We tried playing a “Spicy D&D Date Night for Couples”

Transcript

Courtney: Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is Courtney. I’m here with my spouse Royce. Together we are The Ace Couple and we made a mistake.

Royce: Oops. Hopefully a relatively minor one.

Courtney: Kind of a funny one. So months ago I decided to purchase a D&D date night bundle. I believe the exact advertisement that was sold to me sounded so awesome. Awful that we thought it would be good podcast material, and we were kind of curious about just how they did it. But the advertisement was like, spicy D&D night for couples. Yeah.

Royce: And so reading this, we thought, oh, this may be the D&D equivalent of us playing like the Fog of Love board game.

Courtney: Yeah,

Royce: Where it has a very intentionally allo setting, and wondering how that might translate into a role-playing setting, given that we both have experience playing and writing D&D adventures. And the bundle itself advertised it as something somewhat physical, like, like actual pieces, uh, maps.

Courtney: Oh yeah, the advertisement I clicked on showed a physical adventure book and maps and card handouts.

Royce: Which is interesting even from like a, a creative writing perspective if this is a product that is billing itself to probably people who are maybe not super experienced in TTRPGs, or maybe like one person in the partnership is experienced enough and is trying to use this as a means to pull someone else into the medium. I was kind of expecting something that was maybe a little cheesy or corny or rather simplistic, but I thought that analyzing the approach might be interesting.

Courtney: Yeah, well, it was also like $34, and like, there are $34 board games.

Royce: Yes.

Courtney: That have physical tokens and maps, and so this seemed perfectly reasonable to me at the time. But the answer to how does this translate, uh, it didn’t. It, it didn’t translate. Not only was it allo bullshit, but it was straight up AI bullshit. We got scammed real bad, had to file a claim with our credit card company to get our money back. But we did slog all the way through the first adventure anyway so we could still talk about it to you.

Royce: Yeah, there were three present and we played the one that seemed the most interesting. It was, uh, the, the sort of genre, I guess, that seemed the most interesting. It was a masquerade, but after—

Courtney: Very Phantom of the Opera coded, so it, it was very much up my alley. You’re going to a masquerade ball, there’s a risk of the chandelier falling. Great, sounds fun. The two of us can have a nice night, play a little D&D adventure. Even if it’s bad, maybe it’ll be so bad that it’s funny.

Royce: But yeah, after getting maybe a third of the way through it, and it was supposed to be a 2 or 3 hour adventure, we realized something’s wrong here. But first of all, no physical anything. Um, we were shipped digital copies of things with the instructions that, hey, you can print these if you want. Um, which flimsy printer paper never comes out as well as like officially printed media anyway.

Courtney: No.

Royce: And that’s a lot to go through to print something that could be done through theater of the mind, theater of the mind, given that the maps were mostly useless anyway. This wasn’t exactly a very combat-heavy encounter, but—

Courtney: Well, it had a very odd suggestion because I assumed, even as a one-shot, that one of us would act as the DM and the other would act as the player, and whoever is the DM would read the adventure and then run it. It didn’t actually suggest that. You were supposed to be able to just sit down without any preparation and play it, and it actually said each chapter— it was broken up into 4 chapters— you should alternate DMs, right?

Royce: Which, that made it more difficult for us to figure out what was going on until we actually sat down to play it, basically right before we started recording this. And what, 2 months after purchase, something like that?

Courtney: Uh, more than that even.

Royce: There are 3 small adventures present, all supposedly written to scale to an individual player so that you play it one person DMing, one person playing. And it said in the instructions either one person could be the DM, one person could be the, the player, or you could alternate because they all have these 4-act structures. So we decided for the first one, let’s see if this works, let’s see if this is actually written in a way where you can hand off like that, because supposedly as a collaborative storytelling game that was supposed to keep a little bit of mystery for both people.

Courtney: Allegedly.

Royce: Allegedly.

Courtney: So you went first, and immediately we were rolling our eyes at the hook. But it also didn’t take too long into playing before we realized that our player and DM abilities and our instincts as, you know, people who have written adventures like this, um, far exceeded that of what the game anticipated.

Royce: Yeah, so the hook was basically you as the player were sort of a, a minor noble, someone in the aristocracy who was invited to this, this big like annual event put on by the Duke, some of the other people who were the, you know, most influential people amongst the aristocracy present. Uh, but there’s danger afoot and you receive a message to try to stop that.

Courtney: A second letter— you get a letter inviting you to the party and then you get a second letter being like There’s a plot. Someone’s gonna try to drop the chandelier at midnight. Signed, your secret admirer.

Royce: Please, please do something about it for, I don’t know, your conscience, the good of society.

Courtney: The “signed, your secret admirer.” First of all, I also had no idea what side I was actually on, like who any of these people were to me or why I should care. So I was trying to find reasons to care, but it was way too vague for that.

Royce: Having played through it now too, the secret admirer line felt weird in the letter. Yes, but then it also didn’t manifest into anything.

Courtney: It was so weird.

Royce: But the first act is basically arriving there, and you’re sort of introduced to the event. It’s kind of centered around a ballroom. Um, at this point in time, it didn’t jump off the page to me that this was AI-generated. There were a few things that were clumsy, but I was willing to chalk a lot of things up to human error. But part of this may just have been— may just have been due to the simplicity of this opening section, which was: go to the place, you have 4 main areas to go look around, each of these areas is sort of sectioned off and has its own thing that only kind of barely bleeds into the surroundings, and so it was sandboxed in a way where it couldn’t contradict itself too much. There were still some cases where– The way that it was organized was bad. The way that you had to read through it was overly cumbersome. But we’ve also used published material from Wizards that sometimes has a cumbersome layout, or we’ve seen typos in printed books from large companies and things like that.

Courtney: Yeah, well, it was funny going back, uh, after playing this to read that first chapter because it was the one that you were writing, because not only as players being who we are did we just totally disregard any of the romance bullshit, we also absolutely disregarded, like, all of the gender role stereotypes that were baked into it. And I didn’t even realize that at the time, but it was really funny because you had to use your previous skills as a DM to— basically paint a picture for me in a way that the book didn’t recommend based on other things it said. Because I went to, like, the buffet first, and, and what was it? It was like, there’s a guy here, if you’re a woman, he’s gonna try to get into your pants. It literally said try to get into your pants. And if you’re a guy, he’s gonna challenge you to an arm wrestle.

Royce: Well, it was— there was a drunk, like, minor lord here. I forget what his title was, but he was an affluent person who had too much to drink, who was being very snobby and was, yeah, said to be flirting with basically any woman present. And it was kind of amusing. The, the— I guess I’ll get to this in a minute. The adventure, now that I know that it was more than likely AI-generated, had very explicit things where it was like, oh, you can make a check here, this is the thing you do here, but failed miserably at any attempt to go outside of a very strict pathway of instructions.

Courtney: Yeah, you said it was sandboxed. It was railroaded heavily, frequently.

Royce: Yeah, yeah, but by the term sandbox, I, I guess I was— I didn’t think about using an alternate term. I didn’t mean as like a sandbox game where you can just go anywhere, do anything. I meant that each little section was like cornered off. Like, here is a place, you can only do a limited amount of activities over here, and you can go to another place and these two might as well be separate worlds. Like, they don’t really impact one another.

Courtney: Yeah, well I mean, first of all, we were playing a sorcerer, and I guess we didn’t even really determine, like, a gender before we started because it didn’t seem that important to us. But then turns out all over the game it’s like, if you’re a woman this, if you’re a man that. So I guess you just sort of instinctively treated the character as a woman for the sake of this guy in this encounter. But also, it, it told you before to make a high charisma character, by the way.

Royce: Yes.

Courtney: But it suggested sorcerer, bard, or a charismatic fighter.

Royce: Rogue was in there too.

Courtney: And we were like, where’s the warlock? We said that before we even started. We’re like, what do you mean it doesn’t say you should play a warlock?

Royce: But— and I rolled the character while you were finishing up some work, and I had the thought, I have low expectations for this adventure in the first place. There’s probably going to be a lot of ways to break this. And I immediately thought about a warlock with the invocation to be able to cast Disguise Self at will is probably something that this is not prepared for. I also, when rolling the sorcerer, decided against the aberrant sorcerer which has psionics, because any means of telepathy is probably going to ruin aspects of this adventure. Like, being able to do Detect Thoughts would probably completely— this is before having read what was going on. I figured that would probably be game-breaking in some way.

Courtney: That theory was proven true. Yes, this game was not prepared for most things.

Royce: But anyway, this— I started the story about this drunk lord at the banquet. It basically said he was flirting with anyone present. If you are playing a guy, will challenge you to what they called a friendly arm wrestling contest, and if you beat him at the arm wrestling contest, he’ll chat with you a bit. Otherwise, if you just exist as a woman, he’s going to make a pass at you, and you just need to succeed in a super easy deception check just to let him ramble on about his own stuff to get the information you need and then walk away.

Courtney: Yeah, so that was interesting because in order to try to do the book’s job for it and set the stage for me to be like, here is a person who is actually drawing your attention in some way You improvised a scene where he was arm wrestling with another guy because you read, oh, if you’re a guy, he’ll challenge you. So you just extrapolated, he’s probably challenging someone else to an arm wrestle. And so I preemptively was like, fuck all those gender norms. I strolled right up to him and challenged him to an arm wrestle.

Royce: I had a feeling you would if presented that option, but without, without seeing it laid out beforehand, you wouldn’t have thought to do so because you, you paused in the area to try to eavesdrop first.

Courtney: Mm-hmm. I tried to win on a straight strength roll, but I rolled horrendously.

Royce: There was a lot of really bad rolling today.

Courtney: But I was a sorcerer, so I cast Shock and Grasp on him in the arm wrestle because he was obnoxious and he deserved it.

Royce: I clarified, you’re not fully casting the spell, you’re doing a non-lethal shock.

Courtney: Non— non-lethal damage, please.

Royce: We modified the cantrip so, um, a random nobleman doesn’t just die in the middle of a party.

Courtney: No lethal damage on the arm wrestle, please, just so I don’t get kicked out, uh, immediately.

Royce: Right, right. But after that, kind of moving around the central area gathering information, this little adventure segment, segment was basically gated. You have to go around and make some checks and gather some clues, and it doesn’t really matter what you find or you don’t. Either you find a couple of clues or You’ve searched everywhere, and then there’s a stop where you transition from Act 1 to 2.

Courtney: Well, it was so infuriating because there were 2 different people that said, hey, there’s this suspicious looking person acting weird, and I managed to find out where this person slipped away to. So I was like, okay, I’m gonna go in that door too, and the game was like, you cannot—

Royce: There is a hard stop. It was like some of the, the staff, the butlers for the event, just stop you.

Courtney: And I was like, and I can’t try to roll to persuade them? I can’t—

Royce: Nope—

Courtney: Try to roll to deceive them? I can’t cast a spell that would help me in this situation? It just said no.

Royce: It said if you persist, you might get kicked out.

Courtney: And it said the player will not be able to follow up on this until later, which felt a little funny because not too long ago we played our second round of the Final Fantasy TTRPG.

Royce: Oh, the Final Fantasy 14 TTRPG.

Courtney: Yeah, yes, we’ve got a friend who has run, uh, two sessions of that for us now, which is still to this day the only Final Fantasy game I’ve ever played is the TTRPG. But that one’s really funny because as D&D players, the first time we tried to run it, we’d be presented with an encounter and we would try to, like, roleplay, and the game’s like, no, you can’t do that.

Royce: Yeah, there are sections of the book that’s like: “this is an unskippable cutscene.”

Courtney: Yeah, this is—

Royce: This area is out of the game. This is an out-of-boundary area. You can’t go there.

Courtney: Or someone would ask us, hey, will you transport this thing over there for us? And we’d be like, I don’t know if we want to do that, actually. And our friend who was running the game literally read a passage from the book that says If the players don’t want to do this, pause the game and explain to them that they have to do this.

Royce: Explain what the nature of the game is, which is my experience with playing that TTRPG a little bit, is that it’s, it’s basically a mechanical combat simulator with a, like, railroaded RPG plot around it.

Courtney: So when this game tells me right out the gate, play a high charisma character but then in the second scene has just a commoner servant at this big ball telling me I can’t go into this door where clearly there is plot behind it, and it won’t even let me try to get in. That’s infuriating.

Royce: They should have put a sign on the door: “not until Act 3.”

Courtney: So there were— in, in this first act that you were running for me There was drunk guy who, per the text, will try to get in your pants. That is literally how it was written. There was a woman who— it did say she would be flirty. It—

Royce: That basically was all it said. It said she would, like, speak in a flirtatious manner or something like that, but there was no example text for what anyone would say. So I was reading this like, how? Like, what, what do you mean?

Courtney: Uh, yeah, I, I didn’t get flirtatious from you.

Royce: Uh, I, I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, and that was part of the experiment here. I didn’t get that from you either. Like, you completely shut down anything or didn’t make any attempts to play along.

Courtney: Everything vaguely flirtatious seemed suspicious to me. Yeah, because then, I mean, after those two encounters, we do finally meet this mysterious masked person who signed a letter, your secret admirer, who apparently knows where I live by sending me this letter ahead. Of time, um, who I don’t know from Adam. Like, am I supposed to think this is romantic? As soon as I meet this person, I’m like, who are you? Why, why me? Why did you send me this letter? What’s going on? Why do I care? Who are any of these people to me?

Royce: Yeah, he sort of led you out to what, a balcony, some area outside of the main hall, and basically goes on like an angry political rant about all the injustices happening and is like clearly you’ll help, right? I sent you that letter, so clearly this, this is the plot. I was like, I don’t know, maybe stop the game and explain to the players what the plot is.

Courtney: Maybe the Duke deserves to have a chandelier dropped on his head. I don’t know, I don’t know him.

Royce: But yeah, you were immediately suspicious.

Courtney: Yeah, of course I’m gonna be suspicious.

Royce: Someone sends me a letter signed your secret admirer and nothing in the character’s description or text or the things that you wanted to say —indicated that they were really interested in you. It was basically, “Hey, here’s the deal. Here— I can’t act because I’m being watched by the person who’s doing all the wrong things that you figured out.” You know, the, the enemy here that you’ve figured out from Act 1. “I can’t act, so I need you to do the next step. Go in this direction, go find this person.” And then he just, like, broods under the moonlight, and it’s up to you, like, oh, if you want to go over to this brooding man and dance you have the opportunity to, but you were just like, why would I dance with this brooding man? You were just side-eyeing him as you slunk into the hedge maze.

Courtney: I did. I pulled off my mask just so I could glare at him sideways, just, just so I could give him the look. But also, like, even the woman who was supposed to be flirtatious, like, she just approaches me on the ballroom and is like ‘Hey, seen anything suspicious? Weird things happening tonight? Why don’t you tell me everything you know?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know what side you’re on. I don’t even know what side I’m on.’ This person was—

Royce: They used the word flirt in description for that scene, which— for that scene, which there wasn’t a lot of pre-written text to go off of. There was a description for each area, but they didn’t really give any characters a voice. And this character was just mentioned as being someone who was a gossip. They were going around from group to group speaking in a, like, flirtatious manner, which I interpreted to mean— like, sometimes at social events there are people who are just very bubbly and personal. And again, how—

Royce: But it started to occur to us, one we got into this and weren’t feeling those vibes from the situation. You were immediately suspicious. I wasn’t given— I would have done better with better examples, but also a lot of the, a lot of the, the framing just, like, didn’t make sense. This didn’t seem— it didn’t seem like a very romantic evening when everyone is concerned about a chandelier being dropped on someone’s head at midnight. Like, there are other things going on. People are worried, someone’s running around bumping into people, smelling oil with something nefarious on their tool belt.

Courtney: So after encounter with secret admirer, he’s just like, go into the garden and find a poet who is there. Just do it. Okay, sure. So we switched. Yeah, because then that’s, that’s chapter 2, so now it’s my turn. So as I’m reading chapter 2, uh, before we even started, I said, uh, Royce, is this AI? Because there was an NPC named Captain Lorne who occasionally would be referred to as Captain Morne, and I was like, that is odd.

Royce: Surely that would have been noticed in an editing pass.

Courtney: And then, first of all, the, the writing is also just ungodly. It’s like one of the first encounters, you go into the garden and you hear whispers and they have to pass like a DC 7 perception check to follow the whispers.

Royce: Was that all it was?

Courtney: Yes, you failed real bad.

Royce: I had, I think, 5 straight rolls under 10.

Courtney: Yeah, it was real bad. And all it was was like, there are lovers exchanging smooches in the garden, and when you walk up, you startle them and they run away and they leave half of the bottle of wine they were– it’s like that, that’s it.

Royce: That’s, that’s the whole— so you’re supposed to steal their wine?

Courtney: No, they just left it. You didn’t have to steal it.

Royce: Yeah, but you got a bonus for taking wine elsewhere. No, that one wouldn’t have counted.

Courtney: It specifically said that you had to go all the way back to the buffet room to get, to get wine to bring back if you were gonna do that encounter. Never mind. Yeah, no, no, you— it’s not that clever. You’re trying to put pieces of a puzzle together that are not the same picture.

Royce: Yeah, so whatever was used to generate this was constantly losing context.

Courtney: Also, there were so many single sentences that just contradicted itself. We’re just gonna need to read it. We have to find the line that was like, she’s writing but she isn’t—but she is.

Royce: She is not writing, but rather gripping her pen, writing haphazardly.

Courtney: Ah, of course. I have such a clear picture of exactly what is transpiring. So this is a poet we were told to come find for reasons. And it’s like, she’s incredibly paranoid. She’s afraid. She has a rigid posture. She’s not gonna trust you. Even if you tell her that your secret admirer, whose name we were apparently supposed to get— I didn’t actually ask for a name, so I still did not know who this person was. It’s like, even if you say that such-and-so sent you, she’s still not going to believe you. So you need to pass a per— or a persuasion check, DC 13 persuasion check.

Courtney: And it says if you don’t persuade her, she won’t believe you, but you can try to persuade her again. But every time you fail the persuasion check, the DC is going to increase by 1. You failed 3 persuasion checks in a row. And then I just didn’t know what to do because when we’re trying to also, like, actually roleplay as these characters with not nearly enough information about what’s going on, what these characters know, what the actual plot is— we don’t even know who sent us to talk to her, really, or why. We were just such at a loss because you, you’d keep trying to persuade her in roleplay with almost no information to go off of and nothing else to do.

Royce: This is nothing else. The one thing I was told to go do and nothing else to do.

Courtney: So I did eventually just cave and give it to you, and it kind of says to do that because it, it says she won’t believe you. You have to pass this persuasion check. If you fail it, you have to keep trying, but it gets harder and harder. And then the next sentence, it’s like, eventually she relents. Here’s the information she knows once she trusts you. So after you failed 3 in a row, I was like, fuck it. Especially because that third roll would have succeeded the first 2 times, I think. Yes.

Royce: But this was another person who was supposed to be a possible romantic interest, right?

Courtney: Which we didn’t know at the time.

Royce: It made no sense. It made zero sense at all. It was someone who was, like, afraid that their life was in danger because they had information on the evil person.

Courtney: Yeah, so turns out there were 3 canon potential lovers in this game. Which we didn’t know because it doesn’t tell you that until the end of Act 4. At the very end of Act 4, it says, all right, game is over. Based on your choices, he— one of these 3 people is going to end as your lover. It was either gonna be the masked secret admirer, this poet, or Captain Lorne, sometimes known as Captain Morne.

Royce: And which secret admirer person just stands outside brooding for basically the rest of the adventure. Uh, this poet also doesn’t do much else.

Courtney: Well, this poet also has a current lover, which I decided to just— halfway through this miserable roleplay because neither of us knew what was actually going on and you kept failing your checks, I decided to just give you everything the text gave me even though it was weird and clunky because There was one line that was like, oh, she’s worried about not only her safety, but also the safety of this other lesser noble. And then in parentheses it said, who is her secret lover? And so I decided to just go full soap opera at this point because I was like, I— fine, we’ll say you passed that roll because we have to get through this encounter to finish the game. Apparently.

Courtney: And so— because it said one of the ways you can get her to trust you is to promise to try to protect the safety of her lover. But the only time it said she even had a lover was in parentheses earlier, which sort of implies that that’s a secret. But I was like, all right, I guess I can try to find, like, ways to get her to trust you more. So she’s like, but I’m afraid for the safety of my secret lover. Uh, whose name we did not get. It just says she has a secret lover, and basically after you earn her trust— or she just caves because there’s no way to earn her trust if you fail enough rolls, it’s gonna become impossible. Yeah. Then she’s like, I hid a ledger in a flower pot in the garden maze, go find it.

Royce: And I did. The dice finally cooperated.

Courtney: Well, on the way you ran into Captain Lorne, sometimes known as Captain Morne, and he asked you if you’ve seen anything suspicious tonight, which sounds— it was very similar to the random woman in the ballroom. Like, there was no creativity in how these NPCs would interact with you, but you did decide to tell him.

Royce: Yeah, I decided captain employed by the Duke who’s probably going to die. We had already gotten some— wait, did I metagame this? Maybe not. Because I had DM’d the first one, I knew that the Duke had also received a letter, probably not mentioned as from his secret admirer. That would be— I assume it was not signed exactly the same as ours. I don’t think you said anything to him about a Duke getting a letter, but I knew that information. I couldn’t remember if you as the player knew that information. I did not.

Courtney: I’m just learning this now.

Royce: That’s, that’s I wondered, because I, I did mention to you that you weren’t the only one who received the letter, and you did know that you passed an insight check where you saw the Duke glancing around suspiciously, I think at the chandelier perhaps, as if he knew it might crash. But, um, yeah, I took that as enough information to just spill and hope that this person wasn’t on the wrong side, right?

Courtney: Yeah, it was, uh, interesting because that’s what you needed to do to get him to trust you, or her. I guess it didn’t specify, it’s just Captain.

Royce: I mean, it uses “he” pronouns throughout the entire book.

Courtney: Oh, okay, so that’s where I got it. So you do decide to tell him, and it’s like, if you reveal everything to him, he will trust you and tell you that the man in the gold and green mask is exactly where you know he already is because you already had someone tell you that he went there, right?

Royce: It’s the inaccessible area from Act 1.

Courtney: Yep, which is apparently information you need to go there in Act 3. So after that, you pass the two necessary checks you needed to find the ledger buried in a flower pot. I still don’t know exactly what this ledger said.

Royce: Yeah, it was never specified, was it? It was just secrets from a lot of the nobility kept in a ledger.

Courtney: But like, apparently it was important because that’s what we were told to come here and do. So then it’s time for Act 3, and we switch again. And this I found funny because before we started Act 2, I asked you if this was AI and you did not think so. But as you were reading to prepare for Act 3, you went, oh wait, yeah, actually, yes, definitely AI. The—

Royce: Given the structure of Act 1, how it was information gathering, how there wasn’t a whole lot to build upon, I was still chalking a lot of things up to possible human incompetence. I didn’t read Act 2. I didn’t see all the mistakes. I didn’t know the mechanics. I didn’t know that most of the things that were happening in Act 2 didn’t really matter, that threads didn’t connect, that a lot of things— they just didn’t string together very well. There wasn’t much of a build to it. I read Act 3— Act 3 is a climax. Act 4 is a very fast resolution. It didn’t even— it’s basically a 3-act plot.

Courtney: I mean, Act 4 was like a paragraph of here’s how it ends.

Royce: Yes. So Act 3 gives you a binary choice. You can either run out to the ballroom and confront the person who has orchestrated all this, or you can go to that secret area because apparently the staff are no longer watching it and you can just go right through the door. And, and it introduces a timing mechanic where it’s 20 minutes until midnight when the chandelier is going to fall, and each time you do a certain thing as listed by the book, 5 minutes are supposed to go down on the clock. Now, the text takes a sentence or two to pat itself on the back about how interesting this mechanic is.

Courtney: “This next section includes an interesting mechanic.”

Royce: Which is very ChatGPT.

Royce: Um, looking through it, unless I missed something, it was not possible to actually hit enough situations to wind the clock down to zero anyway. So I don’t think the mechanic mattered.

Courtney: Yeah, well, this is also the point where when you started seeing, oh, this is absolutely AI, because we weren’t planning to use maps, but we did have digital assets for maps. So we also did at one point pull up the maps just to see what they are, and they clearly do not actually have anything to do with what was happening. Like the map of the garden, yeah, there’s a big fountain in the middle, which is where you, you talk to the poet by a fountain. But there’s supposed to be, like, a hedge maze that you have to make checks to get through to find a flower pot, which just doesn’t exist on the map at all. So, not functional, even if you’re trying to use them.

Royce: Yeah, it really felt like whoever orchestrated all this just grabbed some random maps off of Patreon that were theme-appropriate and bundled them together. Probably without the appropriate licensing. But the other thing, the thing that really set this in, were the stat blocks. The, the, uh, the noblewoman who is behind everything had a stat block, and the saboteur also had one. They were so bad.

Courtney: Well, and you even— you told me, you looked at these stat blocks and you said, yeah, I’m not using these stat blocks. And I said, no, we’re in here this far, we know it’s AI now, we’re gonna finish this damn thing. Use the stat block as written, and if I die, I die and we will just reset. We have to know, we have to know how bad this is.

Royce: You beelined for the secret area.

Courtney: Of course I tried to go in Act 1 to confront the saboteur.

Royce: Which, knowing the stat blocks, I was like, oh, that’s the wrong decision.

Courtney: Well, I, I tried to do this in Act 1. I was furious the game wouldn’t even let me try. All we knew about this guy is that he has like carelessly bumped into a couple of people over the evening. A couple people are afraid of him. He apparently had a tool belt someone saw and he smelled of oil. But then we get in and it’s like, oh, he’s adding charges to his contraption. I was like, charges? Did it— is this a fucking bomb? What’s going on? Yeah, that was never really explained.

Royce: The word “charges” were used. Apparently he had bombs alongside his dagger and crossbow. He was a rogue.

Courtney: Yeah, so I walk in and I’m like, hey, what you doing? And he pulls a crossbow on me, which, which you pointed out is not on his stat block.

Royce: As soon as we got into actual combat, this completely dropped the ball. It, it said if you’re antagonistic, you could have tried to persuade him down. You didn’t do that because you, you came in and just were like, “hey, what are you doing?” And didn’t try to talk. And then as soon as he pointed a crossbow, you tried to, like, mage hand the bomb, which was an aggressive thing. So the combat counter— the combat encounter began. That’s what the book said. No description whatsoever of a combat encounter anywhere there. And the crossbow didn’t even, like, follow the rules of combat in D&D. It went off more like a trap.

Courtney: It was written as a trap.

Royce: Yeah, like, instead of making an attack roll, it was a dexterity saving throw without the proper modifiers for an actual attack. It was like you triggered a, like, a pressure plate.

Courtney: Yeah, so he shot the crossbow at me, which was rude. Then we rolled for initiative. He rolled above me, and he stabbed me with a poison dagger real hard, which was also very rude, and in his first attack took me down to 6 health.

Royce: If you hadn’t succeeded on your Constitution saving throw against the poison, you would have been unconscious before you got to move.

Courtney: I would have just been unconscious, but I succeeded on my CON save. And so I was like, okay, uh, what is my most damaging spell I have? I’m only level 3. I guess I’m gonna try to hit him with a Witch Bolt, which I did, and it didn’t hurt him that bad, unfortunately. But I was a wild magic sorcerer.

Royce: And through all of my struggles talking to the poet in the garden, trying to pass a measly easy— well, an increasingly difficult persuasion check. I used Tides of Chaos. It didn’t help me. Even with advantage, I still failed the pers— the persuasion check. But that meant that wild magic triggered when you used the only leveled spell that was ever used during this session.

Courtney: Yep, which turned me invisible, and that’s the only reason why I lived.

Royce: Yeah, you ran, which–

Courtney: Of course I ran, I had 6 health. Not part of the book.

Royce: The book was like, you either do one or the other.

Courtney: He shot me with the crossbow and stabbed me with the poison dagger, and I almost died immediately.

Royce: Okay, so these stat blocks, they don’t match the descriptions in the book, and they just have abilities tacked on and on that just don’t make sense. The saboteur stat block had sabotaging item mechanics, but the chandelier as an object was not described in any way, shape, or form in the book. It didn’t have an AC, it didn’t have hit points, there wasn’t a certain number of turns that you needed to work on it to actually cause it to fall.

Courtney: Which is funny because I even remember asking you in Act 1, knowing that a chandelier is supposed to fall, I asked if I could roll a Perception or Investigation to, like, look at the chandelier and see if I identify any mechanisms for dropping it. Nope. And you were like, the book doesn’t say anything about it. And you couldn’t read ahead because I was gonna be running the next chapter, so you couldn’t even try to see if there was anything ahead. But no, there wasn’t anything about how the chandelier dropped in any of these chapters. So, right, but between the—

Royce: Oh, you acted aggressive. So the combat encounter starts with no section dedicated to the combat encounter, the stat blocks having abilities that did not make sense, the fact that this was written as a CR 2 rogue sort of character who had normal— what you’d expect— roguish abilities, but also had a multiattack, a poison dagger, a means of sabotaging an item nearby which would cause splash damage from, like, shrapnel coming off of the device. And just the ability to like impose disadvantage on all of your attacks against a single level 3 person made no sense.

Courtney: Yeah, rude, very rude. So thank goodness wild magic turned me invisible. So of course I took that opportunity to run the fuck away. The book did not account for this. No. So you, in all of your DMing experience, decided, okay, we are hybridizing these two, right, branching path options.

Royce: You ran down and told the Captain of the Guard, hey, the person is sabotaging the chandelier right now. The Captain of the Guard left, which was funny because the Captain of the Guard was written into the book as basically your best chance to win the argument on the ballroom floor, and you did something that the book didn’t even think was possible. You sent him away.

Courtney: Which was very, very rude because yes, if you did not make the choice face in Chapter 2 to tell him everything, he would not trust you. It said if he trusts you, if you told him everything, then he will become your ally in Act 3. But it was for a very specific scene in a very specific circumstance, and I just— I sent him away. I was like, I can’t deal with this. This guy’s strong. Go up there with all of your guards. He’s about to drop the chandelier. And then what, what did it say too? Because you read this aloud to me. It was like, now’s your time to call out the Contessa in front of everyone. And I was like, is she the one doing this? Do, do I know that for a fact?

Royce: “The Contessa stands nearby, a look of serene triumph on her face. To expose her here in front of everyone is to play your final card. There will be no going back.”

Courtney: And I was like, okay, I get— I guess I can do that. I, I did— I didn’t know for a fact it was her, nor—

Royce: It is, it is very odd to include a directive like that in what’s supposed to be the descriptive text for entering a room.

Courtney: And I was like, did something implicating her— like, did I read that in the ledger that we got in the act unspecified. Is that— is that how I know it’s her?

Royce: Several people all night have just been saying, hey, she’s sus, she has way too many guards present, and that’s basically it.

Courtney: Yeah, that, that’s it. She has a lot of guards with her tonight, more than average. That, that’s it. She’s staging a coup. But I also couldn’t talk to her. I tried to talk to her in Act 1 because attention was drawn to her, but it was like, you cannot get close to her.

Royce: Oh yeah, all the important people had had so many— such a big crowd around them that you couldn’t actually talk to them.

Courtney: So I was like, I guess I’m just gonna assume there was something in the ledger that said it was her. And there would have never been a situation where I would stand here and just in front of everyone be like, it, it’s her, she did this.

Royce: But the book basically told me to, so yeah, that was your only real option was a public confrontation. Which—

Courtney: Ooh, the captain was apparently, if he was our ally, which he should have been, was supposed to back me up and be like, yeah, this person’s trustworthy. But I sent him away. Also, the Contessa stat block is quite something.

Royce: Yeah, you would have— even with the captain present, you would have had to do— there were 3 rounds of checks. The second one you would have succeeded automatically with the captain there. Instead, you had to make a check to succeed. You did succeed on the second round. But the first two were content— or that rounds 1 and 3 were contested checks against her, which again, the text in the book does not match the Contessa stat block. She has a bunch of random abilities that don’t make sense, just like the Saboteur did.

Courtney: Oh my gosh, you have to read them because I was just shocked when you were explaining some of these to me.

Royce: So just right off the bat, this is a– in order to win the game with a good ending, basically, um, you have 2 checks that you need to make against her because you have to get 2 out of 3. So you have to win one of these 2 contested checks. For one of them, she has a +8. For the other one, she had a +6. Uh, you’re a level 3 character. Your highest skill bonus was a 6, so you were at best even, if, if not worse. If you actually paid attention to the stat block instead of ignoring Apparently she has advantage on all charisma checks, period.

Courtney: Period.

Royce: Reducing that chance of success there significantly. And had we gone into—

Courtney: We were role-playing this back and forth a bit, but had I consulted these abilities, I was also just making shit up, hoping, hoping it was right, because trying to persuade people, I’d be like, look, all the proof is in this ledger that I haven’t read, presumably.

Royce: But yeah, between abilities to charm people or read them properly with Insight— again, there were things in this— stat blocks feel like they were generated completely separate from the adventure and just had random stuff that didn’t make sense in them.

Courtney: Wasn’t it like she has advantage on everything? She can force disadvantage.

Royce: She can also, she can impose disadvantage if you attacked her, which combat against her was not a thing that would have happened.

Courtney: She also randomly speaks Infernal. Why not? As a noble human woman.

Royce: Her one action: Slap (only if she must).

Courtney: Only if she must. Didn’t she also have some sort of crowd something or another?

Royce: Yeah, she could charm people.

Courtney: Yeah, she can just charm people. So apparently after sending Captain Lorne away, there was almost no way— but, but then you had to prompt me because I was like, what do I do? Like, I, I sent the guy away who can vouch for me, and you, you had to tell me, oh, the poet can also vouch for you. And I was like, is she even here? She stayed in the garden at the end of the last chapter. So with no description of this room, of— with her existing here, she is just all of a sudden here now and is still terrified of the Contessa and it felt wrong and mean to try to be like, “That woman over there who’s terrified and doesn’t want attention drawn to her, she can vouch for me.” Also, who is she to any of these people? Why would anyone listen to her? I had to be like, “You know what they say, always trust a poet.” Clearly.

Courtney: Which, I guess she did vouch for me. She did not seem as charismatic as this overly persuasive noblewoman was. So I don’t know why that should have worked. But there, there was one actual, like, romance-adjacent scene that you did not unlock with her in Chapter 2, because it was like, if you convinced her to trust you and also gave her her, her quill pen back because randomly unprompted I had to have you roll a check to see if you found a quill in the garden and you did and you picked it up, which was weird, but then you didn’t give it to her. But had you given it to her, she would have said, why don’t you go all the way back to the buffet room and bring us back 2 glasses of wine? And then the 2 of you could sit there drinking wine. And if you did that, you would have gotten inspiration.

Royce: What a perfectly natural thing to do. But again, is that supposed to be flirting? Is that what the game was telling us?

Courtney: Well, because she was a love interest, apparently, even though she, she had a love— she had a secret lover who up until that point she was still loyal to. So that— I, I don’t know, it’s, it’s all a mess. There, there’s no understanding allos nor AI, and this is an allo AI.

Royce: Yeah, we got far enough into this and we’re questioning, is the romance not here because we’re too ace for it, or does the AI also not understand it?

Courtney: And now we will never know. But, uh, yeah, so basically you decided, even though I didn’t stay on any of the story tracks perfectly that it wanted me to, you made the executive decision that I pulled enough strings that the chandelier would not get dropped.

Royce: Yeah, I merged the endings, which— there are 6 potential endings mentioned, which made the resolution Act 4 complicated because it was either you choose the first path and you go into the ballroom and confront the Contessa, and you either succeed or fail, and that has 2 different endings, or you go up to the saboteur and you have 4 different endings based on whether or not you killed or incapacitated the saboteur and whether or not you were able to disarm the charge that was going to bring down the chandelier. And so there are, you know, 4 permutations based off of that, but you kind of ended up with half of 2 different endings because you bridged both paths and told the guards to go arrest the person up there, which you just assumed they could do that because they didn’t have stat blocks. Well, one of the paths says that your secret admirer just goes up and single-handedly subdues this guy, which—

Courtney: If he can do that, why did you get stabbed? Why? Literally, first of all, why is he enlisting me to do this in the first place if he’s so much stronger than I am? But also, if I got to a point where I am alone in this combat encounter and about to die, why, why was there not some kind of scene where Secret Admirer swoops in to rescue me and save the day? There wasn’t anything like that written. So that act ended with the chandelier not dropping. Act 4 was, yeah, it was like 2 paragraphs, uh, based on previous decisions made. So there wasn’t any roleplaying, it was just me trying to make sense of what ending we actually got. Because all the decisions made were not any of the things the script anticipated. Yeah, nothing fit cleanly.

Royce: And some of the— there’s like a, a point tallying system like you used to see, like at the end of some kind of, you know, quiz, like which category do you fall into.

Courtney: Well, it starts with, okay, if the saboteur in the mask gets apprehended He gets unmasked in front of everyone and it’s Lord Such-and-So, which is a name that we have never heard. It means nothing to us, but in parentheses it says, “This is the poet’s secret lover.” Okay, this is, this is the first time we heard this name. Also, the only way I was able to even say that she has a secret lover is because I decided to go so soap opera ridiculous about that because there was no good way to actually improvise that scene with how little information we had. And it’s like, okay, if her lover gets unmasked, she’s going to denounce her love for him in front of everyone and then run back out into the gardens, which— that doesn’t sound like a secret lover to me if she’s publicly denouncing, but yeah, and then, then it says, here are the 3 potential lovers that you will have at the end.

Courtney: It’s either your masked secret admirer or the poet or Captain Lorne. And it says, based on all the decisions you made, here are how you can get or lose points of their favor. And basically whoever you had 3 points with was your lover at the end. And then there were little cutscenes for “how you and your lover end the night.” And we just barely had 3 points in Captain Lorne, which was basically only because you told him everything you knew in chapter 2 and the chandelier did not fall. Like, those, those are the ways to basically get 3 points with him, which also doesn’t seem romantic at all. That just seems like he did his job.

Royce: Yeah, we, we thwarted a disaster. The character is bleeding all over the place, and, and they’re like, shall we have a dance?

Courtney: Yeah, well, the, the poet— you had to get points by having that glass of wine, that romantic glass of wine scene in the garden, which you didn’t come even close to unlocking. And also her secret lover would have had to remain alive and be unmasked as the intruder in order for her to denounce him, because otherwise, if he just died or didn’t get unmasked, she would have remained loyal to him. So you did not have enough points, uh, from her. We didn’t have any points for the masked secret admirer because, because apparently in Act 1 I was supposed to dance with the suspicious brooding man, and I did not. And so, as I’m reading this chart going, it would have been really close because we had exactly 3 points in Captain Lorne and exactly 0 points in either of the other 2. If you did not make the choice to tell him everything in the garden, we would have not had points, points in romance on anybody. And I don’t even think there was a paragraph for that option.

Royce: There is, but I think we got caught up critiquing it and didn’t read it. There are actually three— it’s, the conclusion of the adventure is just there are three paragraphs, read the one that matches your success. And there’s like a, a good, medium, bad.

Courtney: Hmm, interesting. See, it was really funny to see your face after all this happened. Seemingly out of the blue, because now we just happen to have exactly 3 points in Captain Lorne/Morne. It’s like, all right, everything’s cleared out, this guy gets arrested, everyone leaves, so now it’s quiet and the ballroom is empty, and you walk up to your lover, Captain Lorne, for a dance, and you share a silent waltz. And bask in this new partnership. And you were like, Captain Lauren? Yes, didn’t you know you’ve been romancing him all evening? Did you miss that?

Royce: So yeah, that was a mess. It did occur to me a little while back, I was trying to search for, um, a different writing tool, and I did stumble upon AI-assisted D&D DMing tools, and I’m skeptical.

Courtney: How about don’t? Yeah, how about don’t?

Royce: Creative writing is part of the experience.

Courtney: But yeah, it was a disaster.

Royce: Nothing connected here. It was so hard to wrangle— it was difficult to wrangle the loose bits of information into something cohesive. There was very little guidance on how to play any characters or what purposes were— looking here at the end about you know, did you get the good, the medium, or the bad ending. The fact that Act 3 was a mixture of different things and didn’t play by the rules completely threw that off, because it’s like, if you got this ending or this ending, read this text or add this many points.

Courtney: It was so bad. Even just like, first of all, practically both of those potential ending encounters were impossible because you can’t fight this guy. I only survived because of wild magic. Turning me invisible, almost impossible to win a persuasion battle versus this noblewoman who has way too many abilities. While we were roleplaying that, like, we, we did have fun with how ridiculous it was just because it’s the two of us, we know D&D, we know adventures. We realized quickly that this whole game was a lost cause and not to be taken seriously. So when I am sitting here being like, “but I have a ledger that presumably has the proof. I didn’t read it, but I’m sure it’s there.” Then this woman’s still winning her checks and being like, “Guards, arrest her.” And so I was like, no, don’t— don’t arrest her.

Courtney: If it wasn’t AI slop, if we thought it was just a bad allo adventure, we’d probably consider playing a second one because this bundle we got had 3. Definitely not gonna play another one, but it did occur to me at one point that if this was legitimately written by someone, that if we were to try it again, we’d probably have to try to like, LARP as allos in order to actually do it correctly. Like, we would just have to try to flirt with everyone or assume everyone was flirting with us. ’Cause we didn’t unlock a single one of these, uh, extra mechanical things too. ’Cause if we got these little romance scenes along the way, you were supposed to get like a bonus card and a bonus scene and— like the one with the poet would have given inspiration. But there was also a boon if we did dance with Brooding Secret Admirer, which we did not. So we didn’t get any of these special things.

Royce: Yeah, the other perk was, um, advantage on charisma checks for the night.

Courtney: Boy, that would have been nice. Maybe that’s why that noblewoman has advantage, just because she had a romantic scene with someone earlier that night, because that would make it make sense. So yeah, that’s our story playing the complete and utter disaster that was D&D Date Night.

Royce: Yeah, unfortunately we are in an era where any new merchant you shop from, you really need to search to see if they’re a scam. Um, Reddit’s been a good place for that. In playing this, we sort of talked about this and realized we may not be exposed to as much AI-generated content as some people because like I don’t I have social media, I use an ad blocker, I get news from an aggregate. So I also have a tendency at this point to go to specific sites if I want to search something, areas that I know are trusted. Because, like, for a lot of plant-related information, if I’m looking for seeds, I’ve already learned that if you type in the seed of a specific species and genus, you will get results even if that plant is not something that is normally grown from seeds. They are sites that are automatically generated, often with AI-generated images. And I have not made a bad purchase, but I have spent time looking through catalogs only to go, wait a minute, this site is fake, isn’t it?

Courtney: Yeah, which is very disappointing, but it, it is true. I mean, I don’t see all that many ads anymore, and usually when I do see ads, they’re incredibly misguided. I’m nowhere near the target market, doesn’t apply me at all. And so I was really disappointed with this one, uh, that we got— got— because I don’t make very many impulse purchases online. I really don’t. But it was really just because I thought the concept was funny, and I thought it was gonna be bad, but I thought it was gonna be bad for different reasons. So once I saw this, like, oh, spicy D&D for couples, which by the way, AI slop aside, there wasn’t anything spicy about it. Oh, not at all. So even that alone as a premise for, uh, being sold on it—

Royce: I mean, spicy aside, I don’t even think you could call this romantic, this adventure. This was all just, uh, trying to stop a murder.

Courtney: Yeah, so it was, it was an experience. Learn from our mistakes. Do not do as we do. If you want to play D&D as only two people, just do it with an already written adventure or write your own. I’m sure there are maybe some independent creators out there who do try to write two-player D&D adventures, but you’d have to really specifically search for them, I think, in order to find— legitimately creators doing that. But we’ve played D&D as the two of us before, but we’ve done actual adventure modules. Sometimes one of us will DM and the other will actually play like 3 different characters, so we’ll play a whole party, a small party, a single person. So like, there are options out there.

Courtney: It’s, it’s not that we’ve never had a D&D date night before, we’d just never been sold on the premise of a D&D date night and wasn’t worth it. We’ll chalk that up to another one of our, uh, personal, uh, D&D horror stories. If anybody does happen to know of any legitimate small creators who are doing anything approximating a spicy D&D or a romantic D&D for couples, uh, maybe send it our way because we’re still kind of morbidly curious about the concept, but, um, um, that’s the last time I impulse buy a TTRPG online, to be honest.

Courtney: And so that is going to be all for today. As always, thank you all so much for being here, and we are going to leave you all off with today’s featured Marketplace vendor, Elemarth Creates, where you can find pride bracelets and neurodiversity wristbands and stickers. Pride Month is coming up soon if you would like to get something such as— a dragon scale rainbow pride flag bracelet. There are also some loom bracelets here in a variety of pride colors. Of course, yours truly got an ace flag colored one. But they have lots of different options here. And there are some wristbands about celebrating neurodiversity, autism acceptance.

Courtney: Basically, this is a great shop for people who, like us, are both too ace and too autistic to play romantic D&D modules. Because there are several elements of that that we are just never going to understand. Links to find Elemarth Creates are going to be in the show notes on our website as well as the description box if you are listening on YouTube. We will talk to you all next week, and in the meantime, I hope you all stay safe from the AI. Goodbye!