Hail and well met, welcome to Counter Monkey. I am your humble storyteller Spoony, and I am here to tell you of my own epic adventures of the past, so that you might laugh... and maybe learn.
Counter Monkey is a Web Video series hosted by Noah Antwiler, also known as The Spoony One. In this series, Spoony recounts various amusing and awesome stories from his Tabletop Game days, as well as offering helpful tips and tricks for other GMs. Also featured recordings of regular weekly Pathfinder sessions played over Skype, based on the Kingmaker adventure path and starring many of the same players from his other campaign. The name of the series comes from his days of working at a tabletop gaming store: "counter monkeys" was the employees' name for people who would hang around on the counter, never buy anything, but just tell long rambling stories about their characters and campaigns.Spoony originally wanted to publish it in a book, but it later morphed into a blog (which can be found here, it also has a WordPress site) and eventually into a video series hosted on The Spoony Experiment along with his other reviews. Spoony has also mentioned hosting a weekly podcast or still trying to publish the stories, but these have not yet materialized.The series can be viewed here.
Even within the session this ended up happening; the character Gustave apparently had an extensive backstory along with a plotline that would involve clearing his name and avenging his family's murder. For much of the early campaign, Gustave acted as the leader of the group, and was clearly meant to be important. He ends up dying in the second session, during the fourth combat encounter the group faces, bleeding to death after being mauled by zombies.
The plan for Spoony's group in his Thieves' World game was for Tempus Thales to be the party's Big Good, inasmuch as that term can be applied to the avatar of war and rape, setting them up with missions and loot and eventually taking over the city with them and making them his lieutenants. A well-aimed flask of acid quickly derailed those plans.
Accidentally Accurate: Tandem the Spoony would boast of being 'the Greatest Swordsman in the World' just as part of his Awesome Ego character and it wasn't intended to be serious. When a sword specialist got offended by this and repeatedly got him into duels in an attempt to disprove it, though, Tandem managed to always beat his opponents by sheer luck, effectively becoming the Greatest Swordsman in the World.
A Fate Worse Than Death: A minotaur Player Character in "Thou Shalt Not Fuck With the Lady of Pain" did, indeed, fuck with the Lady of Pain, purely on account of a Bragging Rights Reward. He wanted to get mazed so that he could use a made-up racial ability (presumably derived from a very vague implication in their fluff text) to find his way out. That didn't help him when the maze turned out to be a single, hundred million-mile long hallway. Furthermore, the Lady of Pain's pocket dimensions are impossible to die in.
All Men Are Perverts: A possible reason Spoony suggests for the fact that even experienced players fall for obvious traps in "Beware the Woman, For They Come From Hell". And then in the ConBravo livestream, the party was tricked into drinking drugged beverages then being robbed, Spoony included. Only Linkara was wary, though it didn't stop him from passing out.
Alternate Continuity: He recommends doing this for any adventure set in an established continuity, such as comic books or television shows. The DM being able to freely change whatever aspects of the setting they wish solves several problems, mainly players familiar with the work calling out the DM on fudging facts about the setting, and to avoid players trying to be Genre Savvy by using their knowledge of the work to influence their decisions when their characters don't know what the player knows. He notes in a game about Babylon 5 that it didn't happen often, but if a player tried to use their knowledge of the show to influence decisions, he would turn it Wrong Genre Savvy by going against their expectations.
Aluminium Christmas Trees: In "The Jedi Hunter" he points out that his Badass Normal anti-Jedi tactics were clever and original at the time, but since that time lots of other people have come up with the same ideas and they're now commonplace in Star Wars canon.
Always Chaotic Evil: Any woman interested in sex, according to "Beware the Woman, For They Come From Hell."
And That's Terrible: After relating the tale of the Toilet Pizza: "But honestly, that was like the worst thing I've ever done to somebody... because that was horrible. That was really bad."
And the Adventure Continues: "Tandem's Last Ride" ends with Tandem and his party sailing off to explore unknown worlds.
Angrish: During the Thieves' World campaign, Magnificent Bastard Tempus Thales is about to give a public address announcing a price on the party's heads, but he's still so furious over being hit in the face with a vial of acid that he winds up pacing back and forth for several minutes muttering incoherently before he can bring himself to speak.
Anti-Climax Boss: The Dragon from the ConBravo campaign. The DM intended for it to require an army to defeat, it was hyped up throughout the campaign, and a four player party kills it. Moreover, one of the players is incapacitated for two turns after drinking poison, and the Dragon not only fails to hit any of the players, but it ends up falling flat on its face. invoked
April Fools' Day: 4/1/2013 featured a video where he continues from a false video, which turns out to just be a retelling of Army of Darkness with Spoony in the place of Ash, masquerading itself as an interview with Gary Gygax. He purposefully accentuates all the things someone could dislike about his show, he swears often and nonchalantly, he tells Oreo to be as disruptive as possible, suddenly reads from the NC-17 cut of [1] based on the Zantabulous Zorcerer of Zo movie from The Eighties staring David Warner as the Zorcerer, an RPG that requires owning a different, rare, expensive, and likely otherwise unrelated book, cost Spoony over 400 dollars, and has images of naked children, which he of course cannot show. He then tries to show the camera the pages tiny text, so as the audience can read it. At the end he claims that Crazy Mike, the DM, died. He was struck by lightning indoors, leaving only some kind of green gelatinous blob, then leaves, saying he's going to masturbate furiously to a stuffed dog toy.
The moral of the story is; have a character with a high inteligence and an alchemy skill, and you can figure out the recipe for gunpower.
Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: He will often talk about something, then start going through his sourcebooks to find what he's referring to so he can show the camera, only to be distracted by something else he's seen while looking through the book and start talking about that instead.
Awesome, but Impractical / Boring, but Practical: In Age of Manure, Spoony warns against specializing in exotic weapons, as most D Ms will not think to have things like Halberds, Nunchucks, Double Hammers, or similar as loot at the end of a dungeon. Rather, it's better to go with swords, daggers, bows or similar "boring" weapons.
Badass Decay: Spoony criticises this happening to dragons (and to a lesser extent other monsters) in "Circle Strafe" when DMs don't play them intelligently from the POV of the dragon, instead just doing it to provide an encounter for a party in a way that lets them all attack the dragon and often weakens the dragon in other ways. Spoony believes a dragon should always be a Final Boss and shouldn't be degraded in this way.
Badass Normal: In "The Jedi Hunter", he recounts when he joined a Star Wars game but didn't want to be a Jedi like everyone else, so he thought about what a non-Force sensitive character could do to fight someone like Darth Vader who can deflect blasters and similar weapons with lightsabers and the Force. He ends up arming his character with things that Jedi can't block or deflect, but also relying on the predictability of other players and DM Crazy Mike in the Force skills they likely haven't taken. In the end he created a Jedi hunter armed with dual armor-mounted flamethrowers, an armor-mounted electric net launcher (the net being capable of knocking people unconscious), a deck-clearing blaster (which he describes as a blaster shotgun), smoke and stun grenades, andhe's rigged the hallways of his ship with explosives. He deals a Curb-Stomp Battle to two Sith Lords, blows up a third, and completely incapacitates Sith and Jedi alike at once, pissing off DM Crazy Mike with his antics. He also had additional weapons that he'd utilize in later fights, including spore-based tear-gas grenades that had a small percentage to kill instead of stun.
Balance Between Good and Evil: Deconstructed in Laundry Day at the Tower of High Sorcery, wherein Spoony expresses confusion over why anyone would devote their live to maintaining neutrality. His argument is basically that if you consider keeping the balance to be a desirable thing, doesn't that make acting to keep it a good act in your eyes, and therefore you should view yourself as good?
The players of "Vegan Steve & The Djinni of Jengai Fomogo" sought the eponymous Djinni to wish away a curse that would turn them into beasts.
Manure golems in "Age of Manure" turned everything they touched into manure (or fellow Manure Golems, post-edit).
Bavarian Fire Drill: Encouraged in "The Bardic Knock Spell" as a way to get past obstacles without resorting to violence or sneaking. Comes with a warning that the DM will probably only let you get away with it once.
Berserk Button: Spoony attests that stealing from the party is so very much this that it can work as a railroading device.
Born Lucky: Vegan Steve. Out of a shuffled Deck of Many Things that has 11 good cards and 11 bad cards, he draws 11, and the first 10 are all good cards.
Spoony himself when playing his bard character Tandem the Spoony, as seen in "Tandem's Last Ride" and "The Greatest Swordsman in the World" (at the start of the ConBravo segment - or, for that matter, the ConBravo campaign itself). He consistently wins battles that on paper he would be expected to lose, just because his rolls are always so good and the enemy's are so bad.
Big Mike:note The DM of the ConBravo campaign, after describing a critical hit where Tandem stabbed the dragon in the spine. What is it with you and your fucking character?
Born Unlucky: The subject of the "Botchamania" video.
Spoony's friend Crazy Mike, who failed to connect a to-hit roll in two months, and that's while Dual Wielding, which doubled his number of to-hit rolls.
The Black Dragon Final Boss from ConBravo 2012 - D20 Live part 2. First he misses with his breath weapon, misses his bite, misses one claw attack, critically fails with the other claw and then collapses face first onto the ground, while the party kills by hacking away at its spinal cord.
Big Mike:note After Linkara elects to follow Spoony's lead and attack the dragon's spine. I am the unluckiest dragon in the world, I had cannons shot at me and now everyone's hitting my spine!
Bragging Rights Reward: The only conceivable reason Spoony can derive for a minotaur player disregarding the tenant of "Thou Shalt Not Fuck With the Lady of Pain."
Break the Cutie: Vampire: Spoony's Jyhad really reads like this, both for his character and him as a player. He played a Carthian with poor combat but good utility skills so as to be a friendly, helpful character, in hopes of socializing more with the other LARPers. When his character is jumped and kidnapped, he's actually optimistic and excited about it, thinking this was a special adventure for the newbie, having previously been worried about being ignored as a side character. His hopes are then crushed as his character is tortured with a blow torch and made a slave of the much less friendly vampires that make up the bulk of the LARP, and he proceeds to bomb them all to hell in revenge. Spoony admits he reacted poorly to the railroading though still considers them to have been out of line.
Brick Joke: In the ConBravo - D20 game, Spoony's character makes sure to steal a bunch of glasses from his employer, crush it and put it in a bag, before his party goes on their mission. Later when they encounters an ogre like beast Spoony's character shoves the teams tank out of the way to attack the monster, with the sack of crushed glass to the face.
Spoony:Excuse me... Seven hells you're one ugly lizard... Hey, yo, Puff! Why don't ya come down here and see what a real man's made of? If, you've got the guts.
Essentially what the Minotaur player was trying in "Don't Fuck With The Lady of Pain".
Spoony advises against players doing this to the DM. If the player pointedly tries to make the DM angry, or to derail the story, or plays in a way that they know annoys them, the DM will start to fight back, and they will win. By contrast, playing cleverly and intelligently but going along with the story and having fun will make the DM happy that their campaign is being enjoyed, and they will repay the kindness if the players need it by helping them out or sending good loot their way.
But Thou Must/Stupidity Is the Only Option: Discussed in "Beware Women For They Come From Hell", when he says that even if a player knows that any food they're offered in the game is poisoned, getting on the boat will result in being attacked by aquatic monsters, and that the woman giving them the quest will turn out to be evil, they still have to go along with it because otherwise the adventure would end there.
Spoony:There's a point where you have to ask yourself, "do you want to play D&D or not?"
Butt Monkey: Jinx the gnome druid in the Pathfinder campaign, as played by Pushing Up Roses, on account of the character having an intelligence score of 9.
Card-Carrying Villain: Discussed in "Laundry Day at the Tower of High Sorcery", where graduates of the titular tower wear white, red or black robes to identify themselves as good, neutral or evil. Spoony brings up that unless you have mental instabilities or are already known as a bastard, he doesn't understand why someone would advertise themselves as evil and thinks it would be more pragmatic to try and play it cool to trick people easier. In this particular story, he doesn't see why even someone who was aware they were evil would wear black robes to advertise their alignment and intentions to others.
Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Gary, who knew the game's rules but never could show up on time for any number of reasons, including one occasion where he left the house, then realized he forgot to put on pants.
Combat Pragmatist: "Circle Strafe" covers how various enemies, particularly dragons, would and possibly should use their natural advantages or intelligent tactics. Why let Conan whack you in the shins when you can circle overhead and blast the party with your breath weapon, particularly those pesky ranged combatants? Other thoughts include lizardmen attempting to sink a boat instead of board it, and hobgoblins (who are military-grade combatants) using such formations as a phalanx or a shield wall.
Cool Versus Awesome: Discusses this as the big draw of the Cyberpunk spin-off Cthulhupunk. In the usual Cthulhu stories, weapons are of course useless against a Great Old One, but that's in the 19th century, Cyberpunk is in the 21st century. What happens when all the enhanced cybernetics, energy weaponry, genetics research, and other technological advances of the time are used by characters to battle a Great Old One? Only one way to find out, but whatever the outcome it's going to be badass.
Cowardly Boss: Discussed, Spoony thinks this is the best type of villain to use if you want a recurring antagonist over a series of campaigns. If the villain actually tries to confront the party the party will either refuse to back down and lose, or they'll get lucky and kill him before you want him to die. Making him a coward that flees from danger solves that problem, as long as you have a foolproof way for him to escape like a Teleport Ring or hidden passage.
Crazy-Prepared: Martin/Brendan, the wizard of the Thieves' World campaign. Spoony describes him like Batman; he would prep massively devastating spells in advance, he knew how to disguise his nature (including wearing a shield that served as backstab protection), and he made devastating alchemical grenades for when he needed to act quickly.
"Don't Be That Guy" evolves into Spoony advising players to be this. If you need to cause a panic to evacuate a building, have something that will create smoke or a bad smell, have utility spells like flying and walking on water, when fleeing from enemies or stopping charging enemies, bring caltrops or use a Grease spell to disrupt their movement. Bring sacks if there's something you might need to carry but it's too heavy or you don't want to touch it, and empty bottles to carry liquids. Bring multiple types of weapons in case you run into a monster that's resistant to one type, like the various types of undead. On the final note, Spoony reflects he's known players who carried with them a blunt weapon, a slashing weapon, a silver weapon for lycanthropes, a magic weapon (or spell to make a weapon magic), and a cold iron weapon for fey creatures.
Spoony's "Jedi Hunter" character. Not only did he get pretty much every weapon he could effectively use against Jedi and Sith, including dual flamethrowers and an electrified net launcher, but he also installed remote controlled explosives in the corridors of his ship just in case he ever needed to "get rid of" Force-sensitive intruders.
Crippling Overspecialization: a.k.a. "being that guy" as described in "Don't Be That Guy." Don't be the pyromaniac wizard loaded with fire spells who will thus be useless against fire monsters, don't be the fighter with the rapier who tries to kill zombies by stabbing them, etc.
Spoony and Sage discuss this trope when talking about the double club, including that if you find a magic weapon, it's probably going to be a magic sword, a magic shortsword, magic bow, a magic longsword, occasionally a magic greatsword. But you'll never come across a magic double sword, a magic glaive, a magic poleaxe, or any of the exotic weapons, so don't expect to find one if you specialize in such weapons.
This is partially why Spoony's "Jedi Hunter" was so effective - the party, and consequently their opponents, had pooled practically all their skill points into lightsaber combat and completely neglected stuff like precognitive sense and energy absorption that would hinder (if not completely negate) his Badass Normal tactics.
Cycle of Revenge: In "Thieves' World", the party resort to what Spoony refers to as "The Chicago Way" - when Tempus Thales and his Stepsons start using brutal tactics to suppress rebellions in the cities, the party escalate to even more brutal tactics against the Stepsons.
Darkness Induced Audience Apathy: invoked In the "Vampire Jyhad" video, he chose to play a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire with no combat skills because he felt that an entire group of evil-as-hell vampires (which the others played as) would be boring.
Did You Just Scam Cthulhu?: Attempted in "Thou shalt not fuck with the Lady of Pain" where one player creates a character build with the specific intention of pulling thisnote He intended to get "mazed" by the Lady and then use his race-based Minotaur power to find his way out of any maze purely to get bragging rights, only to get Out-Gambitted by Spoony in a bit of quick-thinking as GM. Spoony even name drops Cthulhu when describing the Lady.
Disorganized Outline Speech: Frankly you're lucky if he stays even remotely on topic, besides jumping into background, setting mechanics, and other stories in the setting he can also jump into completely different topics with no connection at all; for instance the Dragonlance discussion started on AD&D's Ninja class. The most extreme is the set of The Trouble With Superheroes, If You Stat it They Will Kill It, Because He's There, and Hey Fatty, Let's Go To Mordor! which are all just one multi-hour ramble that got cut up for time.
Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: As a corollary to the above, he describes The Lady of Pain as this, since under no circumstances should you fuck with her, and if you do she will either straight up kill you, "maze" you or generally fuck back.
Double Weapon: The double club and other impractical weapons from the "Age of Manure" video. Spoony and Sage come up with a bunch more at the end of the video.
Likewise, the Thieves World players who earned their victory over Tempus Thales. Though in this case it was more "earn your Bittersweet Ending", as several members of the party died, and they had to abandon virtually anything resembling morality to achieve even a partial victory.
Even Evil Has Standards: In "So You Want To Be Evil" he says this is the reason why he thinks the only way you could play an evil character in an RPG group is if the character was Lawful Evil, since while you're still evil you still have some lines that you won't cross.
Everything Trying to Kill You: Dungeonland, a D&D module based on Alice in Wonderland, along with other modules penned by Gary Gygax. The GM for the game recounted in "Tandem's Last Ride" buffed up the enemies to provide a challenge for the higher-levelled player characters, but the Mad Hatter and March Hare were still fairly high-level in the original module.
Evil Is Cool: invoked Deconstructed in "So You Want To Be Evil"; when the big question of "why do you want to be evil" arises, the answer inevitably boils down to "I want to behave in a manner that would be disruptive to the party/campaign," either deliberately (by being a Stupid EvilSociopathic Hero) or indirectly (being The Friend Nobody Likes purely on account of being evil). Personal biases aside, this is a major reason he discourages playing with evil alignment.
Eye Scream: In the campaign based on Thieves World, the players enrage and humiliate Tempus Thales so much that he skull-fucks an NPC to death in retaliation. Even Spoony himself was horrified when he did this.
Also, when he was at ConBravo, he threw crushed glass into the eyes of a giant opponent.
Foregone Conclusion: In "Hey Fatty! Let's Go To Mordor!", he talks about how this is a problem with setting a game in a setting based on a book or movie where everyone already knows the story and who will turn out to be a bad guy. He suggests several workarounds such as having the adventurers' story happen at the periphery of the 'main' one, or a sort of Alternate History setting where some characters are different and people who turn out to be heroes or villains in the original may not be in this one.
For Science!: Presumably why Hinsty David created that darn Manure Golem.
For Want of a Nail: The eponymous "Leaping Wizards" encounter was supposed to have the full party of 6 with a Wizard, three Magic KnightGame Breaker Clerics, a Fighter and a Thief, ambushed by three Level 1 Wizards armed with quarterstaves and with Magic Missile as their one spell. Spoony changed the spells because he knew the encounter was a joke, and the party laughed when he had the Wizards attack them. But by simply changing their spells to Sleep, Charm Person and Ray of Enfeeblement, and getting some lucky rolls, two-thirds of the party is put to sleep, one of the two left is Charmed to attack his ally (and subsequently knocked unconscious to stop him), and the last one loses enough Strength that he becomes encumbered and is unable to run as two of the Wizards surround him and start beating him over the head while the third attacks the sleeping party members and the Charmed party member is unconscious. End result, two of the sleeping party members end up dying.
Fridge Logic/Fridge Brilliance: invoked Discussed, Spoony brings these up and encourages players to think about the positive and negative consequences of doing so. For example, as discussed in "Don't Be That Guy", if you're a pyromaniac who's carrying ten flasks of alchemist's fire, and you botch your throw and drop it at your feet, think what's going to happen to the other nine vials you're carrying, because if your DM is an asshole, he will make you roll to see if they explode in your face. In another video, he mentions that if the party is travelling near a body of water, do you really think the warrior in plate mail that gets pulled into the drink is going to be able to swim, or even stay afloat?
In "The Squirt Gun Wars", he discussed that the drug DMSO was one, as when mixed with other drugs and sprayed through a squirt gun, it caused those other drugs to instantly be absorbed through the skin, causing instant paralysis or death. The story then goes into how the titular Squirt Gun Wars began as Spoony, as the DM, fought back by trying to restrict their access to the drugs. When this failed he had the Megacorps unionize, arming their security forces with the same weapons. Then the two sides began coming up with increasingly creative and ridiculous ways to protect themselves from the enemy's squirt guns and finding ways to circumvent that same protection when the other side adopted it. Such methods included radio-controlled cars with water guns, sprinkler systems rigged to spray DMSO, grenades tied to balloons full of DMSO to aerosolize it, and at the point Spoony believes they realized how silly the game had become, an industrial-strength water cannon of DMSO.
In "The Jedi Hunter", where Spoony details how, upon entering a Star Wars game partway through with a part consisting of purely Jedi, he decided to make a non-Jedi character specifically designed to be able to go toe-to-tow with Sith Lords. As he recounts the story, it becomes very clear that the Jedi Hunter outclassed everyone purely through the fact that all of the characters were built for Lightsaber combat & nothing more, whilst the Jedi Hunter was given weapons that Lightsabers were useless against or capitalised on the lack of balance to the force attributes. Spoony notes that it got to the point that the DM was specifically speccing the NPCs to counter the Jedi Hunter, i.e. he uses gas based weapons, suddenly the Sith Lords were all wearing helmets or breather masks to render that tactic useless.
Gameplay and Story Segregation: Spoony discusses this in the Thieves World campaign, where, at the end, a group of level 7 characters manage to defeat Tempus Thales; he acknowledges that within the canon of the novels that would never happen, but the players spent (real-world) weeks planning and setting up the battle and exhibited amazing teamwork and foresight, so he felt that they had earned that victory and let them have it regardless of how it broke with the novels.
Geeky Turn-On: In "Never Get on the Boat" he claims that the idea of a zombie Loch Ness Monster in one of the sourcebooks gives him 'a weird boner'.
Gone Horribly Right: In "Thou Shalt Not Fuck With the Lady of Pain," the minotaur player intentionally and successfully got mazed by the Lady of Pain... only to end up in A Fate Worse Than Death.
Linkara definitely was thinking on his feet during the ConBravo game — when they find their employer's daughter flirting with a suspect in the main quest, he convinces the guy they want to reward him for helping to find her, convincing him to come back to the employer's house with them. At the house, after the guy is knocked unconscious when interrogations go poorly, and the employer is furious they had done the same to his daughter, Linkara quickly corrects him by explaining it was the suspect who did that, they saved her from him. Also, he was the only player wary about the drinks the party was offered, though it didn't stop him from being drugged.
He-Man Woman Hater: Discussed in "Beware Women, For They Come From Hell", where Spoony gives it as one suggested explanation for why game masters tend to make every female NPC who appears in a campaign turn out to be evil.
Tempus Thales. His Facial Horror at the hands of the party's hands eventually goes into Sanity Slippage territory thanks to being a Wound That Would Not Heal, his healing powers revoked by his master until avenging this humiliation. Even declaring martial law with the backing of super-elite soldiers fails to get the job done. While he kills two of them in the final battle (but not the one responsible for the Facial Horror), he is paralyzed by his sister and obliterated by the others. Lastly, by the time he'd revive from such annihilation, they'd be long dead and unable to suffer his revenge.
The Black Dragon in ConBravo D20, also a Trauma Conga Line. First he gets shot up by cannons, upon his return he misses with his breath weapon (narrowly averting a botch), he gets zapped in the wings with two Lightning Bolt spells and is sent crashing to the ground, he tries two claw attacks but forgets to put the first one back down, resulting in him faceplanting and losing his armor class, he gets stabbed in the spine with a sword, takes an arrow shot to the same location, and finally dies when the sword still stuck in his spine is struck by lightning.
Along with (Physical) Trauma Conga Line, "Botchmania". When a player fails to land his athletics check to leap safely onto a moving train from a helicopter, he botches the roll and thus the landing. Spoony lets him roll to see if he catches himself three times, and he fails each time, traumatizing and breaking his arm before he finally tumbles off the train and barely survives in critical condition. Unable to continue without him since no one else had his level of skill, they retrieved him and tried to heal him, only to botch twice, breaking his neck the first time and killing him the first time. After their attempt to defibrillate him botches, the faceman is forced to try the leap, botches every roll, and the mission is over because two party members are dead and no one else has the skills needed to complete the mission.
Inherently Funny Words: The names of the people involved in the Manure Golem backstory in "Age of Manure", Hinsty David and Mr. Mockingham, according to Spoony.
Irony: In "Never Get On The Boat", he warns that the reason DMs will send players on a boat or raft or even just walking along a river or beach is so they can use the aquatic monsters they never get to use, and cites Ultros as an example of this. Except that the first encounter with Ultros is the only time in the entire Final Fantasy series where he's fought during a boatride of some sort, in every other appearance including subsequent appearances in the same game, the lack of water to strike from is no hindrance to him.
Jack of All Stats / Master of None: Spoony describes his character, Tandem the Spoony as this; he liked the notion of Bards being competent at a wide variety of things without being great at anything. He notes that created problems when he was the strongest magician in the party at Dungeonland.
That's a problem. When the bard is the reigning authority on all things arcane, and that bard is Tandem the Spoony... that's a bad thing
Jerkass Genie: In "Thou Shalt Not Fuck With the Lady of Pain", Spoony admits to being hardwired this way whenever players piss him off, deliberately construing the wish into something negative.
Killer Game Master: Spoony laments that most of his sessions end with his players dying gruesomely. This is chalked up more to bad luck than evil intent, though Spoony has admitted that he's a "harsh" DM generally. However, this is due to him wanting the players to overcome a genuine challenge so they feel a sense of accomplishment for it. A few stories tell of Spoony bending the rules a bit to help out the party if they get incredibly unlucky and the campaign would otherwise derail ("Botchmania", "Vegan Steve & The Djinni of Jengai Fomogo"), because he wants them to win, he's just not going to make it easy.
In the "Leaping Wizards" video, he says that insultingly-easy encounters, such as fighting three first-level wizards with magic missile as their only spell, are just unfulfilling to the players. This leads to him modifying the above encounter by varying the wizards' spells, which ends up killing a couple of the player characters and led to Spoony getting kicked out of the RPGA.
A genuine Killer DM, one Gary Gygax, designed Dungeonland, which is the focus of "Tandem's Last Ride".
And Spoony's appropriately named acquaintance Gary (the "I forgot my pants" guy) was also one, with anyone who played in his campaign becoming resigned to rolling up a new character at least once per session.
One party that didnote partly, they suffered several casualties in what turned out to be their final adventuresurvive Spoony's campaign only did so by becoming a pack of sadistic, kill-crazy savages, even by Thieves World standards.
In Never Get On The Boat, Spoony claims all DMs turn into this if the players ever get anywhere near a body of water that gives them the opportunity to use all the "interesting" deadly aquatic monsters and races from the sourcebook they never usually get to use.
Laser-Guided Karma: Vegan Steve ends up dying by pulling the Void card from the Deck of Many Things, an item he obtained by completely screwing the party over. Note that he drew it as his last card out of 11, after his first ten cards were beneficial, and the tenth card allowed him to escape his furious teammembers. It couldn't be more laser-guided than that.
Lensman Arms Race: "The Squirt Gun Wars", where the introduction of DMSO (which allows any drug to be instantly absorbed through the skin) in Shadowrun leads to the introduction of lethal DMSO drug cocktails and an arms race of super soakers, hi-tech water balloons, sprinkler systems, and fire hoses.
Something similar (though at a smaller scale) happened in the story of "The Jedi Hunter" when, after getting destroyed by Spoony's Badass Normal character, the sith encountered by the party from then on began to adopt the same antipersonnel tactics and countermeasures that he used.
Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Discussed. Spoony says that in older editions of D&D, when the Wizard got one spell at first level and only 1D4 hit points, they suffered through it because they knew their patience and hard work would be worth it when the day came that they could start throwing fireballs and calling down ice storms.
Lord British Postulate: Discussed several times, Spoony says this trope is the reason he's happy when RPGs don't stat the Physical God-type enemies that the party should not be able to kill, because if such an entity appears in the campaign and their strength is quantified, the party will inevitably try to kill them just to see if they can. He notes that in the D20 Cthulhu, they make Cthulhu overpowered with unavoidable attacks and several abilities that allow for a Total Party Kill, not to mention that if he is killed he regenerates in 10 minutes at full strength, but if you put him in the game, the party will still try to take him no matter how suicidal it is.
When he put a cameo of Darth Vader into a Star Wars campaign just to add flavor, it quickly derailed as the party turned back to try and take out Vader, getting themselves killed for it because Spoony was not about to let them do it and they kept ignoring his obvious hints that he had escaped and they were wasting time.
Again in "Do Not Taunt the Lady of Pain" when a player tries to beat even this statless character by finding a way to overcome her ability to put you in mazes. Spoony specifically compares it to Captain Kirk and the Kobayashi Maru.
The Magnificent: In "Dungeon Mastering A Great Game", Spoony talks about how this trope can help make characters memorable and flesh them out, especially if the cognomen in question is particularly distinctive, using Game Of Thrones as an example.
This is where his own alias comes from—his character "Tandem the Spoony" was so named because he wanted a cognomen that was a real adjective, but an incredibly obscure one.
Not Completely Useless: "Countersong" is a bardic ability that allows the bard to mute over auditory magic. It is virtually never used and often forgotten about, since such attacks are extremely rare, but it saved Tandem's party from a Compelling Voice.
Nothing Is Scarier: In "Beware Women, For They Come From Hell" he discusses how to induce Paranoia Fuel in players by using phrases like "You don't...see any traps" and "How are you opening this door?" when it turns out there really are no traps and nothing scary behind the door. But there might be next time!
"Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: Noah spends a good 15 seconds in "The Importance of Wearing Pants" reassuring us that he's not making up the story about the player who somehow left the house without his pants.
Not Using the Z Word: In "Cthulhupunk" he discusses the fact that players can take even very powerful enemies like Lovecraftian Eldritch Abominations for granted if they're used to them and know they'll be in the game. Instead he suggests not telling the players this, make them think they're playing a normal cyberpunk (or other) game and then throw them in without warning, and never name the beings, just give accurate descriptions of them—which is far more horrifying because of the fear of the unknown factor.
Amusingly, one commenter said he does the same thing in games he DMs with Pokemon and successfully makes them sound like fearsome enemies.
One of the interesting side effects of this is how the players interpret the descriptions without proper names. What would come across as a terrifying eldritch horror in one setting might be construed as "yet another corporate project gone awry" in a cyberpunk setting, although the oh Jesus what the hell is THAT factor is still in play.
Obviously Evil: His point about the black robed magic users in "Laundry Day in the Tower of High Sorcery." If robes are specifically deigned white, red, and black for good, neutral, and evil respectively, who in their right mind would wear black robes? Nobody is going to trust you about anything, including your fellow black robes, and if your alignment doesn't intimidate people into following your will, odds are they'll turn against you.
Spoony himself does it in "Vampire: Spoony's Jyhad". In a Vampire The Requiem LARP, Spoony's character is railroaded and brainwashed by the other players. His in-character response? Making a bathtub full of Semtex and blowing up the Prince and every other vampire in a one-block radius.
Pretty much all of the Thieves World campaign. Spoony's original plan was for the PCs to slowly work their way into Tempus Thales' "favor" and assist him in overthrowing the city. After a textbook example of why not to interrupt the DM (see Wham Line), the campaign turns into horrifically escalating war of atrocities between Thales and the party.
At ConBravo, Big Mike's original plan was to have the party, upon seeing that the Big Bad was a Colossal Black Dragon, to go get an army of reinforcements. Instead, Spoony throws some insults at him and the Party ends up killing the Dragon without getting hit, much to Mike's surprise.
One Steve Limit: Averted in the "Vegan Steve" video, where he plays with three different Mikes, and has to give them nicknames to differentiate between them ("Crazy Mike", "Big Mike" and "Store Mike")
Played for laughs in the Thieves World story, where he mentions Matthew the thief, then suddenly gets frustrated at slipping and using the player's real name again, only to correct himself when he realizes Matthew is the fake name for the thief player, it was another player who had the real name Matthew.
Overprotective Dad: Zeus literally throws Tandem the Spoony off Mount Olympus for macking on his daughter.
Paranoia Fuel: He talks about how DMs can induce this in their characters in a number of ways: invoked
In "Dungeon Mastering a Great Game", react to players pointing out by continuity errors by enigmatically smiling and saying "Yes, that is odd, isn't it?", making them think there must be some dark secret behind the whole thing;
If a thief searches for traps and doesn't find any, never say "There aren't any traps." Say "You don't detect any traps."
In "Swimming in Diarrhea is Bad", infecting players with diseases after they go to disease-prone areas like sewers unless they take the proper precautions.
He advises players to be afraid of bodies of water because the reason they're in the adventure is so the DM can break out the aquatic monsters, and they will not waste the chance.
"You see a lake, run fucking screaming from it, 'cause I don't know what the fuck is in there but it's badass, and there's gonna be a lot of them."
"Cthulhupunk" presents the option of Not Using the Z Word and simply describing what the subject looks like, causing the player to interpret the description however they wish.
Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Spoony will periodically describe someone or something in a game as "BAD.ASS!"
Railroading: When Spoony played a Vampire The Requiem LARP, the GM forced his character to get kidnapped and brainwashed by the other players. This did not end well; see Off the Rails above.
Refuge in Audacity: Recommends doing this occasionally in "The Bardic Knock Spell", named for how Spoony once, in order to get into a guarded building, just knocked on the door and whacked the guy who opened it. Spoony goes on to recommend this trope to other players — knock on the doors of dungeons and see if people answer and if you can Bluff them to just open the door, and walk into guarded areas and Bluff your way past the guards, because neither the GM nor the in-universe characters will expect you to be so audacious ("an enemy wouldn't knock"), but if you're good at Bluff, it'll work. However, he also warns that this is a pretty cheap tactic and should only be done now and then, if you do it all the time the DM will begin to get upset and turn it back on you, as well he should.
An unintentional one is Spoony trying to protect the identity of the people he's talking about by giving them aliases, only to forget to use them halfway through the story and only realise he's done it until after he's used their real names several times.
Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right: Done unintentionally with the "Leaping Wizards" incident, which got Spoony booted from the RPGA for not adhering to their hand-holding methods, which he strongly disagrees with.
Self-Parody: The April Fools Day episode, "Gary Gygax Interview". Title has nothing to do with the content, his atrocious memory combines an earlier episode (the Dungeonland one, which he realized after posting he got most of the details wrong) with Army of Darkness, stops halfway through for a pointless digression into another system, his ego is so out of control that he stops to say how he's the smartest gamer ever a few times, and he gives his dog specific instructions to be as disruptive as possible.
Shout Out: An unintentional one; while talking about fellow players Crazy Mike and Vegan Steve, he momentarily muddles their names into "Crazy Steve", Linkara's nickname for the In Name Only All-Star version of Batman.
Another unintentional one when talking about making players paranoid by pointing out seemingly harmless things; one example he gives is one of the party looking over the side of their boat and noticing there's alotof fish.
Special Guest: Bennett The Sage made a guest appearance in "Age of Manure" to talk about some of his own roleplaying stories.
Spoony Bard: Tandem The Spoony, one of Spoony's most notable player characters and the one that he took his online alias from. It should be noted that, in "Tandem's Last Ride", Spoony admits to naming Tandem after Edward fromFinal Fantasy IV.
"When I read the words 'Cyberpunk 2077', I squeed. Nothing makes me squee!"
Super Drowning Skills: "Never Get On the Boat" is part cautionary tale of reasons to avoid aquatic travel, part tips on how to survive in those circumstances, especially if you're likely to get pulled under.
Taking You with Me: The end result of the Vampire The Requiem LARP. If Spoony couldn't play his character the way he wanted, then no one would.Of course the GM just threw him out and ignored everything he did (which Spoony knew he would do), but it's the principle.
Theme Tune: The into of his more recent videos is accompanied by the final verse of Van Canto's cover of BlindGuardian's The Bard's Song (In The Forest):
Villainous Breakdown: In ConBravo, the DM, Big Mike, starts to lose it as the players beat the dragon. He was initially surprised and cocky when Spoony challenged the Dragon, before being irked that he was missing, before flipping out when he botched the role, then staring in disbelief as the players hacked away. When Roo landed the final brawl, all Big Mike had to say was "FUCK!".
Wound That Will Not Heal: In the Thieves' World campaign, Tempus Thales would normally shrug off and regenerate the Facial Horror he received at the hands of the players, but because his patron goddess considers this lucky shot by a nobody a humiliating insult, she revokes his regenerative capabilities until he gets revenge. Cue Roaring Rampage.
Zeerust: Discussed in "Counter Monkey Punk", when he compares what Cyberpunk 2020 foresaw for 2020 with the reality of 2012. Some predictions are surprisingly accurate, like the size and price of digital cameras, but others suffer heavily from Technology Marches On.
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