A mysterious stranger meets up with our daring adventurers as they are trying to figure out this strange airship. Will this be a friend? Will this be a foe? The suspense has rendered my body into a jello like paste. I would be at home at a Nareevian pool party, I am so nervous!
The adventure continues with Steve Melloncamp (Mike Bachmann), Aludra Wyrmsbane (Jennifer Cheek), Jaela (Nika Howard), Toby Treacletart (Tim Lanning) and your Dungeon Master (Michael DiMauro). Don’t forget to follow our editors Steph Kingston (@stephokingston) and David Stewart (@spudcam)!
Podcast art by @bridgitconnell! Want the world to see your fan art? Tweet it with #DrunksAndDoodles or head on over to the forum.
Link to the survey site, Please.
http://wondery.com/survey/
http://wondery.com/survey/ shout outs to my boy caleb
For some reason I cannot download the last two episodes on Podcast Addict. Here’s the screenshot: https://imgur.com/gallery/Dlxym Did the feed change somehow? Any suggestions?
Make sure you are subscribed to the correct feed – http://feeds.feedburner.com/dndpodcast
I had this happen to me last week. Podcast Addict shows two feeds for Drunks and Dragons. When I switched to the feedburner feed, everything started working again.
Proposed episode title: “Zero Clucks given”.
I was literally yelling at my computer, “That’s not a statue! That’s a guy who was petrified by the cockatrice! You gotta un-petrify him!!”
This podcast currently gets $40,272 annually from Patreon (before Amazon takes its cut?), which is used to cover podcast operating costs such as server-hosting the sound files and website, the editor outsourcing?, and travel/rental expenses for Geeklycon? Along with a gratuity for the cast? …and maybe PAX travel costs to sit front row for AqInc a few times?
I hate ads, and podblurbs are inescapable for the captive listeners and cut into the time that could be spent within the session on the original content. I’m sure the crew has a (good?) reason for this new podblurbs format, but even with the great comedic talent at the casts’ disposal these ad-spots remain boring and dissonant to the tone of the podcast. How popular would Star Wars be if tickets were originally free but Luke Skywalker stopped halfway through Episode 4 to talk about silver-lined underwear for five minutes?
I want Drunks and Dragons to succeed and prosper (and it would be great if Thrifty could realize his dream of becoming a professional full-time DM, and the rest of the cast get fat stacks of cash), but I have to wonder if podblurbs might ultimately dampen the ability of the podcast to find new listeners and patrons or Twitch subscribers (they might have profited from first getting bigger vis-à-vis Justin Timberlake’s speech in The Facebook Movie).
It seems weird to me that DnD couldn’t make more overhead on an expanded merchandise line with 3D printed cast miniatures, more t-shirts, themed craftbrews, disc golf discs, Nika headbands, fan/cast music albums, actually talking to Chris Perkins and pitching him a comedic 5e supplement reboot, etc. Oh well, they probably already considered this possibility and decided to go in the current direction. Consider this my survey entry.
Thanks for your comment. First, I understand not really liking ads. It makes sense in a vacuum since, hey, it isn’t us doing the D&D thing. But the harm of running an ad to the listener is extremely small. I say this as a huge podcast fan and not a creator. The grumpy ad-hating podcast listener baffles me since it implies that your slight inconvenience is worth more to you than the prosperity of the show you are listening to.
Second, you do not want Drunks and Dragons to succeed, really. Honestly, look at your first paragraph again. It is equal parts condescending and ignorant. Most telling is that you list “gratuity for the cast…” as almost a throw away point. As if you have dug into your thoughts and at the bottom you have started scraping and come up with “tips I guess.” You are saying that we do not deserve to be compensated for our time. This is shitty. I have said it before, if you do not want creators to make money you are actively harming the creative world. I get pissed off because I see it not just happening to us, since honestly we are small enough fish and our community is really good, but to creators all over the place. On the ignorant point, $40,272 gets reduced by about 60% before we even start paying for the essentials. I am not going to go and break it down, but one of the downsides of making over a certain amount of money is you get the honor of being taxed. Patreon is for sure not going to take that tax hit on our $40,272 in donations. Neither is PayPal. Yes, each host 1/5th cut is amazing and is still baffling that it happens, but there is no way to get away from people thinking that our time is not worthwhile. Most folks don’t really realize that their comments come off that way since they probably don’t really think that way. But it is inherent with the language that is used.
Third, we would have to sell like, one hundred shirts to match one ad. I didn’t do the math or anything, but bottom line it takes a lot of sales. And guess what, you know how we would tell you that we have a new hot shirt on the store? Talk about it on the podcast. Which is an ad. Other non-traditional merch has upfront costs and risks since maybe folks don’t really want to spend their money on the weirder stuff. Other ideas cost so much time that they simply don’t make sense.
Unfortunately, the only option hard-core-ad-haters have is to either toughen up or stop listening. And toughen up really means reach over and fast forward a bit. We don’t mind, we still get paid.
To be fair, I have seen a D&D podcast go to crap because they got focused on making money in stead of having fun. So people being worried makes sense to me.
That said, Drunks and Dragons is the mostest awesomest podcast on the web, and I trust you guys to be fun as long as you keep doing it. Hopefully forever ^_^
I appreciate your response Tim, I am sorry to have upset you with my comment. I think that the cast’s time is very valuable and wish that Patreon profits and background merch sales could fully support your endeavors (and meant ‘gratuity’ to mean even possibly full funding of your lives if successfully scaled into the future). I have no data on how many t-shirts you have sold in total through the years or the profit margin you earn per sale and I also was not aware of the current tax issue you guys seem to be facing since many successful enterprises legally incorporate into tax havens thanks to much-used Republican-protected business laws popularizing the Cayman Islands, Lichtenstein, etc. as the “home” of many companies (among many other loopholes available to financial planners).
Penny Arcade sells lots of overpriced t-shirts, in a similar manner to NPR running funding drives to essentially sell overpriced tote-bags to support itself, and in a more direct comparison “The C Team” uses Twitch donor funds to help characters in a way similar to the Hunger Games.
It was my goal at this crossroads with the listener survey to propose alternate funding streams for you guys, in the spirit of Google Chrome newly blocking popup ads from websites and GMail cancelling its e-mail surveillance metrics. I realize that comedians are universally joked about as “angry and broken people” (indeed you still have beef through the past episode about Titus’ sister’s story arc) so you have likely already waved aside my proposals, but as a representative for some portion of ad-hating listeners I thought it was worth a try to bring up such ideas as possibilities. If you guys feel that in-session ads are your best choice good luck with your plugs (ads for your own merch or related subscriber or funding drives would at least touch upon a subject that the listeners are obviously interested in, which is the show and its characters).
I am going to geeklycon! Ready to cosplay as Tim Lanning! Full grown man in a baby diaper crying about how much money we don’t make. Eyes shrink wrapped with liberal tears ready to go!!!
Just what is wrong with you? Tim wasn’t complaining about how much money the weren’t making, somebody complained they were getting too much, so they should stop making ads.
What do you want? Keeping them on a leash of low payment? Do you fear that they’re going to produce crap once they get “rich”? Don’t they deserve getting paid for the content they produce, if it is by ads or otherwise?
Won’t you just please rather stop listening than posting insulting comments?
We know you are Mr. Johnson, Tim. Cut it out.
I can see your IP address, idiot.
lol
Curses, foiled again! How did you know it was me, Tim Lanning?
How could you see through my clever ruse, of setting up a second identity as guy in Germany?! It was waterproof! I even set up a tumblr and twitter and everything!
lol
Always surprises me how people can complain about great content that they get for FREE. It’s one thing to pay money up front then get hit with ads. It’s another to watch hundreds of episodes of free content then complain about a 45 second ad. Coming from someone who is reasonable the ads are fine, and are quick and simple enough that I can fast forward through it in seconds.
As for the episode, great stuff as usual! Can’t wait to get to the finally of this arc!
“No, bird! No!” rofl
I was listening to the radio and All Star came on. I immediately stopped what I was doing to go find this episode and skip all around in it to find Steve reading the lyrics.