Mistie Sits Down And Chats With Adam And Robert From Viva La Dirt Leagues New Series!

Roll for initiative!

A brief statement and call to action and chance. Whatever your character sheet’s strengths, skills, or past experience, your position in combat is looking up at you from the top of a colorful D20 die. Strategies must be quickly formed to keep your party alive, successful, and feeling satisfied in the latest conquest over their enemy. With talent and practice so many things can go right, but with one poor roll of the dice, so many things could go wrong… and hilariously so.

This collection of words might seem crazy to you, but if you play D&D, then this statement means a lot more than to the uninitiated.

I state this primarily because we here at Nerd News Social were given the chance to pre-screen Viva la Dirt League’s newest series D&D Logic, their first episode, and even chat with the people behind it.

Let’s join Adam King and Robert Hartley as we talk about DND and what to expect from the new series on Viva la Dirt League‘s channel!

Mistie Newman: First of all, absolutely thrilled to be here. I’ve been watching Viva La Dirt League content for a couple of years. It’s hilarious, I love it.

Adam King: I’m glad!

Mistie: Just to get one question out of the way, because my husband was like, “You gotta ask, you gotta ask!” Adam, do you really drink your tea that way?

Adam: No I don’t, and that’s a question I get asked a lot. I got a lot of hate for. Actually, I’m the opposite. I either like black tea or a very small amount of milk.

Robert: Just show it the milk. My granddad used to say just show it the milk. It can’t be too strong. If the teaspoon can stand up on its own, then it’s the right strength of the tea.

Adam: Yeah, I am a tea snob. I’m quite the opposite, but everyone assumes the opposite.

Robert: It’s amazing how few people can’t differentiate between character and player.

Adam: But, we always get the question is Rowan an asshole in real life and I have to say yes he is an absolute asshole.

Mistie: I imagine that you guys are absolutely lovely in person. As far as the DND Logic, I had the chance to watch the screener. Absolutely hilarious.

Adam: Oh thanks.

Mistie: Love the comeback character, the twin brother.

Adam: Oh yes, oh yes.

Robert: He is a fun character.

Mistie: Is everyone on the team a seasoned D&D player?

Robert: No, absolutely not. Thankfully I am. So I can just make them look like they are, by writing their lines for them. I obviously play with the Viva La Dirt League guys on the Viva La Dirt League D&D channel. That’s Adam, Alan (Morrison) Rowan(Bettjeman), and Ben (Van Lier). Britt (Scott Clark) has played with us before on the Avernus Campaign, and Ellie has played with us before as well. So we’ve had a number of people playing, but then Emmet Skilton, Tameka Sowman (Vahatau), Phoenix Cross, and Byron Coll hadn’t played before, had heard about it but had never played. So before we filmed I actually got them around to my house, and I ran a one-shot for them, so at least they were more familiar with what the game actually was before parodying it.

Adam: Although, even loads of us who have played, I would not call seasoned veterans in the slightest. Rob is the only one who is the Veteran.

Robert: You only need to watch the games to how little they still understand about D&D.

Mistie: As far as class types, which one would you say is your favorite class type to play and put together.

Robert: Oh, that’s a good question. For me, it’s probably monk. Partly because of nostalgia because my very first character was a monk. But also because I’ve always been a fan of martial arts and martial arts movies, and the monk is basically the martial artist of the group. Also because they are so powerful. They are often overlooked they are not a spellcasting class, but they can do so much. So I really love playing monks.

Adam: I’ve ever only played sorcerer and paladin. Interestingly enough, I actually prefer to play a paladin. I really enjoyed playing them as a class, that was very fun actually. But there is a part of me.. I play warrior/tank main in World of Warcraft. There is a part of me that looks at Rowan as Bodger, I would really love to play a barbarian. I think I would feel like I would smash that. I love tank maining. It’s very fun.

Robert: If this New Zealand lockdown currently, continues for any longer then we might do Isolation Games part 2. In which case maybe you’d roll up a barbarian.

Mistie: I keep hearing about the lockdowns over there, you guys have another round of 64 new cases, I saw.

Adam: It was 64 just yesterday, we are spiking up there. We are in solid level 4 lockdown. But I am very happy about that. I’d rather be locked down and get rid of it.

Mistie: Oh good.

Robert: Yes. 100%.

Mistie: As a GM, how often do you pull punches to make it easier for your parties to survive a session?

Robert: Quite often. There is a lot of GM styles. There are as many styles as there are people. Everybody has their own unique thing. It depends on the game that I’m trying to run. With the Viva La Dirt League guys and their channel, I have a story in place and we’ve got to always be aware that we are making content for a channel. So I have to move the story along a little bit as a faster clip. So it influences it a bit, I can’t just have one of them dying because I accidentally didn’t balance the encounter right. So sometimes I’ll pull punches. Or if Ben is rolling particularly poorly, I might pull punches so he doesn’t hate the game. The primary concern for me, even above making good content, is the four people playing with me are enjoying themselves. It’s a game at the end of the day, and I’m hoping that the people playing are having fun. So as long as we are having fun that’s the most important thing. If I feel like pulling a punch is going to make the game more fun for them, then 100% on board with that. In my home games, where it’s a lot more sandboxy, and every direction we go is 100% decided by them, then any situation that they get into where I need to pull a punch is by definition gotten into by their decisions, their choices. Therefore I’m less likely to pull punches because that’s something they’ve decided to do. They’ve gone and attack that dragon before they are ready to. It’s really a case by case.

Mistie: What other types of D20 styled games do you dabble in?

Robert: I was actually talking about that just this morning in my stream actually. There are a lot of tabletop RPGs, like hundreds if not thousands. I haven’t played that many of the other ones. I haven’t played Pathfinder for instance, which was based on 3.5 edition D&D. But, I have played Starfinder, which is a sci-fi version based on Pathfinder which is based on D&D. That’s D20 system, it’s very number crunchy. I enjoyed it, but you really have to get involved with the character sheet. If you think D&D is complicated, then it’s a 10th of what Starfinder is.

Adam: That sounds difficult.

Robert: You don’t just one armor class, you got a kinetic armor class physical weapons. You got an energy armor class, in case you are getting attacked by ray guns. You’ve got a different armor class if someone is trying to grapple you, and things like that. Then you got +1 from this little thing, +7 from this, and a -2 from this encounter. There is a lot of math and crunching numbers. A lot of D20 I find to be a bit too involved for newbies to pick up. But then again there are other systems outside of D20 systems like D6 systems, and no dice at all systems, and card-based system, and things that can be very rules light and it can be easy to pick up for anyone who has never even heard of a tabletop roleplaying game. You just have to find the right system really.

Mistie: Absolutely, it can really put a pause on a game if you have to calculator and a math sheet to try to figure out how hurt are you.

Robert: Yeah, absolutely. That’s why I always say, if you can’t find the ruling as written, within a minute, make a ruling up on the spot and look it up later. It’s more important to keep the flow of the game going than to get it exactly right. You can always go back in the last session, and say “When we said that fireballs work like this, turns out they work like this instead, so we will be doing that from now on.” So we’ll be doing that from here on out. Just make a ruling and just go with it in the moment.

Mistie: Can you remember your most favorite character that you ever put together and roleplayed?

Robert: Adam?

Adam: I’m trying to think of everything that we’ve done.

Robert: As actors, it’s not just roleplaying games, but also roleplaying in performances as well.

Adam: Yeah, that is kinda how Viva La Dirt League works in a lot of our skits, where we improv. We have loose scripts that we try to stick to, but basically, we just know our characters. We go, here is the scenario, now just say words in that scenario. I kind of feel like we’re always roleplaying in Viva La Dirt League. In terms of tabletop games, I love playing Baradun. I’m usually described as a nice guy, and it gives me the right to play a piece of shit.

Robert: My favorite character, that I’ve probably played, one of my favorite ones was a human barbarian, with a soldier background, called Herman, and his raging came about because he was the LT. in an army, and he felt like he let his entire battalion down and they all died because of his decisions. So his raging came about more like a PTSD thing, if anyone in the party got into danger, then he would involuntarily go into a rage to protect them, to make sure he wasn’t making the same mistake again. It was a fun character, I only played him from level 1 to 5, but it was a fun little campaign.

Mistie: What is your stance on a TPK?

Robert: TPK for anyone who doesn’t know the terminology, stands for Total Party Kill.

Adam: I did not know, so thank you very much for explaining it.

Robert: Generally when the entire party has gotten into such a dangerous situation that they all end up going down. Maybe it’s super dangerous and overbalanced as an encounter, or rolled poorly, or the bad guys have rolled really well. So TPK, or Total Party Kills, I generally try to avoid them in my game, because the story comes first in my game. It’s more of a storytelling thing, than it is a board game. So, if I am telling a story, then I have plans for these characters to have proper character arcs and redemption arcs and all of these sorts of things. It will mean a lot more work for me to scrap all of that, and start again the next session because they all died. So, I’m okay with a TPK if it’s the party’s decision. If it’s the party that has done something really stupid, and it leads to their death, that’s the appropriate way to end thier story. But if it doesn’t feel appropriate, if it was just a random encounter that we all happened to be rolling, I’ll massage certain things to make it go differently, or after they die I’ll come up with a Deus ex machina reason to them all being resurrected by the bad guys, so now they work for the bad guy. Some way to continue their story. Very case by case though.

Mistie: Have you ever had a player become uncomfortably balanced in a game, where it was affecting the entire path of the game?

Robert: I am still playing the home game that I first started with, and early on, one of the guys wanted a bigger sword, bigger than a great sword, because he was basing his character on an anime character who has this huge anime sized sword. Sure, A great sword does 2D6, pay x amount gold, and you can have a sword made that does 2D8, and before you play the game for a while, that doesn’t seem like a lot. Once you’ve played for a while, that’s a really big balance difference. Because every time he is hitting he is hitting with 2D8. So that is a way to overbalance it, but instead of removing it, or nerfing him, I just made the other guys equally more powerful, and they became more of a heroic class. They all feel a little more like superheroes because they can all do more damage than they should be able to do. I tend to catch those sorts of things early and adjust to make up for it.

Adam: A friend of mine was saying, he is usually a DM, but in a game, he was playing in, a reasonably inexperienced DM gave him a wish ring, some item that had wish associated with it. He as a DM knew it was a seventh-level item.

Robert: Shouldn’t be getting this at this level.

Adam: He was thinking, how are you giving me a wish ring, you absolute idiot. So he purposefully didn’t overuse it. Not because he didn’t want to break the game, but because he knew if he overused it, it would be taken away from him. But he basically thought he could do anything essentially.

Robert: Wish is described as the most powerful thing in the game for good reason. It’s a choice. I deliberately gave my early party access to a one-time wish, just to see what they would do. By that point, I had played with them enough to know that they were responsible enough to use it in character, and I was just curious what they would do with it. But just giving it because you haven’t thought otherwise, is very dangerous. You could easily overbalance 5th edition D&D by accidentally giving out powerful items.

Adam: I think it was just his DM brain that thought, I shouldn’t abuse this.

Mistie: How do you feel is the best method to introduce and bring someone brand new into a D&D session?

Adam: Thats you.

Robert: Yeah.

Mistie: Do you help them by pre-writing some, see which one looks good to them, or do you help them make the characters?

Robert: I tend to give them the option. So with these guys, when we started the D&D game, I said, who do you want to play? It made sense, kinda no brainer, that the three Viva owners will be playing their NPC characters. But because Ben had just an adventurer role, that came up from time to time, and he has played a few other roles in the Epic NPC Man world he had the most free reign of every, so I gave him free rein, and I worked with him to create the character. I sat him down with all of the books and worked him through the character sheet. But occasionally if it’s for a one-off or one-shot, I’ll usually, if I am being hired as GM to run a game for someone then I’ll give them the option, do you want to make your own character, or do you want me to make you a premade and give you a character sheet on the day. There really is no one way that is better than the other. It just depends on what that person is interested in.

Adam: I imagine a lot of people will ask for a pre-made.

Robert: Quite a few people did. Quite a few people ask for a cross between the two. They have an idea for a character they want to play, they have no idea how to turn that into a D&D character. So they will tell me the idea of the character they want to play, they want to be a badass character who is sneaky and jumping between shadows, and unlocking things. So I go, okay I will turn that into D&D and give them their character.

Mistie: I loved the preview with the scheduling issues.

Robert: Very typical of D&D, having scheduling issues, trying to get five adults together to play a game.

Mistie: Right? The first series episode was great. Is the fellow that was killed off, right off the bat, will that be a recurring joke?

Robert: It is, yes. There are a few recurring jokes for the characters. Him being a wizard, wizards are the squishiest class, with sorcerors as a potential and other squishy class, and so I wanted this running joke that he feels like a super badass being a magic-using wizard, but he’s also got the fewest hit points of anyone in the class. So he is probably going to go down quite a few times.

Mistie: Excellent, I’m looking forward to that.

Robert: I got a few running jokes for a few different class members, that I’m looking forward to coming out as the series goes on.

Mistie: From what I saw, it’s going to be absolutely enjoyable for anyone who has played D&D, and is a nice introduction to the tropey concepts, for those who don’t really play D&D.

Adam: I think D&D logic is going to be great. The reason we are putting it on our main channel is that it has a lot of the humor and style of the Viva La Dirt League content. It’s still most certainly Viva skit style. So anyone who likes Viva skits, or comedy in general, will absolutely love D&D Logic. Rob has written some amazing top-level nerd jokes.

Robert: Some real nerd jokes that I have to explain to some people. That’s the balance, I was trying to make. So that it’s accessible and funny and enjoyable for people who just like D&D and have never heard of Viva, and likewise enjoyable and funny for people who love Viva and don’t know anything about D&D.

Mistie: I’m thrilled about the whole show. I’m looking forward to getting to watch it, and I really hope it is super successful for you as all the other series that you have done so far!

Robert: Thank you!

Adam: Thank you very much!

Mistie: Thank you for letting us have this time with you today.

I can honestly say that I am pleased that the new series is every bit as hilarious and true to the source materials as their prior Logic series. Check out the new series HERE