Episode 8 – Push Your Luck, Deck Building and Dungeon Crawler

Our topic for today? We’re behind the scenes of creating content.

Music: Black Moons by The 126er on YouTube

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Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast episode are those of the people featured and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Tabletop Inquisition.


2 Replies to “Episode 8 – Push Your Luck, Deck Building and Dungeon Crawler”

  1. RogerBW

    For me Zombie Dice is pretty much a pure push-your-luck game: the only decision you make is “based on what dice have already come out, shall I draw and roll more, or stop here?”. It can be good light fun, but sometimes you just get a runaway winner.

    The Boardgame Inquisition Press should perhaps be accompanied by the Boardgame Inquisition Rack and Boardgame Inquisition Thumbscrew…

    I’ve done some segments with Lizzie Bell for Our Turn Podcast, and while we mostly chat over Google Hangouts we make our own recordings at each end of the link because that’s higher quality than the Hangouts version. For Improvised Radio Theatre with Dice we get together in person, since my co-host lives fairly close to me. And for Whartson Hall actual-play RPG recordings, I record one stereo track of me directly, and one of everyone else via Hangouts… which isn’t great, but it’s easy for the players getting together after a long day at work. For each of these I then take the raw recordings and tidy them up in Audacity – suppress noise, cut out any spoken flubs, then compress and normalise.

    The most expensive thing I’ve bought for podcasting, and the thing that’s made the biggest difference to sound quality, is a Tascam DR-40 stand-alone recorder. (It also makes it easier to do interviews on the go.)

    I’ve been thinking about getting into video, but there’s a whole extra level of complexity there. With audio only, I can cut out a bit of speech that went wrong, and cover it up so that people won’t notice; but if I’m a talking head on video, my head will jump sideways.

    (But in any case I dislike social media so I’ll never get rich and famous off this.)

    • Oliver

      Hello Roger,

      Thank you for your comment. I’ve never played Zombie Dice, but it does sound like fun.

      I also like your suggestions for the Tabletop Inquisition branding. We’ll have to think about those…

      Yes, recording podcasts via local recording always gives you the best quality, but does require a lot more work when editing, as you have to line up the audio. We found using Zencastr is a good compromise. The audio quality is usually good, as long as the guest’s internet speed is good, but we have also started recording locally. As I say though, it’s all about the time needed to get the episode out there. It’s always a matter of finding the time alongside your day job.

      As you say, video is definitely a whole new level of time commitment, as well as related costs. Editing audio is a lot, lot easier than editing video. As a very rough rule of thumb, it takes at least 3-5 times the audio length to record, edit, etc, while it takes probably 5-10 times the video length. So a 10 minute podcast can be finished in an hour, while a 10 minute video can easily take 2 hours. If you want to do it well, it’ll take even longer.

      With regards to making a living out of this, it’s very hard, if not impossible. I think most people in the tabletop games industry who write blogs, make podcasts, publish videos, etc do it because they love doing it and it’s more about subsidising your time with getting free review copies, some sort of support via Patreon, Ko-Fi, etc or maybe getting some advertising sponsorship. However, that doesn’t stop us from continuing of course.

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