much more robust. ⁓ So no, 100%. Roll20 was one of the other ones I looked at too. Like I don't know which one's better. I've not, again, I don't DM. And when we play, we play together. So ⁓ I've not put a lot of time into them, but just the fact that they exist in a way for you to go try these games. And I believe start playing, it's not just D&D. can start, you know, hey, I've always wanted to try Pathfinder. Like we've talked about Pathfinder, but I don't think we've ever.

like really dive deep into it. So if you're interested in playing Pathfinder, you could jump into a group and see how it goes. So yeah, absolutely get out there, jump on any game, especially, you know, and again, I know we're old men here, but when we were kids, it was like a clandestine conversation. You almost felt like you were a spy using code words to see if somebody else might want to play D&D without, you know, we didn't want to signal to the world that we should be made fun of. So.

Jeff (46:46)
Yes.

Steve Scarfo (46:46)
You know, we had to kind of hide even the question about do you play? Do know? Not, and now you can just go click. I'm in with 50 people I don't even know. But awesome.

Jeff (47:05)
All right, and I really want to share this critical hit. It's called Egg of the Phoenix. It's a second edition D&D module, levels five through nine for five to six characters. This was perfect for our group. That's what we had. we, this came out in 1987. And I'm just going to read the back of the module.

Steve Scarfo (47:06)
Hmm.

God, I remember that one.

Jeff (47:34)
Come on, they said, it won't be so tough. Just stopping a slavery ring, they said. I don't know, you said, those slaves aren't even entirely human. How do we know they won't try to kill us? But you went, and now you're having second thoughts. There were the thieves in the lost crypts of Imperia, raising hundreds of no. Too disturbing to think about. There were the three dragons who no, too painful to remember. Now there's this egg of the phoenix.

What does that have to do with anything? This was supposed to be a cut and dried stop the slaver's job who said anything about retrieving lost artifacts. Trudging through forests, traipsing through castles, trotting through dungeons, traveling through other planes. This has turned into more than your run of the mill adventure. The compensation had better be worth it, provided of course, you're around at the end to collect your share, which you weren't, killed you all.

No, that's not true, you survived. But it was awesome. It was an 80 page module that the structure was really great at the time. So ⁓ you can see these boxes, that's where you indicated what the DM would read to the players and then the rest was a description of what was happening in the room. ⁓ sorry.

Steve Scarfo (48:52)
Yeah, for those of you just listening, Jeff's pointing to on the page of the module.

That's OK. We are video. So if you're not watching, you should. But it's a little block of text set aside from the rest of the kind of the magazine style. It's a great image in the upper left hand corner. But there were sections of text that were specifically things the DM should say to the player.

Jeff (49:14)
Yeah, not every module at the time had that. Sometimes, you know, I'd end up reading the wrong thing, telling the players something they shouldn't have known. So it was really nice to have this box, read this, not the rest. The rest you kind of make up. And that's where, you know, that's where the creative aspect of D&D would happen. And I wrote some notes in here and I can tell that Boyd,

character Raistlan was my primary nemesis because I had like, if forgetting poison on Raistlan, had Raistlan loses a point of wisdom. So, but it was a great structure. was 80 pages. had a separate booklet of maps and, you know, a tear away of like all of the NPCs with their names and some really basic descriptions of

of the people there and then some, you know, couple of original magic items. The Egg of the Phoenix, for instance, and the Holy Sword, a plus five Holy Avenger. And it was a great module. I would highly recommend if they, I don't know they ever resurrect any of these old modules, but man, this would have been a good one. Or maybe, cause there's so much of it I forgot about, I just remembered how much I enjoyed running that.

campaign with you guys and ⁓ maybe we can do that one again. Go back to second edition and play a second edition module. That'd be awesome.

Steve Scarfo (50:52)
Yeah, modules, God, it's funny how much, ⁓ like, you know, it sounds stupid, forgot completely about the Egg of the Phoenix until you picked it up. I'm like, my God, I remember that. Do you know what's funny? I've been seeing a lot of ads in my feeds, probably unsurprisingly because of how much of this we're doing. But there's a new starter set, they're calling it, a D&D starter set.

And Jeff, it's got everything. mean, down to menus for the taverns in the town, pre-printed. They actually have cardboard cut out of the characters. So instead of using miniatures, it's like the old board games, you pop out the cardboard and you can move them and then you have maps for you. It's literally like, and maybe depending on how much it is, maybe we should grab one and kind of play test. ⁓ I think that could be kind of fun because it seems like it's laid out.

Jeff (51:26)
Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Steve Scarfo (51:50)
Like they're really trying to make it easy for people to get in to the old school D&D on the tabletop rather than these online platforms or in a video game. know, Baldur's Gate we've talked about is like a great 5e representation. ⁓ But I think they're really trying to push this like back to the table kind of idea, which is pretty cool. So I will say ⁓ the bad thing.

Jeff (51:53)
Mm-hmm.

Steve Scarfo (52:18)
maybe some of the bad about this evolution into paid DMing, and Dave pointed it out a little bit, is it sort of maybe gives people unrealistic expectations, right? Because again, there's one Brendan Lee Mulligan, there's one Matt Mercer, and they, and again, critical role, that group is all voice actors. In fact, Ashley, one of the girls who plays with them all the time, has a role in ⁓ Avengers, Age of Ultron.

She's the waitress at the end of the movie ⁓ that I believe Captain America, no, maybe it was even the first Avengers. She's in one of the Avengers, these are actors is the point I'm trying to make. These are people whose primary goal is storytelling and so they take D&D to that next level. And I think maybe ⁓ if people don't have any other experience with the game, they have this expectation that if I go pay 20 bucks an hour, someone's gonna,

weave me this intricate story when really they might just be kind of old school DMing and they might do that. I don't know, but it just leaves them with an expectation. ⁓ But also.

Jeff (53:28)
Yeah, and I think,

I agree with you. I think that that can be an epic fail if you're watching these things you haven't played and then you think, I'll, maybe if you go to even this, you know, pay for a professional DM and you're expecting, I'm paying this guy 20 bucks and I'm not getting this professional voice actor, why not?

Steve Scarfo (53:50)
Yeah, where's my world, man? But I just think, just, people have to temper the expectations going in. But I think it's cool. Just don't expect too much. And then don't worry about, you know, I don't even know. It's about, I was gonna say, don't worry about, you know, how much you have to pay, but I some people have to worry about it, right? In the sense that you may not be able to afford it.

Just because someone charges $100 an hour versus $20 a session versus $20 a session doesn't necessarily mean the $100 a session person is better. They're just pricing themselves higher. Now you would hope that that would be a correlation of how much effort they're putting in, but so buyer beware a little bit too as you're going into these platforms. And don't necessarily judge the entire structure of gaming on one batting session if you have a

Jeff (54:47)
Absolutely.

Steve Scarfo (54:48)
All right, so we're dropping into the end of this and I am gonna throw our, we don't always do this segment, but I'm gonna throw it in.

I need to re-edit one of those to make a make an OG ask you. Because this is my question for you. If you could hire anyone to be a Dungeon Master and you wanted that experience, who would it be? It could be real, fictional, alive, dead, doesn't matter. You know, we've mentioned the two that are probably the most well-known in the world today. But like, you know, Jeff Goldblum is the name that came up when I was doing the old.

machine learning help, ⁓ but you know, someone who does a lot of great voices, like... ⁓

Jeff (55:37)
Yeah, it'd be fun.

Hey, just to hear his voice again, I'd bring back Alan Rickman, ⁓ Snape from Harry Potter. He had the best voice. ⁓

Steve Scarfo (55:51)
god, he would be amazing.

His cadence,

his delivery was, did we talk about this during the Galaxy Quest episode? Or maybe it was something I watched while we were doing that episode that we talked about Galaxy Quest. But like he put in serious work for his character. Like he was such a great actor. I would love to have him. Alan Rickman would be phenomenal.

Jeff (56:00)
Yeah.

Yeah,

that would be my choice.

Steve Scarfo (56:21)
I would love someone who was maybe like a rich little ⁓ for anyone who remembers him or someone who does a lot of fun voices. ⁓ Cause I just think ⁓ it just adds that level of silliness to put ⁓ an actor or a character you know into that world. They did a little bit of that with ⁓ Big Bang Theory. The actor who played Howard whose name I'm not remembering.

Jeff (56:29)
Mmm.

yeah, yeah.

Steve Scarfo (56:47)
He actually does some great voices and they actually use them in a D&D setting which is why I'm thinking of it. ⁓ So something like that would be fun because he would do like Nick Cage as the wizard. And my Nick Cage sucks so I'm not going to do it. But it would just be fun to hear those voices in in world.

Jeff (56:49)
Yes.

That's right.

Yes, that was awesome.

Yeah, that's a point.

Steve Scarfo (57:08)
All right, well, I think we have gone through. ⁓ As always, let us know what you're thinking. ⁓ Being paid as a DM, listen, you're one of these people, you're ⁓ Jesse the Elder or somebody else who's been paid to be a DM and you have a story for us, us. If you love the idea, you hate the idea, if you have questions about it, reach out. ⁓ It's originalgeekpodcast ⁓ @ gmail.com and

Check us out, all the social medias, ⁓ TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. We're going on to, we have YouTube channel. check out the merch. We got the new shirts are in. I just posted a bunch of new stuff on Facebook about the new images. So check us out.

Jeff (57:55)
Absolutely. Thanks OGs. See you next time.