The cast of Merely Roleplayers season 1 - Ariadne - get back together to talk couldas, wouldas and shouldas.
Episode transcript
Matt: Hi and welcome to a new, vaguely experimental Merely Roleplayers bonus, which I think we're going to call “director’s notes”, where we're gonna have a little discussion about season one and some of the behind-the-scenes things that could have happened but didn't, or maybe were planned, or things that people think they should have done differently, that kind of stuff.
Ellie: Shoulda woulda coulda.
Matt: Shoulda woulda couldas of season one. So all the crew from season one are here.
Ellie: Hello.
Strat: Hello.
Everyone: Hi!
Matt: So we've got Ellie, Vikki, Alex and Strat round the table. Does anybody have any burning questions that they want to like, kick off with?
Ellie: I am desperate to know what you thought things were going to turn out as. Like, I think we … did we stray a long way from your predestined path?
Matt: Not a huge long way, no. I sort of expected a big showdown on the stage, largely because like, the stage was the most likely place for weird stuff to happen, given the way that I designed the weird phenomena to happen. I tried to not plan too heavily exactly how you could like, end things. And I wanted to try and stay open to the idea that maybe you wouldn't fully banish the evil or that there’d be some trace of it left, or that there'd be some cost. The main thing I had planned for that never got used was the possibility that you could cross over to the … you could cross the fourth wall.
Everyone: Oh!
Matt: And end up like, on the same plane of existence as the things.
Strat: That would have been really cool.
Vikki: That would have been really cool.
Matt: So you came closest, Alex.
Alex: Right.
Matt: When you got pelted and covered in shadow goo. If you hadn't managed to turn that around to your own advantage, you'd have got pulled over into like, their shadowy fourth wall breaking world.
Alex: Oh, dammit!
Strat: You rolled too well!
Ellie: And then we could have done like
Vikki: We could have done like a seance-y thing.
Matt: Yeah, you might have been able to get him back, or he might have become … he might have had to keep rolling to not hurt you and stuff like that.
Ellie: Right. That would have been pretty interesting.
Alex: So I would have become one of those shadowy demons. So you would have seen an Alex-shaped shadowy demon.
Ellie (silly voice): Hello!
Vikki: Waving at us like a gimp.
Alex (silly voice): I don’t like it!
Matt: Who’s gonna do the show now?!
Strat: Did anything … maybe it just forces him to do Captain Ironface for the rest of the…
Vikki: For the rest of time.
Strat: Other than Captain Ironface, was there anything in particular that we did that surprised you? That you didn't think it would go that way?
Matt: Like, nothing is totally predictable, and everything … because it was definitely … obviously the first one of these we’ve done on mike, and only really the second or third roleplaying game of any kind that I've GMed. So everything felt a bit like rolling with the punches. Captain Ironface was definitely the most unexpected, the thing that I hadn't even…
Ellie: No one saw that coming.
Matt: …thought could happen.
Vikki: Even Alex didn’t see that coming.
Alex: No, I’ll be honest that was, yeah. You saying rolling with the punches, that was me just making it up as I went along.
Matt: And that … but I think that's one of the best moments of the story.
Ellie: It’s one of the most memorable moments.
Strat: Oh, here's … unless, has anyone else got another … right. The NPCs of, the other characters. It's not … if you were gonna think I was gonna say “what the hell is going on with all the Bovril”…
Ellie: That’s exactly what I thought you were going to say.
Strat: I mean, that also, but…
Matt: We can get to that.
Strat: Of the NPC characters…
Ellie: What does that mean?
Matt: Non-player character.
Ellie: Okay, so like the pre-programmed characters.
Matt: Yeah, any character that I am running.
Ellie: I get it.
Strat: Yeah, and this is going to show now, because it's been a while since I last listened to it. So the theatre manager was…
Matt: Tess.
Strat: Tess, and then the techie?
Ellie: Bee.
Matt: Phoebe.
Strat: Yeah, Phoebe.
Alex: And Errol.
Strat: Yes, Errol. Errol came in, had a load of Bovril stolen by Alex…
Matt: Yep.
Alex: Still … still rankles with me that people call it theft when it clearly wasn't. If you listen to it…
Strat: There was a vote.
Alex: There was a vote which I think was rigged. It was fake news. I’m a stable … I'm a stable genius.
Vikki: The stablest genius we know.
Alex: One of the most stablest geniuses everyone’s ever seen.
Ellie: You know all the words.
Alex: Some of the best ones.
Vikki: You are like, incredibly smart.
Alex: So incredibly smart. Sometimes.
Strat: But other than having his Bovril stolen, and then … like, he seemed like maybe you were expecting something more to happen with him. Because the others, they definitely had a very definite role, and took us somewhere and did something, whereas Errol was there…
Ellie: He was just a strange interloper.
Strat: Yeah, so I wondered if we didn't do anything to really bring out his proper thing.
Alex: Trigger him.
Ellie: Did we not push his buttons?
Matt: From like, a game running, mechanical perspective, one of the roles that he was fulfilling was … if stuff was getting a bit stagnant and not very much was happening, and it was just like, people getting into their own little circles and not really moving things forward, he was … Errol was a slightly clumsy oafish character…
Ellie: So he’s like an agitator.
Matt: … that I could have do something wrong to force you to react.
Vikki: Yeah.
Strat: Oh.
Ellie: So like, he dropped a stage light.
Alex: Errol is the agent of chaos.
Matt: A little bit.
Strat: Got you.
Matt: But also…
Strat: But does that mean that we were generally not needing him?
Matt: Generally, yeah. There wasn't a huge amount of use for him. He was also like, he was someone that I had in the back of my mind that I could put him in trouble and that you might have to rescue him.
Ellie: He’s a bit feckless.
Matt: Yeah, he was somebody who like, I was hoping that all of the kitchen antics would maybe give at least some of you some level of like, affection for him? And his ways?
Vikki: No, we hated him.
Matt: And that if he got into trouble, you might want to rescue him.
Vikki: No. We’d have just left him.
Matt: As it was, you kind of got yourselves into trouble well enough anyway.
Vikki: I punched a person in the face.
Ellie: We know what you did! With a torch! That’s worse than punching them in the face!
Strat: I got so close to using the whole kitchen antics thing as an “explain away”, which I never got to do. I think it was fine, because we got some stuff. When it was on the thing, if you haven't punched her in the face, or hit her in the head with the torch…
Vikki: Yeah, sure.
Strat: …or if that hadn't worked or something, my plan was to explain it away by saying that Errol had spilled a bit of Bovril all over the thing, and all the black stuff coming towards us was just really goopy Bovril.
Vikki: Just goopy Bovril!
Strat: And sadly I never got to have another … I was gonna have another Bovril rant, I was gonna make him clean it up…
Matt: That was actually…
Vikki: It never happened.
Matt: That's actually something that I realised afterwards that I should have done, was actually get you, or somebody, to to make a roll to see how well you convinced Tess after she came out of her unconsciousness…
Vikki: Yes.
Ellie: Oh.
Matt: … of your side of events. Because in the end you did a load of other rolls to see how well…
Ellie: The production went.
Alex: The show went.
Matt: …the production went. But I never actually introduced any chance into how well your plan to convince her that it was all fine went.
Vikki: Yeah. Or the chances she would wake up and not quite remember what we had done.
Strat: And tell the police that you smacked her with a torch.
Vikki: Yeah.
Alex: I mean, we'd have dobbed you in straight away. Thrown you under the bus.
Vikki: Roll for a guilty verdict!
Strat: No one had any trust with me, so I’d have been on you straight away.
Ellie: What was the Bovril thing about?
Matt: That was just a stupid joke that I came up with that I really wanted to put in there?
Ellie: And you just didn't expect for the … incandescent rage.
Vikki: No, no, I think he did expect the incandescent rage.
Matt: I expected bafflement. And it was almost kind of a way of setting the tone of like, something is a bit off and bizarre here. Something is a bit inexplicable. In a way it was kind of a … throwing you a red herring, and there was also the possibility that you might have … like, that might have put a lot of suspicion on Errol. And you might have ended up focusing on him as a potential source of problems.
Ellie: Tried to poison us with Bovril. What … how much further will he go?
Matt: I did not expect … I expected bafflement, I did not expect the rage.
Vikki: Me and Strat were both very angry about it.
Ellie: Oh, he was full of burning rage.
Start: You found the two people in the world that were gonna give you that rage.
Vikki: I mean, if I'd actually drunk any, then I would have been…
Strat: Even if we fake drunk some.
Vikki: Yeah, yeah.
Ellie: Yeah, there was no actual Bovril.
Vikki: No, no, but I was like … I just had tea. I didn’t even have fake Bovril, I had tea. But just the fact that Strat had ended up with Bovril made me angry. Oh god.
Alex: Bovril rage. Who’d have thought?
Ellie: Well, yeah. If you’re listening, Bovril, we’re available for sponsorship.
Vikki: I mean we mentioned it literally one hundred times.
Matt: We did have a tweet after that episode came out saying, “When I started listening to this, I did not expect to hear the world Bovril literally one million times”. I don’t think anybody did.
Vikki: No one did, no one did. But it worked out well.
Matt: We're not sponsored by Bovril.
Vikki: No, certainly not. What is wrong with you?
Alex: Hey!
Ellie: So there were no other things where, Matt, you felt like, “Oh, I had this really cool thing I wanted to get in there and it didn't happen”?
Matt: I was doing my level best not to approach it that way, because then I would end up…
Ellie: Right, disappointed consistently.
Matt: Yeah, disappointed or…
Vikki: Or trying to make us do things.
Matt: Yeah, trying to railroad you towards stuff that didn't feel logical to you. So I've been trying to approach it as, I'm giving you a set of circumstances and then it's up to you how to respond. I guess the only other thing that I thought that you might gravitate towards, that I was a little bit surprised that you didn't, was setting up some sort of seance or like, “We're gonna spend the night in the spooky place, like, in a circle of protection and see what manifests” …
Ellie: Because that would have linked in really well with the play we were doing, which is Audience with the Ghost Finder, which had like, a load of spooky seance props we could have used.
Strat: I guess really, the story didn't … not a huge amount of time elapsed within the story, so that would make sense if it was like, “We'll come back tomorrow and see”, but we kind of…
Ellie: But it felt like it was escalating quite quickly.
Alex: Oh, it did.
Strat: Yeah, and we kind of tackled things head on.
Matt: Yeah it was weird that one of you finally went into a room with windows and I was like, “Oh hang on, it's actually still like, it’s not even lunchtime”. In the time it’s taken…
Vikki: Seven hours have passed!
Matt: I was all ready to be like…
Vikki: Yeah, it was me.
Matt: … “It's very dark and stormy”, and it’s like no, it's not dark, it's still daytime.
Vikki: Yeah, it’s daytime, it's central London, people are just going about their business on Oxford Street.
Ellie: All they've had to refresh themselves is Bovril!
And were there things, fellow team players, that you thought “I wish I hadn’t done that” or “I wish I'd taken that opportunity”? I mean obviously now there's a few things we know we could have done, which we cool, but you know like, pre-knowing that.
Alex: I think for me, there … I will, if I get a chance to do it next time, will be to be a bit freer with the roleplaying and get more involved with the roleplaying. Because I felt that I was a little bit standoffish, because I was a little bit like, trying to gauge what’s going on, how can we work this, and I think I overthought it too much rather than just going, “Let's do this, let's do that, bam bam bam bam bam”.
Vikki: I totally agree with Alex. Like, I think in the second play around, because I've done a second one already, I was definitely much more like, “This is the thing I'm gonna do now, this is the thing I’m gonna do now” …
Ellie: More decisive.
Vikki: Rather than thinking like, “Oh, maybe, I'll do this or maybe…” I was just like, “I'm just gonna go with it”, because it keeps things moving forwards quickly.
Matt: It was one of the key differences, is that in that second, in season two, I think was the first time anybody went off and did something independent of everybody else. It was, you went off and said “I'm gonna decide to” … I think it was calling the kids’ parents or something. And you were like, “I'm gonna do this, and I'm going to deceive everybody else about what I'm doing”. Whereas I think in season one there was a lot of discussion between the group of what is the best way.
Vikki: We need to make a decision as a four, yeah.
Strat: I kind of get the feeling having … obviously I’m only a couple of episodes into season two, because they’re not all out while we're discussing this, but I think a big part of it for me is, listening to both and the difference between the two, is in season one we kind of came in at the start of something and the set-up, and we kind of had to roleplay it as like, “Well, we're just going in and setting up the show”. So there's a good twenty, thirty minutes of…
Ellie: Of business.
Strat: …us just roleplaying ourselves, which perhaps wasn't … it didn’t get to anything…
Vikki: Because nothing necessarily weird had happened in order for us to need to address it.
Strat: Or it was weird, but it was kind of like, rumors of weird … there wasn't a definite thing for us to attack. Whereas in season two, because you're like, halfway through there, you've established where you are…
Ellie: Well, you’ve established the norm.
Strat: You've established the norm and there's something going on and you're specifically told it is this thing. I won’t say what it is in case people haven’t started listening to it. But it’s like, this is the thing you need to fix, I think meant that it threw you into that with a lot more kind of, a lot more direction, rather than us with like, “Well, we’ll set up some props then”.
Vikki: “Let’s keep doing the normal things we’d do until something happens.”
Ellie: Something becomes irrevocably weird.
Vikki: That will mean we have to respond.
Matt: And that was a conscious improvement I made after listening back to season one and going “Actually, this takes quite a while to get going”. And part of it was, there was some exposition that I had planned for Tess to provide, which I forgot to give you.
Alex: Solid effort there.
Matt: That's how it goes sometimes.
Vikki: Lessons learned, people.
Ellie: Thing is, even you saying that like, “I forgot to do this, and I as the…” What do you call the in-charge person?
Vikki: The GM?
Ellie: GM? What’s that, general manager?
Matt: So, Powered by the Apocalypse technically calls it … the rules for the system technically refer to it as an MC? As in master of ceremonies. Other … like, the generic term in general roleplaying games…
Ellie: Oh, is it game master? So yeah, GM, MC, whatever combination of letters you want to use, I think despite you saying “Oh yeah actually, I realised I'd messed up this, that and the other in series one”, I came off the back of series one being … thinking actually, I don't need to, like Vikki was saying, think so much about what I'm doing and discuss all the options, because whatever I do, I can just do, and then if it … there's no wrong thing to do, and if we're not getting close enough to some action and moving things on, then that's Matt's job as GM, MC. He's gonna step in and it's in his, like, best interest for things to keep moving. So the the better thing for me to do is to not think, “What is the most efficient way to solve this problem?” which is maybe what, in real life, is the better thing to do, but in the game-playing world, not interesting!
Alex: Not interesting at all! It’s like, “What's happening over there? Is there a light switch I can flick on and off for a little bit?”
Ellie: Yeah! Let’s say something outrageous to this person we just met, that’s fine!
Vikki: And I think it is difficult when you are playing … it is a little bit difficult when you're playing yourself, to drop…
Alex: Yes.
Vikki: …to drop the … and also like, you don't want to go so far off the reservation that things that you do make no sense, right? You still have to do things that seem like … I think you have to, at least at the start, do things that seem like a relatively logical progression, otherwise it's suddenly like, “Oh, and we're immediately gonna call the police!” And it's like, “Whoa, we don't even know if there’s a problem yet!”
Matt: And that makes sense in the genre of the world that you’re put into.
Ellie: Yeah, that's an interesting challenge as well, and I think I felt weirdly like, more comfortable with season two because it felt more like, “Oh, we’re in a story”. Because we related it to Arthur Ransome, Enid Blyton, and I was like, “Oh they’re stories that I know”. Whereas the first one, it was like, “Oh, you are a theatre company, you are playing yourself, you're going to do a get-in at a theatre, and then some strange things are gonna happen.” And I knew from that that it was going to be supernatural. But for me that didn't feel, I guess, like, attached to enough of fictional stories that I know for me to feel like I could just be a character and part of the story.
Matt: It's an interesting challenge. I've actually been talking to other game masters and other runners of actual play podcasts on Twitter about getting your players to play versions of themselves and the problems and challenges and advantages inherent in that. Because I do think it's, and correct me if I'm wrong, kind of easier to get into the idea of doing roleplaying when you don't have to try and think, “Am I being true to this character I’ve made up”.
Vikki: Yeah, it is easier.
Matt: If the question in your mind is just, “What would I do?” it's kind of easier to get started.
Ellie: And I think it's also easier for remembering how you would approach fellow team players, because not only would you have to hold your own character in your head, but also the characters of everyone else around you, and be like, “Oh, well I'm an angry troll so how would I approach this happy princess?” You can tell I’ve played a lot of these games.
Vikki: I like that all of your knowledge is based on the TV show Community.
Ellie: Correct. If it’s just me approaching Strat it’s easier.
Strat: The hardest thing I find in any roleplaying game is just remembering other characters’ names. Or just spelling them.
Vikki: It's much easier to look at you and be like, “It's Strat, I'm gonna just talk to Strat.”
Strat: Matt and Alex and a couple of us are playing a D&D game at the moment, that Matt is DMing, and I … I can’t remember my character's name, let alone anyone else’s at the moment, so being able to play yourself comes with a lot of benefits of just being able to say “Oi, Ellie” or “Oi, Vikki”.
Matt: The disadvantage, of course, is it would not work if we all didn't know each other already. So if we start … if we get to the stage, which I'd like to get to, of bringing in more guests and people who are slightly … not in quite such a tight knit friend group, then it actually becomes a barrier if everybody's playing themselves, because they don't necessarily know how everybody else would react.
Ellie: But also, I guess that you get pluses with that situation, because then you kind of get a “Oh, getting to know each other” and finding the vibe at the same time as the listeners do. Whereas for us, something particularly with season one I was really concerned about, was like, we can't do loads of in-jokes because no one's gonna get that. But actually I think we … I relaxed more in season two because I thought, well actually, we're creating the in-jokes as we go. So you know, it's fine. And also I think what really helps is that although you're playing yourself, you get to do all that kind of scoring at the beginning, and getting your special skills and stuff, which aren't necessarily true to life. In fact a lot of them aren't. I mean you're very strong, Vikki, but you’re not that strong. So that kind of gives you the fantasy leeway to be like, I'm gonna be this version of myself. So I'm still playing a character and can make decisions I would not normally make.
Vikki: I definitely feel like in season two I gave myself a bit more permission to follow that than I did in season one.
Matt: To like, play up … find the middle ground between what would I actually do in real life and playing the stats, as it were?
Alex: Yeah, that's something that I think … if I do it again, I will be much more aware of.
Matt: And I do want to do some episodes at some point in the future where we are creating new characters rather than playing ourselves.
Alex: That'll be really good.
Vikki: I think it just comes with practice. I already found season two easier than I found season one. Like, by about tenfold, found it easier.
Strat: Well the unknown is out of it, and I imagine, yeah, if we come back and doing the same … because it's like, I was coming into it thinking this … like, I've done a lot of roleplaying, so I should … it’s a completely different style of roleplaying, like a hundred percent different. There’s a lot … there's rolling the dice, and that's about it.
Matt: Not only, or not least because we are doing this for broadcast, so it's not just a game, it's a performance as well. I'm having to think not just as a game master or MC but as a, like a radio producer as well, and trying to not just keep the story going, but thinking, is this … how good is this for the audience?
Strat: Yeah, because it needs to be satisfying a story. And that was why I was hoping for more of a showdown with the baddie in season one. I think it was … sort of, the what we found to get around it was really cool, but it, sort of, I wish there'd been like, a big, like a, kind of, some sort of battle, kind of climactic thing.
Matt: You were suggesting not long after that like, you were kind of expecting, once you’d knocked out Tess, for the thing to actually be independent of her at that point, and for it not to quite work as you intended. I think it, like … that might have happened if there’d been like, a mixed success.
Strat: Yeah, we just did too well!
Vikki: But I think that was part of the problem with season one, which is something that none of us could control, is that actually we rolled mostly really successfully.
Ellie: We did not fail a lot. Which is what I really liked in season two. You introduced like, if you fail, you get some points for failing, like there are rewards for failing.
Vikki: Much more comfortable with it in season two. We had to become comfortable with failure very quickly in season two.
Ellie: I don’t know if that was also because like, Chris and Dave were so laissez-faire about the whole thing, like “Yeah, whatever!”
Vikki: Dave was looking for the fail. He’s looking for the fail.
Ellie: He was hoping for the fail.
Vikki: I think so, yeah.
Matt: I think one of the things that happened pace-wise in season one is, it gets to a point where it's like, every kind of next step is sort of logical? Whereas in season two, we had a couple of things that completely swerved things.
Vikki: Yes, quite a lot of the time.
Ellie: And there was a lot of situations where it was like, “Well, there are literally three things we could do here, and they all seem to have equal likelihood of succeeding, so let's just choose one.”
Vikki: And quite a lot of stuff goes pretty wrong.
Ellie: It goes sideways.
Vikki: So it’ll … yeah, I'm hoping it sounds as kind of climactic as it felt when we were doing it.
Matt: Great. Any more final things before we wrap this up?
Alex: No.
Strat: Anything you wanna say about the experience, Matt? About how wonderful…
Matt: Everybody was amazing. Thank you, thank you all so much for going with it, and like, getting over the fear and rolling with the punches in the same way as I had to from all of you. And yeah, telling a good story.
Ellie: Yeah, I feel cleansed.
Matt: Yeah, trying stuff.
Alex: Yeah.
Ellie: I feel cleansed from this conversation. Thanks Matt.
Strat: Let's do it again sometime.
Alex: Yeah!
Outro
Matt: Merely Roleplayers is produced by M. J. Starling in association with Blackshaw Theatre Company. Search for the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or your usual podcast service, and if you can't find it, let us know. We're on Twitter @MerelyRoleplay and facebook.com/merelyroleplayers. Reviews and kind words are all very much appreciated, and we hope you'll join us again for our next episode.