Of all the people I’ve ever talked to who got into the various tabletop gaming shows and podcasts created by ex-College Humor people (Such as Dimension 20 and Not Another D&D Podcast), I’m the only one who has followed my particular path. I’m sure there’s other people who have followed the same route given that there’s billions of other humans and millions of other people who fit into the same broad media categories that I do, but I’ve yet to find any despite keeping my eyes peeled. After all, most probably followed the various comedians or College Humor itself as it began to fracture in the collapse of the online advertising marketing (fomented, of course, by Facebook’s outright lies about video views), which makes sense! A lot of the modern Actual Play shows that quickly rose to prominence did so as a result of bringing an existing audience with them (one need not look further than Worlds Beyond Number for recent proof of this). I wasn’t really into the type of humor that College Humor relied on, though, and wasn’t really into internet comedians in general (and I’m still not, to be honest). They’re just not my thing. So I only discovered NADDPod (and through them the rest of the now DropoutTV network) three years ago, when they were about halfway through their second full campaign and I happened to stumble across a song from the finale of their first campaign on my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist.

The song quickly caught my attention since it was the only standout song on an otherwise unremarkable playlist. The gentle, quiet tones of the song that slowly build through what turned out to be a thematic story from the first campaign was what initially caused me to pay attention to the song, but what solidified it as something unforgettable was when a chorus of other voices joined in for the final refrain. I was away from my desk at work the first time I heard it, so it wasn’t until two or three repeats later that I was able to examine the album art for the track and learn that my suspicion, that the song was too specific to be unattached to anything bigger, was well-founded. It took a little bit of googling, but I was able to quickly discover the source of the song and then launched myself on a new podcast journey that included me supporting a podcast on Patreon for the first time, just to get access to extra recordings, including the music I enjoyed so much.

While this wasn’t the first podcast I’d listened to that included music written specifically for the episodes (that honor goes to the first season of The Adventure Zone), this was the first podcast I listened to that had not just background music but a song with lyrics created for it. It was memorable, listening closely for the faint tinkling of the music in the background of scenes and then going to the Patreon (and Spotify at the time) to look up those songs to add to my own tabletop gaming playlists. Not as memorable as my first time listening to One Big Bed after getting the full context of the song from the entire 100 episode podcast season after avoiding listening to it a single additional time after I discovered that it was part of said podcast’s finale, but still pretty important to my general experience of the podcast as a whole! Even now, when there’s much less new music coming out (almost none since they now mostly reuse old music or occasionally license/use license-free music), listening for the faint undertones of the background music and getting surprised, once or twice a season, by the introduction of a new song is still one of the highlights of my listening experience.

I’ll admit that the humor of the podcast sometimes runs right up to the edge of what I’m willing to listen to (I maintain that I’m not a prude or anything like that, I just don’t find anything inherently funny in mentioning genitalia), but it never crosses the line from crude to crass. Plus, the rest of the humor more than makes up for these moments that I don’t particularly like (nor particularly dislike, to be clear). There’s a segment from the middle of the first campaign that still gets me laughing every time I re-listen to it, as one of the characters prances around being a distraction while everyone else sneaks past a potentially unending number of combatants (should the alarm be raised). Which isn’t the only memorable bit of humor from the first campaign, just the one that lives in my head always. Since the show is hosted by comedians, there’s usually plenty of humor and the moments that don’t involve humor tend to be pretty hard-hitting, emotionally. Most of the time, anyway. The second campaign didn’t hit quite as heavily as the first one did and while the third one is coming to a close, it looks like it will land beyond but still closer to the second campaign rather than landing near any of the peaks from the first campaign.

Expecting two incredible games out of an Actual Play group feels like maybe more than I can expect (even if Dimension20 seems to have somehow figured out the secret to getting more emotional impact than average out of its seasons and I think that every major season of Friends at the Table is an incredible game, as are many of the smaller games they play), but I think that NADDPod will manage to deliver eventually, when their campaigns aren’t interrupted like the last two have been. After all, it would be a disservice to describe their first campaign as lightning in a bottle. It was, in my opinion, a stellar experience, but there’s nothing saying they don’t have the skills to do it again. After all, they didn’t really trip into the story they told like the McElroys did with The Adventure Zone. The GM, Brian Murphy, knew what the story was from the very beginning and while the players all improvised some excellent character stories, a lot of them were set up to play out in more or less that direction from the very beginning. Sure, the moment-to-moment stuff is improvised and the entire campaign is all of these great actors and storytellers setting each other up to succeed, but each of them came in with a solid vision that they were able to build on and play out throughout the campaign. It’s difficult to look back at that story after listening to it three times (have I ever mentioned that I maybe spend too much time listening to podcasts?) and think that it is anything but the result of skill on the part of the hosts.

I’d definitely recommend NADDPod if you’re looking for a Dungeons and Dragon Actual Play podcast to listen to. There’s plenty there to keep you occupied for quite a while and even more on their Patreon if you enjoy them enough to invest five bucks (and more if you invest higher, but I’m at the $5 tier and have no idea how good any of the higher-tier stuff is). The only reason I might suggest caution is that they have, in the last couple years, gone from a weekly Actual Play podcast to a podcast that has Actual Play episodes approximately every other week and fills in the gaps with other comedy-centric stuff that I don’t personally enjoy as much. Sure, the hosts are funny, but I don’t really trust their calls on a lot of the “how D&D works” questions they get in for their “Dungeon Court” sessions. Which is just my opinion, of course, but I’m not going to recommend something based on aspect that I don’t particularly enjoy unless I know the person I’m making the recommendation to super well. Still, it’s easy to skip episodes if their non-AP media isn’t to your liking and strength of their AP media makes it worth dealing with the less-frequent episodes of the latest season. Also, if you’re worried about the tone of their humor, the literal first ten minutes of the first episode of their first campaign will set the bar for as far as they’ll go (a thing they even comment on in the moments after the jokes), so you won’t have wasted much time if their humor winds up not being for you.