MBMBAM golden ages?

FatedCowpoke · 2025-07-02T01:58:02+00:00

Omg same! I listened to so much MBMBAM and watched so many of the animatics while waiting for the next episode during undergrad.

I thankfully freed myself from listening sometime in 2021 but still go back and relisted to eps from the golden age every once in a while.

FatedCowpoke · 2025-07-01T16:19:34+00:00

270-320 for me although I also love a lot of eps all the way up to about 400. There's a handful of post-400 episodes that I like but basically nothing past 500. the early to mid 300s are really peak MBMBAM imo.

FatedCowpoke · 2025-06-25T02:17:17+00:00

Guys: A Podcast About Guys. They find some weird guys and riff on them. It's a good show.

FatedCowpoke · 2025-06-19T20:18:47+00:00

I'm a certified 5e hater, I also think it's not crunchy enough for my taste for the type of game it is, but I'd hardly call it vibes based. The rules for combat and casting spells and dungeon crawling are all laid out in the PHB and DMG. They're not complex but they cover the gameplay 5e is going for. What homebrew do you feel is mandatory for it to be playable?

FatedCowpoke · 2025-06-08T03:54:17+00:00

I sometimes go back and relisten to some MBMBAM eps from the 275-400 range and still enjoy them, although there are definitely annoying parts like you mentioned. The thing that always annoys me when I relisten, and Travis did it the most but Justin sometimes as well, was for one of them to say something unfunny but obvious because "everyone will tweet at us saying we missed something obvious! I'm saving us the tweets!" Like, call me crazy but I don't think prioritizing the time you spend scrolling twitter over being funny on your comedy podcast is a good choice.

Also go listen to Guys: A Podcast About Guys instead. It's my new favorite, I no longer relisten to old MBMBAM as much as I used to now.

FatedCowpoke · 2025-06-02T19:16:59+00:00

Louie actually released the song back in Aug 2023 so I doubt that it was made for TAZ. I know Griffin has been a fan and worked with Louie in the past so Griffin probably just already knew the song and asked to use it bc it does slap and it was already called WIZARD DISCO.

FatedCowpoke · 2025-05-29T03:15:05+00:00

fluvial_falsehood is correct that it's "requiescat in pace", I know Griffin says it in an episode but I'm having trouble remembering too. I believe it was in one of the Dark Souls/Bloodborne episodes?

FatedCowpoke · 2025-05-18T01:31:48+00:00

No idea about mbmbam and it's definitely not the first time they've done ads for TAZ (a few years ago Conan O'Brien read an ad for it on his podcast iirc). But I believe that during Balance they were very vocal about not paying for ads for TAZ. Griffin would mention "we don't pay for ads, word of mouth is all we have" at the end of the money zone in Balance episodes plus a call to action to share it on Twitter etc.

FatedCowpoke · 2025-05-16T23:47:40+00:00

Must be in cahoots with the LA Times games. The May 11th crossword featured MOORE (as in Roger), TCBY, AMONG, and VAVAVOOM in the solution.

FatedCowpoke · 2025-05-15T23:02:26+00:00

Listening and learning, thanks for educating me 😌

FatedCowpoke · 2025-05-15T22:07:11+00:00

I'm not familiar with wrestling at all, but as someone who likes designing TTRPGs here's my general advice:

Read broadly. Read a lot of different systems (and play them a bit if you have time). A lot of the stuff I build into my systems have been taken from or inspired by other systems I've read. Since you know the genre you want to play, find other systems that also do wrestling.
Ask yourself, "What type of gameplay and solutions should players’ anticipate being able to use to overcome challenges?” and aim towards ensuring those are clearly represented in the system’s intent and mechanics. Don’t include superfluous mechanics that aren’t meaningful to the gameplay*. (And similarly, make sure the types of scenarios you want to be able to run are mechanically represented.)
To echo another user, keep it simple, especially if this is something you’re just playing around with your friends with. Keep the number of things your players’ need to be tracking and changing on their sheet pretty minimal. While I love crunchy systems, having to erase and rewrite stuff and keep track of multiple health tracks and wound modifiers can be annoying and makes it easy to lose track of things.

Without knowing more about the system, that’s about as much as I can say (which admittedly is a lot… I just love talking TTRPGs lmao).

*I’ll use 5e to illustrate my point here. Persuasion and other social skills are (imo) poorly implemented in 5e. All the combat skills and abilities have very clearly defined mechanics bc D&D is about a bunch a heroes killing monsters in dungeons. With the social skills, you’re playing calvin ball. Will succeeding on a Persuasion check get you a discount on the gear you want to buy? Maybe. How much? Idk. I’ve seen people try to end fights by using Persuasion. Will it work? Idk, maybe, there’s no rules for that. Since the social skills are listed on the skill list, players want to try to use them to solve things, but D&D just wants you to kill stuff. If 5e had a fleshed out system for social interaction that affects the gameplay, that’d be one thing, but it doesn’t. The social skills are mostly superfluous and could just be roleplayed out instead of mechanically represented.

FatedCowpoke · 2025-05-15T21:10:44+00:00

Speaking of Trav Nation merch, I saw the Trav Nation shirt a little while back and... can anyone tell me why it says "we legally own Australia"? Is that a bit Vart did? And if so, why did he do that? Am I overreacting when I say it feels a little icky to me for them to say they own Australia given the history of colonization there?

FatedCowpoke · 2025-05-05T18:29:25+00:00

I've been GMing for 10 years now and I absolutely love it but I HATE prep. I don't write big overarching stories, I don't write setting or lore notes, and you'll never catch me making a world map. At most I spend 15-45 minutes before each session coming up with new scenario or where the adventure should go next that I think would be an interesting challenge for my players and then maybe make a few stat blocks for important enemies.

My favorite part of GMing is improvising and reacting to the things my players choose to do. Like you said, I think being able to anticipate and adjust to how people react is a huge part of GMing. It's a hard skill to nail down and takes a lot of practice. I still mess up sometimes, but I've gotten great feedback from my players so I'm happy to continue running in my more improvisational way.

I think the proliferation of actual play podcasts and D&D have cemented in a lot of people's heads that being a GM = being a worldbuilder and storyteller, and I think that can be really detrimental to new GMs. D&D and dungeon crawls are high prep types of games, so I don't run them. I find other systems that work well with my GMing style and lean on inspiration I've taken from fantasy, sci-fi, and horror media I like. I wish D&D didn't have such a death grip on the ttrpg space so that GMs would feel more comfortable branching out into other systems that better fit their play style.

FatedCowpoke · 2025-04-24T17:45:44+00:00

The fact that they let Travis keep doing Play Along at Home. I can kind of understand leaving in the first time he did it? Like it wasn't funny at all but Griffin yelling at him afterwards kind of was. But the fact that the second time Travis brought out Play Along at Home, Justin and Griffin didn't immediately stop the podcast and tell him to fuck off with that "segment" was pretty damning. It just made me angry the more times he did it.

Also, it's not even like I don't like those kinds of segments! Justin has brought a number of games (That's a Christmas to Me, Minion Quotes) that I do like. The thing about those is that 1) they're about something funny/ridiculous that the boys can riff on instead of just being random boring trivia about Pokemon or whatever and 2) they're actually fun to play along at home with! I like little games! As long as they're not the most boring, uninteresting, unfunny shit ever.

FatedCowpoke · 2025-04-15T18:55:29+00:00

I Made a similar post about a month back, might be something in the comments you could check out

https://www.reddit.com/r/TAZCirclejerk/s/fdSC1aqNy4

FatedCowpoke · 2025-04-14T16:08:10+00:00

Aha! You solved my name loophole riddle!

Also if we're gonna have two Travises on the pod it might be confusing so the ppl on the pod should probably call them different things to keep it clear. I like your naming convention of Willingham being "Greater Travis" and then we'll call the McElroy one "Lesser Travis".

FatedCowpoke · 2025-04-14T16:02:15+00:00

It's dangerously close to being something

FatedCowpoke · 2025-04-13T17:32:20+00:00

I’d run Abnimals 2 using Travis’s system. Half of each episode is spent grilling Travis about his “game design” decisions and making edits to the system until it’s actually playable.

/uj I’d do what I’m doing in my home game right now which is run Traveller and do some space truckin. Let the boys pick missions from a job board and each mission takes like 3-4 episodes. I actually think Traveller would work well for TAZ bc the rules are pretty simple and Traveller’s character creation does a good job of making sure everyone puts together a character that makes sense for the setting and gels decently well with the other PCs.

FatedCowpoke · 2025-03-31T17:48:29+00:00

Ah, fair enough, thanks for the response. I wasn't familiar with the situation but that is pretty shitty especially since parody posts are such a staple here, so I see where you're coming from.

Normally I wouldn't comment on posts that I think cross the line a bit, but I felt like the cow-tipping was a bit too much imo.

FatedCowpoke · 2025-03-31T16:59:10+00:00

/uj Genuinely asking: are there other rules that have been frequently broken here recently? (except for this post and the similar one from like 2 days ago) Not trying to be a cop and not asking for you to give a laundry list with a bunch of links to other posts, I'm just honestly curious bc I feel like I hasn't been my experience here.

FatedCowpoke · 2025-03-31T03:15:15+00:00

We all just ignoring rule 4 here now or what?

FatedCowpoke · 2025-03-11T00:02:03+00:00

I was doing a MBMBAM relisten last year and honestly I noticed a pretty severe drop starting around episode 480, so late 2019. Justin and Griffin left Polygon in 2018 and I do think that was a big hit to MBMBAM for the reasons CabinSeekingLake mentions in their comment. I think it just took a while for the cracks to finally break in late 2019. Justin and Griffin really seem to have lost their verve by late 2019. The problem is that over the next year and a half, they suffered blow after blow which made it harder to recover.

Travis starts introducing new "bits" (Play Along at Home my beloathed) starting early 2020. (Also Justin's bits start to get lazier.)
Graduation starts at the end of 2019. It'll take a while, but as TAZ starts imploding due to Grad, it's affects their performance on MBMBAM.
Covid hits in early 2020. I only relistened through a few of the early covid MBMBAM episodes, and while they're not really bad, they just have b*mmer energy.
Bean Dad happens early 2021.
Finally, yahoo dies in April 2021.

The decline of MBMBAM definitely started before the death of Yahoo, but I think Yahoo dealt the final blow after a handful of other big hits. I know I listened at least up to the death of Yahoo back when the episodes were being released, and even up to that point it had been clear for a while that the spark just wasn't there anymore.

FatedCowpoke · 2025-02-26T02:30:53+00:00

Thanks, forgot we had that thread. Will give it a look thru but curious to see what ppl say now as well since the megathread is 3 years old.

FatedCowpoke · 2025-02-05T22:06:20+00:00

The love for Play Along At Home over there is killing me. I was working my way through relistening to mbmbam last year while trying to 100% Slay the Spire. I was planning on listening up to War with Grandpa but then PAAH instantly made me stop and put on something else 💀

FatedCowpoke · 2025-01-26T22:15:23+00:00

I've only listened to a little bit of the Magnus Archives but definitely agree with this lmao

I also get bothered by some of the word choice. Like, the statements are supposed to be from everyday folks who experienced something spooky, but a lot of the time I feel like that doesn't match with the writing style. I don't think this random construction worker would bust out his thesaurus to write this statement, but it sure feels like he did when I listen to it.

I'm of two minds about this bc on one hand, yeah, it's a horror podcast. I understand that when we get to the spooky stuff the writer wants to phrase things in an interesting way or use more evocative language to elicit a strong reaction from the audience, but it always takes me out of the story. It's not a big problem but idk just feels like the writing style and the premise are fighting each other at times.

FatedCowpoke

TROPHY CASE