Interview With a Tavern Owner

Starting a series here at RPG CounterPoint. Interviewing community and content creators. To start things off, we are interviewing Jim/Argentwind of the Tumbled Tankard, who is also one of our authors here at the blog.
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Jared: First off tell us something about you as Jim, and/or Argentwind.

Argentwind: Well, I’ve been an avid gamer for a long, long time here. We’ll get into more details about that. But other than that, I’m a husband and a dad of two teenagers – very nerdy in their own ways, which is a great source of pride for me, seeing the things that they’re into and what they really love to do. I’ve been a musician and a writer. I’ve performed with bands, playing clarinet and drum over the years. I’ve performed on various stages and places around town, and everything else, for a number of years. I’ve written a few novels and I’ve written a bunch of short stories that have been published in online magazines. Other than that, grew up in the Eastern US, mostly Ohio but also Michigan, Wisconsin, and I’ve been out in the Western area, California and Nevada for the last – well, since high school, let’s say that – for the last twenty… almost thirty years. So yeah, it’s been good to see a little bit here… So that’s a little about me! Other than that, as I said, gaming stuff, there’s a lot of experience there as well.

Jared: With that, ‘when’ can be relative, but when and how did you get started with tabletop games?

Argentwind: This is my 40th year of gaming. I started in junior high, when my best friend got the D&D red box, the original Dungeons & Dragons red box, for Christmas, and we started playing over Christmas break. By my birthday a few months later, I’d gotten the good old AD&D Player’s Handbook for my 14th birthday, and I’ve been playing D&D ever since. I played all through high school and then by college, I diversified. I had a lot of friends that started playing other games here like Champions, Fantasy Hero, Star Wars roleplaying games.  I got into Shadowrun towards the end of college.

Jared: Was that a D20 Shadowrun at that point?

Argentwind: No, it was Cyber-Yahtzee, the D6 system was there. I actually went to visit some friends in Niagara Falls and I got to play in my first Shadowrun game, first edition. That was a lot of fun, and set me off on that whole pathway. I do also play a lot of board games and such, but we’re focusing on tabletop games here. There’s a lot of crossover in some of those board games as well. Butit all started with that one Christmas present, that red box, and took off from there.

Jared: This might answer itself, but what keeps you playing in, but also running, games?

Argentwind: I mean, part of the reason I’m doing this is I love everything about RPGs. The chance to be in other worlds, to be creative, to help tell stories with other people, that co-operative storytelling with friends, I love that aspect of the hobby, of the game. Beyond rolling the dice and fighting the monsters, there’s all that storytelling aspects that go with it, and it’s just so much fun to be part of that kind of experience. I mean, board games are a fun escape, trying to outwit your opponents, trying to work together in co-operative games in some cases. Video games, I prefer playing solo, because I can’t really commit to a block of uninterrupted time there, and co-operative games like MMOs don’t let you pause. I may need to pause to step away, so my video game experience has changed over the years because of that need, that necessity.

Jared: It’s like the interactive book.

Argentwind: Exactly! The DM gets to throw the plot out there, but the characters get to choose what they are doing, rather than just saying, “I’m just reading what the characters do,” you have to be the characters and guide the story and make your decisions. It’s like having the old “Choose Your Adventure” books, but then taken to a much higher degree where you can choose everything. Definitely what keeps me going with that. And then playing the games, being the character, getting into the mindset of playing somebody else, of being in a role that you normally wouldn’t be in. How often do we get to be crazy wizards, throwing around fireballs and sneaky little rogues hiding in the shadows? Most of us don’t get to do that kind of thing in real life, and so it’s a chance to be those fun, creative, different personalities and such.

Jared: With that, where did “Argentwind” come from?

Argentwind: Technically, Argentwind was my main character when I played World of Warcraft. He was my Tauran shaman. Big, minotaur character with a white hide, and blue eyes, and that pale coloration. I just loved playing the class. When I was able to play Warcraft, I really enjoyed it, and Argentwind stuck with me for a long time during that time period. I was Argentwind online everywhere, I was able to create that identity amongst my guilds, and everything else. I was Argentwind. The name, funnily enough, actually kinda comes back to that very first Shadowrun game I mentioned. One of the other players in the game was a street samurai mercenary character whose name was Argent. He was fully chromed out in shiny, silvery armor – Argent, being silver – and so that name stuck with me, and when I started thinking up a name for a character for my MMO, I thought Argent… wind, sure, yeah, that works. And so it just stuck, and I’ve used it in almost every game since then that I’ve played. I’ve had a character named Argentwind if I’m playing an online game on my phone, I always just take Argentwind and go with that, and so it’s just been with me for a good almost 20 years. Essentially that’s where it came from, it’s just stuck ever since.  

Jared: Which came first? The DM&D chat, or the Tumbled Tankard server?

Argentwind: The Tumbled Tankard actually did come first. We were on a different Discord server originally, and so when we started putting together games and different campaigns,we were thinking about bringing in more, and offering up more games. We decided to come up with a name for that group of channels and it became the Tumbled Tankard Tavern, and it just stuck and stayed ever since. DM&D did come later on. It’s something we did down the road a little bit, but it came from the Tumbled Tankard. It was a way to gather up all of our games and all our channels under one banner.  Then when we came over to our own server, e just went with it and stuck with the theme.There is a Tumbled Tankard in my campaign world, a place that my players have frequented a few times now, and it’s good to have that as part of the world as well. So, DM&D did come later on, yeah.

Jared: You’re saying it’s in your game world. Did that come after it came on Discord, or did the Discord name come from the game?

Argentwind: It did. When we were coming up with ideas for our Discord channels for our gaming there, I threw out Tumbled Tankard, the Tumbled Tankard Tavern, and I went, “You know what? I like that, I’m going to use it in the game. And so, there was a tavern I’d planned on the players visiting, and so I made sure when they went there it was called that.I wanted it to exist in both places.

Jared: I mean, yeah. A lot of my stuff I’ve actually bled over in my personal server as well, from the campaign world into the channel names and stuff.

Argentwind: Absolutely. Hard to keep them apart.

Jared: What made you wanna do these fireside chats?

Argentwind: Frankly, when players were first creating games, and we had different DMs that were all running their own campaigns, I had a lot of people asking me questions, and some people who wanted to get into running games were asking me questions; like how do you do this, how do you figure this out, or how do you balance encounters. A lot of these questions kept being asked and I would just talk to folks here and after giving advice to multiple people who asked for it, I decided, you know what? I’m gonna go ahead and make this official. I’m gonna make a show where I can offer up the advice and have people give questions, both online in chat and offline through Discord, and just address those questions with everything else and get those answers recorded. So I decided to pick a theme each week and build up from there, and that’s pretty much why I decided to do this show. It is inspired, of course, by a lot of other amazing DMs out there who do give out advice. Guys like Matt Coleville and Matt Mercer have done shows. Matt Coleville has “Running the Game”. Not as frequently as he used to, but he is still out there doing that, and many others that are out there offering up advice, either in longer or shorter formats. Some of the advice that I give, I may have heard it repeated in various places and so it’s all been absorbed, and things that I have incorporated from things that I have read about and heard about, and so it’s just a way to keep that information going and keep that advice out there for folks that are looking to get into the hobby.

Jared: And it’s a themed Q&A format. I’ve seen other content creators do Q&A but it’s not as structured. And it’s just an open Q&A. But I like the structure of the theme. I think we discussed it early on with the blog too.

Argentwind: Yeah, it is helpful. That way, it’s like people have specific questions, and sometimes I’ll have the theme of the show be based on questions that someone’s sent to me saying, “Hey, I’ve had four different people ask me questions about magic, so let’s do this episode on magic, and incorporate those questions in the content that I’m putting together,” then expanding from that point. So it was a way to collect that information, those requests and those questions that come out, and just go with the theme, and go from there. It’s one of those things where I’m probably at the point now where I’m going to go back to some of my earlier ones and expand on some things, doing a “Campaigns part 2” or something else, as we come back to some things. And as questions come up, I’m always happy to jump in and answer them.

Jared: And it makes sorting the videos easier for someone looking for specific information. They’d look for the theme that fits their question, rather than trying to go through all the Q&As trying to find their question.

Argentwind: Yes, and so it is nice to be able to do that where I have a theme, I’m somewhat running out of certain themes, but I am coming back around to some other ones. Part of it, as I listen to games, as I watch people play online, I just find things that like, “Hey that’s something I didn’t consider,” or “Hey, that’s something that maybe people want to think about or may be something they want to avoid doing,” based on what I’m seeing in some of the higher end very popular shows out there. I also see things that I think, “Huh, I would do it a little bit differently but that’s really cool,” so bringing that aspect into where people can get that information.

Jared: Where do you see this chat, the Q&A videos going? What are your real goals with it?

Argentwind: Mostly, I want to continue to help people. As long as people are finding it useful, as long as people are participating, and asking questions, and wanting more information. I did go from doing it every week to every other week, just to get a little more time to prep a little bit more and to gather information. But yeah, the main goal has been to help people with running games. I’m probably going to take a little bit of a switch into maybe more of a player advice platform. I’ve done a little bit of that here and there, ways of helping players engage with a campaign or engage with a DM. That’s a different way to look at it, and so I’m probably going to be switching into doing more player-centric things as well. I also want to do more things like this – interacting with other DMs and other players. I’ve done that with my friend Zack a couple of times here. I’d like to bring out some other folks and just have a sort of Q&A with somebody else, to get their take on things, get a different perspective, for a chance to have more open discussions and more interactive Q&A.

Jared: And you’ll get that other perspective. You’ll think of questions they haven’t thought of, and vice-versa, because of experiences.

Argentwind: Exactly! And it’s fun, because you never know everyone’s experience in world building, everyone who’s done campaigns and who’s been a player in a long-time campaign, they’re going to have those experiences that really help there, and it’s great to have people interacting and throwing them out, and to do that in a way that we can have two people fielding questions or two people having different viewpoints can really be helpful as well. I’ve seen some shows, I think a friend of ours in the channel here, he’s participated in some Round Robin GM sessions, where it’s four or five people taking the same questions and adding their own spin on it each time.

Jared: Kind of like a panel at a con.

Argentwind: Exactly! And so, I may set up something like that down the road, just to do something a little bit different.

Jared: What made you, and I believe you were part of the founding of this, what made you want to develop the game hosting platform of Tumbled Tankard?

Argentwind: It actually wasn’t something we really planned on doing, it just grew over time. I think we had three games initially, then all of a sudden, a fourth person wanted to come in, then another person wanted to come in, and we saw that grow over time. More people were interested in playing, and more people wanted to run games. We just sort of went, “Well, we have a place for that to happen, let’s make it happen.” I think, by the time we got to the point where it became a little too much for a server that was split across multiple gaming platforms. Just too much for some of the different focuses – our previous server had a very wide focus of all different gaming, online, PC gaming, console gaming, and D&D and it was too much to keep track of it all. And so we split off into our own server. That way, we could continue to focus and build our community just around roleplaying games and giving a chance to people. ‘Cause again, we’re all here to have fun, we’re all here to do things, that all revolve around the same hobby, and so it’s a lot easier to engage with everyone because we’re all coming from a shared experience and a shared viewpoint of what we’re looking for. Obviously, we do have people that have their own interests. I mean, most of us in some way are playing video games when we’re not here, or playing other games on other servers. But this is a place for people to come together, and have a set of games here. If they’re looking for a place to run, we can set them up. If they’re looking for players, we have a lot of people that are looking for games. So, it’s a matter of making that a place for them to be able to do that. It really wasn’t something we initially meant to do, but as it grew we just felt it was a good thing to keep going.

Jared: Most of us, at least at some point, had our own private gaming servers that we ran games on. I still have mine, but that’s because I got into gaming before something like this came across my dashboard. But it goes back to your previous video on community, as it builds that tighter community than all of us having our own server, and so it opens that communication. More open!

Argentwind: Yeah, exactly, and I love to have the connections to other people’s servers, and if you want to come here, or if you want to go there, it’s one of those things, like, if you want to come here to find people and bring them to your server to play, that’s totally fine. If you want to game here, we can do that as well. It really comes down to what people want to do, and I have no problem if people are, I know some of our players, I’m on three different servers, besides mine, there’s two others servers here, in fact, – Dragon is on one of those servers, and my friends from college are on a different server. We play. That’s just the way things work. If we offer up a place to have that if you don’t already have a place, or if you want to try working with a different community, sometimes those other servers become a very tight, tight group of people, and if you want to expand out to other rosters of players, this is a place to come and meet new people, and try out some new campaigns. Or even to do the same campaign in more than one spot with different rosters.

Jared: Right. That way you don’t have the bleed over.  

Argentwind: Exactly! And so you don’t have to worry about, “Hey I already played in this campaign or a previous version of this campaign.” You can re-use campaigns and have that on different servers then, and not have everyone crossing over.

Jared: And then, with that, we went over the mission and focus of the Tavern is that community factor.

Argentwind: t’s really all about having fun. We want people to come and hang out, find TTRPGs, and have people to chat with and such. I mean, it’s not all just about the games. We have all different chat rooms for people to hang out in and just throw ideas back and forth. We’ve got a section for adding in content – helpful for DMs. It’s a place to see a bunch of different things, and meet a bunch of different people, and then if they want a chance to reach out to players, to run games, or to play in one-shots or campaigns, we want to make that available. And so, that’s really our mission and our focus, to allow us to connect with each other, and then with other communities out there as well. It’s a matter of that community factor. It’s literally just forming those connections with other folks here, and giving people a place to advertise their stuff, and what games they have here and there. It’s just a place to gather and have fun.

Jared: And that’s the hopeful expectation of people when they come in this Tumbled Tankard server is that, talk, or game, or just hang out.

Argentwind: Or hangout and watch – we have a spectator role in our server – they can watch any of the games, and just get in there. There’s a text chat they can follow along with there, and be part of that and watch people playing during any of our sessions there. The only one they can’t jump into and watch is the Avress game, because we are streaming it on YouTube, but you can watch it on YouTube live. So it’s just a matter of having those places, if you want to come in and watch a game, or maybe there’s an opening and you just want to see what it’s like. Hop in and watch an episode, watch a session or two, and see what you think. We have one player, I won’t mention names, but he’s there. He was an avid spectator in a lot of games for quite a while before he actually jumped in as a player, and now he’s in, I think, four different campaigns. So it’s an issue of finding your niche, finding where you’re comfortable, and just having fun and jumping in.

Jared: And are the goals of it, what do you see as the future of the Tumbled Tankard Discord server?

Argentwind: Really, more games, more people, more fun. We have another game just starting up here, a Thursday game. We’ve got other games where people have moved in and out, and there’s still openings in games and so, again, we just want to see more people enjoying the time here, more opportunities for games, more opportunities to interact with different people, different groups of people, and everything else. Our YouTube channel is growing, or re-growing, essentially. With adding all the content from previous stuff here, and adding more content from various games. Someday I’d love to see some Twitch streams starting up, if you want to do Twitch instead of YouTube or maybe in addition to that, or if somebody just wants to do a live Twitch interaction, I’m all for that. I am a little technically challenged with all that, so I’m learning a bit as we go here. Our current producer, Nans, who is doing an amazing job putting it all together, has been doing some incredible stuff and I love to see it here, so definitely a shout-out to Nans who has taken the ball and run with it. As we move down the road, we are learning new things and trying out new things, and I can’t wait to see where we go, and to see what the future holds for us.

Jared: Is there anything else you’d like to add about anything we’ve talked about?

Argentwind: I think the big thing is, when you’re on a server like this one especially, don’t be afraid to interact, don’t be afraid to talk, don’t be afraid to throw out ideas and suggestions. We do have a suggestions box for a reason. One of the ideas we had for our server was to put a suggestion box there, because people come up with great ideas for new channels or different things here. So if you are on the Tumbled Tankard, just throw out some suggestions. If you want to just watch a game and be a spectator, that’s fine. If you want to get into a game, just reach out. I mean, I’m really, really happy with the level of participation and just the number of DMs and as we’re seeing people coming forward who want to run games, and more players wanting to get in. We literally have players at this point from all over the world. We have quite a few in the US, we have people in Canada, we have people in the UK and we have our Australian contingent as well. It’s been great to see, which means we can have games almost running round the clock, because those timezones make for some very different times, so, if you have some odd times, you might find a game here based on that. So yeah, I think that, if you’re here, and you have ideas, if you have content to share, I would love to see more of that from everyone involved, because it’s what makes the place special, it’s what makes everyone a part of the community. So I love to see that.

More About Tumbled Tankard Tavern:

The Tumbled Tankard Discord server and the Tumbled Tankard YouTube channel.