D&D is for... Whom?

Podcast Name: D&D Is For Nerds Where I Listened: Podbean for Android Where It's Available: SansPantsRadio.com System: D&D 3e

Clothing Only (With Shield)

Thoughts and Review

Sans Pants Radio, a humor podcast network based out of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia, publishes a series of gaming related podcasts updated on a regular basis. In the title D&D Is For Nerds, specifically, a DM attempts to run a somewhat serious game in the face of players who do not take the game seriously: an amusing and enjoyable parody that strikes surprisingly true to life for most DMs, regardless of length or breadth of their experience.

What I Like

The podcast is genuinely funny. If you have been exposed to D&D over the years, witnessed the transition between styles, themes, and parent companies, this podcast will speak to you on that level. At the same time, it does a very good job emulating a "problem player" environment, where a player (or the entire party) feels like it is actively working to undermine the DM with Monty Python references, intentional failure to learn their own abilities, and refusal to engage with the environment and obvious hooks. The answer in the OSR sphere is, for most of these patterns, to kill said character - the game, rules as written, will do that for you - but I can distinctly remember a point in my D&D career when, running in a D&D 3.5 league to support a friendly local gaming store, I genuinely felt pressured to not kill the characters: if I killed them too much, they may not come back to the store! That, coupled with my earliest experiences running D&D - I had tried to come up with large, epic themes in the tone of Lord of the Rings or the Song of Ice and Fire: in order to do that, in order to have consistent cast of characters for my tabletop novel at age 10, killing off characters had to be a careful thing: as it would ruin the narrative, or worse, scare off my players! Looking back on those times now is fun - as I've since been disabused of so many of those notions still plaguing the new school of D&D - and this podcast elicits a lot of fun memories for me of my earliest experiences actually running games.

Additionally, I like the runtime. Episodes - regardless of how long a session might have taken to run - are chunked up into 30 minute segments. For me, specifically, this is handy: 30 minutes is right about the length of my commute. For not me, more generally, this is handy as 30 minutes can fit into a lunch break - so if you wanted to grab something to listen to during the day, it's very easy with this podcast to keep in the loop, to keep the content in the right headspace, and to follow along with the current campaign arc within a short time-frame of listening. The podcast does a good job of chunking itself up in such a way that the transition between episodes does not seem intrusive even when comparable actual play content producers will often produce episodes multiple hours in length, spanning an entire session.

Note, there are some notable exceptions to this run-time rule - especially in the newer episodes, they have bumped the runtime up to about an hour - however it is still consistent and by and large, at 60 minutes, is still eligible for the commentary above.

For those reasons, I would recommend this podcast for its entertainment value - but mostly to fellow DMs who can empathize with the situations presented and who enjoy the occasional Pythonesque derailment.

What I Don't Like

To be clear - and I realize, reading my previous reviews, it's not always clear - the purpose of this review series is twofold: one, to highlight shows, streams, and podcasts that I listen to, or have listened to, that I want to share with whomever takes stock in my opinion or whomever will listen; but second - and more importantly - I wanted to produce a list that I could refer people to that would help them learn about OSR games and the OSR style of play in a fun and easy way. Thus, to be rated highly on the CWR scale, an actual play must be both a good watch (or listen) and educationally faithful to the movement.

D&D Is For Nerds is, quite simply, not OSR.

This podcast will not teach you to hex crawl. This podcast will not focus on emergent narrative. This podcast will not inform player skill through character morbidity, environmental (traps, hazards) nor combat. This podcast will illustrate a DM actively trying to move the game along in a plot-relevant direction: in opposition to the OSR approach, as embodied by putting down some boards for walls, filling the box with sand, and letting the players loose.

For that reason, I do not recommend this podcast for an aspiring OSR player trying to get into the hobby.

In Conclusion

The question that I've been asking myself the whole of the time I've been writing this review - and I'm sure some of you reading might have been asking as well - if this production isn't OSR, nor does it claim to be, why am I taking the time to make a review for it and to post about it in this actual play series?

My experience with this podcast was over the US Independence Day week of 2019; having taken my family up to the North Carolina high country on an escape both from my real job and the Florida heat, I downloaded the first dozen or two episodes and burned through them - playing them through the car's Bluetooth on the way up, on the way down, and around the mountain while driving about as necessary. I can say I did not continue my subscription, nor was I tempted by their Sans Pants Plus subscription service - which adds a tremendous amount of bonus content in addition to removing advertisements from the actual play casts, themselves - but I will say that I did enjoy it for that week on holiday, as it provided a welcome chuckle speaking to an experience I - and presumably other DMs like me - have had; while at the same time inspiring a healthy eye-roll from my non-gamer wife. It may not be for me - but it may be for you: or for a new-school player that you know.

Thus, I would rate D&D Is For Nerds as Clothing Only (With Shield). Clothing only, because it's not useful, from the perspective of learning how D&D was played in the early days of it's life - but with a shield, because it is worth a few episodes on a weekend or trip and I did genuinely enjoy listening to the subset of season 1 that I got through before returning to reality last August.

Game on, everyone!