One of the podcasts I listen to regularly, NADDPod (AKA, Not Another D&D Podcast), recently started their fourth season (or main campaign, I guess? Though they have talked about changing up the format to do fewer long campaigns and more shorter ones, which really kind of muddies the waters). After all these years of games–main campaigns, side games, mini-arcs, and one-shots–the final member of the group has taken the lead and run not just a one-shot or a mini-arc like most of the others have, but stepped up to run the next main campaign for group. The one guy in the group who hasn’t technically sworn to never run a campaign but has expressed extreme trepidation about it and about not knowing the game well enough to run things has finally stepped out from behind the character sheet and taken a seat behind the GM’s screen. This guy, Jake Herwitz, has always been funny and a great performer (and is, in fact, one of the original founders of the podcast company that NADDPod is a part of), but I was a bit nervous at the thought of him taking over. After all, I hadn’t really seen any of his independent creative work, or anything he’d done outside of the podcast. I had no idea what it was that he would bring to the show that the others didn’t do just as well if not better. Having listened to a few episodes, though, I am happy to say that all of my fears were completely wrong and he’s doing a better job than I ever imagined he could. He might even wind up being my favorite GM for this group, in fact, if he manages to stay the course for his entire run.

What I love most about this run of the podcast is how it is allowing everyone to shine in ways I hadn’t entirely anticipated. First off, we have the surprising revelation of Jake’s talent for prose and descriptive writing which, coupled with his earnest desire to do well pushing him to do a great deal of preparation, shines when it operates under the direction of his improvisational and comedic skill. It is easy for first-time GMs to make mistakes, to overstep their bounds as storytellers and rule-adjudicators in order to tell the story they have conceived of, but Jake deftly avoids all these traps while making plenty of space for his three cohosts to do their thing. Now, all of these other players have run their own games, but they’ve never played the same game together without a guest GM coming in to do a one-off game (which was done using well-established characters, leaving little room for something new to develop). This time around, as they start a brand new campaign with Jake at the helm, they’re able to develop and build their characters in relation to each other, creating a comedic environment that honestly has me laughing more than I’ve laughed during on of their campaigns since the highlights of their very first one. I do not remember the last time I had this much fun listening to a trio of comedians play through a game as they were perfectly set up by the person running the game. Every single episode has had a moment that made me bust out laughing and I’ve sorely needed the fun since this campaign began about two months before this post went up.

Part of what has enabled things to run this well and smoothly so far has been some of the mechanical setup of this campaign. The world that the GM has created is a low-magic world, which prompted all three players to make Fighters, but wildly different ones. There’s a Rune Knight, working with the last vestiges of magic that exist within the world, there’s a highwayman displaying false cheer while he sneaks around and shoots people, and finally a character straight out of Dark Souls complete with heavy lance and impossibly acrobatic moves while wearing heavy armor that he never removes. It is truly a winning combination, this collection of murderous fools who can take down just about any enemy tossed in front of them because they’re using a bunch of the Dungeons & Dragons 2024 rules. The one that they rely on most heavily is one added to help give the Martial classes a bit of an edge that they lacked in the previous version: weapon abilities. This means that, as these fighters cycle through their different weapons, they can impose all kinds of extra attacks or detriments on their foes every time they land a hit. This is super important since they’re lowered-leveled characters still and this extra damage or advantage granted by their move has kept them dominating the fights they’re in. There’s been a lot of close calls, where things might have turned against them but for the luck of the dice, so it’s not like the encounters are unbalanced, they’re just rolling well and using abilities that keep them in a good position to succeed.

I’m not much of a fan of the 2024 ruleset for D&D as a whole. Most of it feels like it’s set up to be a “legally distinct” form of D&D for the sole purpose of giving Wizards of the Coast a version of the game they can use to maintain control of the modern version of the game. That said, there are parts of it that seem to work well and I’m going to do my best to keep an open mind as the 2024 ruleset starts to creep into the actual plays I listen to. It is really easy to dislike the ruleset, especially after what Wizards tried to pull in later 2022 and early 2023, but I’ve been trying to find ways to choose joy more often in my life these days and looking for the ways the ruleset helps build something that couldn’t exist without it is a part of that. Now, might something else just as good and as fun exist in place of what’s going on in the latest NADDPod episodes? It’s entirely possible and probably even incredibly likely. Still, it’s fun to see what the system can do when introduced piecemeal and I look forward to finding out how far it all goes by the time this run of the podcast has come to an end. Whenever that happens. Hopefully not for a while since I’m having a great time and I don’t want it to end too soon.