(intense music) - It's as much fun as you can have with your clothes on it.

(dice clatter) (intense music) - [Announcer] Funding for Unmodified is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Amarillo College, the Josephine Anderson Charitable Trust, and viewers like you.

Thank you.

(intense music) - So, I'm a theater teacher.

One of the things that we talk about in theater history is that theater itself started as a way to tell a story.

Telling stories is just a part of human culture.

It is what we do.

It is how we express ourselves.

Across any medium.

It could be writing, theater, art, music.

They're telling a story in some way.

They may be telling it in a different language of B Sharps and A flats and F minors.

But they're telling a story.

They might be telling a story with pastels and paints, but they're telling a story.

I mean, you go to an art museum right now and you look at a Picasso and you can't tell me there's not a story that you can just read right there.

So stories are important to our culture.

What tabletops are is a way for a group of people to collectively tell a story at once together.

'Cause I have had people who they look at the game at our table and they're like, "Are you a crazy person?"

But the second they sit them down and say, "No, no, no, this is what you do."

And you know, kind of explain it to them.

It's like living in a story at that moment.

(gentle music) - You look around and it's time to start role playing.

Everyone's nervous.

Everyone feels a little embarrassed.

And it doesn't matter how long you've been doing it, it doesn't matter if you're a theater kid or not.

Everyone feels vulnerable in that instance 'cause there's something that can feel childish and embarrassing about playing pretend.

But eventually, you get your toes in, you just say hello in character and then like you feel kind of relieved.

No one's laughing, no one's making fun of you.

- One of the things I tell people with the TTRPGs and I love them the most, is this is a story-driven game.

And if you wanna be a part of that story, it is gonna be one of the most inspiring things you're gonna do.

You're gonna like, you can read a book and imagine yourself, but the book has a finite solution on there.

What happens in the book is not up to you anymore.

It's up to Ernest Cline, it's up to J.K.

Rowling, it's up to JRR Tolkien.

They've already figured that out for you.

You get to decide what direction you go here.

If I said, "Well, I'm gonna sit you down at this table and you're gonna be a sorcerer, and here's your character sheet and you're gonna do all of these things," oh God, their head would explode.

They would go there.

But what I kind of did there and do is kinda like take through it.

Like, "Okay, you want to be a wizard, right?

Yes.

Okay.

You're a wizard.

You're walking in the woods with your friends.

What do you see in the woods?"

"I don't know.

Lots of trees, lots of things?"

"Okay, so we see trees.

So go ahead and roll me a perception check in those trees and just tell me a number between one and 20."

"15."

"Okay, with a 15, you notice that there is something hiding in between those trees, kind of stalking you, kind of moving through there."

As you do that and as you kind of just take them through that, that is probably the easiest way to explain to people what it is you do.

So that wizard can say, "Well, I wanna go investigate what's happening out there."

Or you can just move on, you know, and go like, "No, no, no, I have no time or patience for what that is right there.

I wanna go do this."

Or in the event of one of my other players, "I wanna run to another side and do this."

And you can, but the story to me, I think is probably what's gonna bring people into it.

So another way you might explain it to someone who's new to it is, "We're gonna tell a story together and you get to decide how it goes and when ultimately we can't decide, well that's what these guys are for, you know.

We'll roll that, a two.

We failed miserably."

(chuckles) (mysterious music) - You know, kind of the first kind of geek game that was really niche and really specialized of course was Dungeons & Dragons.

That's where a lot of geekdom gaming started, right?

So as the game grew in the '70s, it was the mold, but then other roleplaying games, you know, spawned from it, you would have games like Gurps and you know, the palladium roleplaying games like Riffs and stuff like that.

Those are some of the older, you know, kind of roleplaying games that kind of came after D&D in the later '90s.

You know, you would have games like Deadlands by Pinnacle, that was kind of a weird western setting.

Of these different role playing games had their different mechanics, right?

But really, where they differed the most was their narrative, their settings and stuff like that.

And then you had games like Gurps which was a setting agnostic game.

So there was no set setting for Gurps.

It was a role playing system.

And it wasn't tied to a specific setting.

You just, you made it what you needed it to be.

And that was kind of the first universal role-playing system.

But eventually, other established role-playing systems would kind of pivot to become more rural systems, even Dungeons & Dragons do.

- For choosing a system, it's usually actually pretty easy.

Either run what your comfortable with and what you can run.

If you're the only one who is going to run or is capable of running at the time, pick what you can do and what you're comfortable with 'cause that will make the burden and the work on you less.

Barring that, take the input from the people you're playing with and be like, "Hey guys, I wanna run a game, but I'm not sure."

Well, I wanna run Star Wars, I wanna run D&D, I wanna run Dark Heresy.

(playful music) - I think Dungeons & Dragons is the one that I ended up just really getting into because it's that removal from reality, like escape that books give you, but it's interactive.

You get to do it with your friends.

I think storytelling with your friends is important because it gives you a comfortable, safe space to explore aspects of personalities that maybe you've always wanted to explore.

And it also, I think gives your friends and you a safe space to be comfortably you without judgment and like fear of other people trying to figure out what you mean by that.

And I think that the level of teamwork that you have to have when you play tabletop games and like, well, playing games together is a very valuable skill and a very, I think, rewarding thing to be able to do with other people is to like figure things out together and cooperatively progress through a story and succeed or not succeed epically.

(bright music) - A session is the daily or the in the case for most people, it's usually a weekly gathering where you get together and you play a game for that day, for a set amount of time.

You know, three to five hours, whatever.

I think it's pretty standard for most adults nowadays to work in with their schedules.

That session is the events that take place during that time period.

And it can arc from, you know, picking up right into a fight with a climactic boss battle to just shopping and getting rid of loot.

Having players meet some of the people from their backgrounds or suss and flesh out different aspects that had led or are leading to the next overall arc of the story.

Those sessions put together and stacked on top of each other, build a pyramid, they build the structure, the foundation of the campaign.

So if your campaign is this overall reaching one where you're gonna defeat the dragon goddess, truing to devour the world, session one would be you guys all meeting, finding each other.

If you have common goals, common insights, common reasons to wanna stop the big bad evil from happening in the case of the story we mentioned before.

And then session 10, you've learned who each other are and how you interact.

You've learned a little bit about each other's characters and who you're playing and what your drives are.

By session 30 or 40, you're fully committed and what probably die for these people around you.

And you would sacrifice your own happiness for them or for the betterment and the accomplishment of the final session, which would be defeating the big bad and hopefully getting to live out the consequences good of what has happened from your multiple sessions.

Building up to this (indistinct) climax at the end of a campaign.

So the campaign's, your overall story, and then the beginning, each session is just a piece, is a paragraph, a page, a chapter building up to that overall story.

(playful music) - Me as a dungeon master, I set the parameters.

I know what they're getting their selves into.

I know what's at the end of the road, but how they get there is entirely up to them.

And whether they succeed or fail is up to them.

- Dungeon master or game master, depending on the different games you're playing or the storyteller, they are the person in the group of people playing who is going to direct the story, the adventure, the game that you are playing.

Imagine it more akin to like a teacher in a classroom.

They are just at the head of the class, but they're still a part of the class, but they stand a little separate from what their role and positions are.

If there are four heroes at the table ready to stop the big giant evil dragon god from devouring the world, the DM plays the dragon, the acolytes, the king who would hire you to stop this great evil?

- I loved DMing so much, but I will say there's a lot on the weight of the DM shoulders.

And just like every player has their own flavor of playing, every DM has their own flavor of DMing.

While a player can show up and have a vague idea of what they want their character to do or say or things they'd react to, the DM has to be ready for anything all of the players are gonna do.

They also have to know how their NPCs are gonna work.

They have to know how the world works.

They have to know how the rules of the system they're playing works.

So whether it's D&D or another system that they are playing, they have to be aware of like everything.

And some DMs are much more laid back.

They don't exactly care to make everything perfect and that's completely valid.

That's honestly my favorite way to DM, when I do.

- I will tell anyone who wants to be a dungeon master that, and I said this before, you are a player at that table too, that you are not there to watch them play and you feed them, you play in the game too.

You just happen to play monsters and gods and bandits and you know, fared damsels in distress over in the corner.

You know?

You need to know what your end game is first.

Start at the end.

What do you start with the big final boss battle?

What does that look like?

Do you want them fighting a fallen angel who has taken over the world and it's your job to rise up and free people?

Do you want to fight Santa Claus and then start kind of thinking of the narrative that you wanna play with that?

The first campaign I ran with my group, I was inspired by Ready Player One and a lot of Legend of Zelda games where you have to go to different dungeons and find different things and those keys all unlock this wonderful magical treasure.

And so I wanted to play that narrative.

So I knew that was what I wanted to do.

But one of the best piece of advice I got is don't write too much.

'Cause if you write too much, then you go write a book.

But if they're gonna be a part of this story, you don't have to like, specifically, not say it, but you can hint at what they're supposed to do.

People are smart and people who play this game are gonna catch on to that narrative 'cause that's part of it.

And they'll run towards it.

And past there, it's just watching them go, they'll all figure it out.

They'll all know, okay, the Call to Adventure is there.

And I mean, Joseph Campbell's the one who pointed out what the Call to Adventure is.

And people pick up on it.

99 times out of 100, they will see the Call to Adventure and go, "That's where I wanna go and that's what I want to do."

(gentle music) - A PC is a player character.

So that is somebody who an actual person created and makes and plays in the campaign.

So you have your PCs, which is a player character that's being played by anybody in your game.

And then you have NPCs, which are non-player characters that are being played by the DM.

- [Interviewer] Can you tell me about some of the highs and lows you feel in real life as characters go through, you know, big achievements or even character deaths?

- Oh gosh, big achievements is easy.

'Cause you know, everybody gets on that high of, we did it, we did this big hard thing and we got really good rewards for it.

I think every player deals with a character depth differently.

Like some get very, very, very attached to their characters and they like grieve, I've had players be like, I need to miss a session this next time because I got a deal and then I'll come back.

I'll make a character and I'll come back with a new character and you have to give them a little bit of a break.

Then you've got other players who seem to die so much in campaign that they're like, "I got a new one right here.

I came with a backup."

And you're going, "Okay, when did you have time for that?"

And then you've got players that think of characters constantly.

They're constantly creating new characters and so they kind of see their player character death as sad, but as an opportunity to bring a brand new character in and be somebody else.

- You'll see enjoyment and pride are the primary bits of emotion you'll see players feel.

They feel great getting to engage as their character and to act out to roll dice and to play as those characters inherently will always, it's intrinsically, it's tied in there.

They'll always bring out joy for most people.

And then there's people who really dive into it.

And then when they roll bad, when they fail, it's not their player failing.

It's them failing and it hits them hard when they see that.

And it tugs at them.

They're like, "I'm a failure.

I couldn't do this.

I couldn't do that right."

And just as exciting as the good emotions are, seeing those negative ones are still strong feeling.

And then you'll see their player act that way and you'll see them punish themselves and their characters, which, you can't have highs without lows in any story.

That is drama, that's conflict, that's what it stems from.

So seeing those sad moments and then bam, just a few roles later, their character redeems themself and makes up for it.

And you can see it on that person's face when they're so excited that they did it.

They overcame the terrible thing they did, the bad roles they've been having on like the dumb decision they made.

They forgot a character ability, they forgot this, they forgot that, and they messed up and it cost something big and they just beat themselves up and then bam, they're the reason everyone's alive.

- There was some bar game going on.

My character just watched the other character play, but they cheated, cast asleep, spell on the whole bar.

They got, were caught trying to do that.

Kicked out of the bar and my character followed, I'm a good character and I wanna make sure this person's okay.

So I go out there and I check in on their character and we start talking and without really meaning to, I start kind of being like, "Hey, why did you act that way?

Is it 'cause you're lonely and you want people to like you?"

And we start having an actual emotionally intelligent conversation that seemed to transcend the game and become more about us as players.

I'd say my favorite D&D moments are ones where I translate from the character to the player and I start talking to my friend and letting them know I love them.

(brooding music) - War gaming, there's so many different aspects to it.

A lot of people liken it to chess, but it's chess times 100 if you ask me to.

- So war gaming actually started in the late 19th century.

H.G.

Wells actually had a war game called Tiny War, where you actually took metal soldiers and there were rules on how to actually fight them on the floor.

You didn't set up terrain or whatever.

And it was a traditional war game.

Throughout, you know, the '60s and '70s, you would have other war games that weren't miniatures-based.

You'd have tokens and they were very military strategic simulation, you know, they'd recreate, you know, historical battles and you'd move units around and kind of do it that way.

Games Workshop was the first to really bring it to the scale of having a miniature that represents an individual model or an individual person.

Then you collect them in units and of course, start painting them and kind of customizing your armies that way.

It was very niche at the time, you know, setting up terrain tables.

So a war game in kind of the kind of current nomenclature, a miniature war game specifically is you're setting up a table with, to look like a battlefield.

And it could be very basic, it could be planes with, you know, kind rolling hills, maybe a river or whatever in a couple of buildings.

Or it can be like in like a game like Infinity where there's a ton of buildings and there's a lot of, you know, verticality to the terrain.

Regardless, Minister's War Game is you're moving those miniatures around the table typically by, you know, a measuring tape or a ruler of some sort measuring by inches and drawing very physical lines of fire based on the facing of a miniature in most games.

And then rolling dice to see the outcome of your actions, your attacks and things of that nature.

And as units are eliminated, you're pulling them off the table, you know, in a lot of games you're securing objectives.

And so it's very much about positioning, it's very much about, you know, a lot of the tactics that come from a war game, - The most prominent one is Warhammer 40,000 but there's Star Wars, there's War Machine and really too many lists.

Some have gone by the wayside.

(techno music) - War machine is a very tactical tabletop game.

It is very finely tuned.

It's made more for the competitive in mind.

It's less what they call beer and pretzely.

It's more, like I said, fine tuned.

It takes place in a fantasy setting, but it's also very like steam punk inspired.

So there's a lot of aspects with, you know, steam powered machinery, powerful war beast and high magic.

What I've always appreciated about War Machine, it has very low barrier of entry as opposed to other games.

You could play a game of war machine with three models.

And so with War Machine, it's very easy to convince someone to say, "Let's just sit down, it's gonna take about 45 minutes.

We'll play a demo game.

I will show you some cool things that you didn't know these models could do you know, from an outside perspective.

I'll let you have fun with your guys, see the things you're envisioning, let them play out on the table."

And then from there, I will say, you know, "This guy could do this or this model could do that."

And then show you some other models that you might appreciate because you seem to enjoy this aspect of these models versus the other aspect.

(light music) - The most prominent one I play is Warhammer.

I was sitting at a friend's house and he had some miniatures on his coffee table.

I'm like, "What are these?

They look so cool."

And Warhammer is a sci-fi ecosystem, if you will.

And they got books, all kinds of stuff.

And he's like, "Oh, well check out the website, pick out the faction you like."

So you go on their website and you just, this whole mess of information that you can dive into and get lost in, right?

There's so many different factions.

There's so many different like little belief systems in this thing that you can identify with.

And so, I mean, it was just downhill from there.

That was back in 2006.

And I've got multiple Warhammer armies since then and played a bunch of different games.

Star Wars, X-Wing, my business partner Carter, that's how we met.

And that game had pre-painted miniatures, but it was a lot smaller game, like a skirmish or a dog fighting game for Star Wars.

(techno music) Narrative play, it's like kinda like I said, you're living through the eyes of a character that you've created.

It's somewhat role play, but it's, you know, role play, is you know, just a few people.

In 40,000, you've got a whole army of stuff.

So you're the commander of this army and you have different objectives that you wanna achieve.

So it's like you're reenacting battles from some of the lore of the game, if you will, or you're facing your bitter rival that your friend is playing.

And so you add some flare to it that makes the game a little bit more interesting.

(techno music) - One Page Rules was a reaction to Warhammer 40,000 7th Edition.

7th Edition was not very well received by a lot of people.

And there was basically a player, and I believe he's from Portugal, he decided he was gonna make a game that could use his games workshop miniatures, but have a very streamlined way of playing, you know, very basic but quick to play.

But you could still get your miniatures out on the table.

You could still have a battle and have a fun time.

And his goal was that all the rules for that game would fit on one page front and back.

And I mean, there were some caveats to that.

Like your army list were a different page, you know, but your rules were in fact, you know, two pages.

And so over the years, he kind of adapted that to, you know, incorporate fantasy and of course, fantasy then eventually became Age of Sigmar and incorporate that.

And at a certain point, they decided, well, we're gonna go ahead and kind of pivot and make one page rules have its own kind of narrative backbone, but why don't we make it to where anybody can, you could use any miniatures, you know?

One Page Rules sells a game and they do sell miniatures, but you don't need their miniatures to play the game, which was huge.

It was totally outside of games, workshops model or really, you know, private tier press or Corvus Belli's models of, "This is our game, these are our models, they go together."

One page rule said, "Well, you have models, here's a game, you can use those models or you can buy ours."

And in addition to that, not only, you know, where they, not really forcing you to use their models, they're not even forcing you to use their army stats, right?

You know, if you support them on Patreon, you actually have access to an army builder to where you can actually go in and create your own armies.

You know, you wanna create your own, you know, world or you wanna make miniatures and an IP that doesn't have a miniatures game.

They give you the tools to do that.

And that's huge.

So like role playing games, having an agnostic system, miniatures game, miniature war gaming now has an agnostic system to where you have this framework to build around.

And one of the cool things that I like about One Page rules is because the core rules are so simple, you can kind of bolt on any advanced or house rules that you want that you feel adds to the game, but doesn't weigh the game down, right?

And so you can kinda, you know, piecemeal this, this experience together.

So case in point, you know, last year, buddies of mine, we decided we were gonna do a skirmish level game that took place in the Warhammer fantasy original world, which technically didn't exist anymore as far as Games Workshop was concerned.

We were gonna use those types of units and basically play a narrative campaign.

And so we had our armies and we basically used one page rules, campaign rules, and I created custom army list for it.

And you know, we painted our miniatures and you know, we had this fictional city we were fighting over and we would take territory and we would mark it down.

And it kinda created this little meta narrative that really isn't a story, you know, by letter of the law.

But you could feel that like there was a reason for these battles to happen.

(gentle music) - Campaign gaming, it's like you're gonna build an army and that army's gonna change with each game you play.

So a unit may die or get severely injured, I guess they don't really ever die in campaigns, but they'll get like a duff in the next game.

Whereas a unit that goes out and just does something really cool might get a buff, like get a stat buff to something that they do.

And it lets you to get behind each unit and give them names and give them character chairs, maybe even paint them in a different way just to add to the flavor of it.

- In Minister's Wargaming and in a lot of gaming in general, board games too, a campaign is just linked games, right?

Linked games that have a narrative reason as to why they're linked.

They can kinda take different forms, you know, in the game of battle tech, you can have what's called a chaos campaign where you and a buddy are in control of, you know, a company of mech robots.

And as you spend your resources to attack this planet or whatever, you kind of have this branching structure that you can kind of pick, okay, I'm gonna do this battle and kind of try to push until you become the ultimate winner of the campaign.

And inside of that, you have to repair your mechs.

You have to spend resources to keep your army, you know, going and also, you know, add new units and stuff to it.

You have some campaigns that are very linear.

That you're just basically going from this battle to this battle, to this battle, to this battle.

And the results of the battle before may affect the next battle, you know, but it may not be a branching, you know, kind of battle.

Or, you know, a campaign can be as simple as you play games against each other and you know, the outcomes just allow you to tweak your particular army for the next time you play.

And you don't have to play anybody in particular, you know, but you can still kinda link those together in a very narrative way to where your particular army is changing, is growing, is getting smaller, is getting beat up.

That is, you know, very organic.

(light music) - Having a painted army, I feel like really sets the game in the world that it takes place in.

Instead of feeling like I'm actually playing with a couple of plastic models on a table, I feel like I am commanding this army of giant trees.

And there's something special to that that can't be achieved with just an army of plastic.

- So a term called immersion comes up and that's kind of, not only is this a game, but there's a lot of lore behind this.

You know, there's hundreds of novels that cover a lot of these things.

And so, you know, you want that immersion, you wanna feel like you're in that battle and getting to, you know, partake in it rather than seeing a gray plastic miniature, you see a fully painted guy who looks like he's ready to go to war.

So really how I got into it, my grandparents owned a train store when I was a kid and I watched these people build these phenomenal train station stuff.

Now trains weren't my thing, but they also sold like Battle tech and D&D minis and things like that.

Little World War II models and tanks and figures.

And I really got into that.

And then sometime when I was about 16, I got into a game called Warhammer 40,000.

And when I found out I can build these models, paint these models, and then play them in a game, they don't just sit on a shelf collecting dust, it's what got me into it.

So I started painting before like, so like even for like school projects, I remember there were like Greek mythology, we'd go over that and we'd do a diorama and it was like, I'm going to grandma's shop, I'm buying some minis that represent minotaurs and things like that.

And then I painted them up, made scenery and things like that.

So I've always been kind of, this has always been kind of a niche for me.

When I started with like testers, paints, which are like an oil-based paint.

Like I didn't even know anything about the differences.

You know, as a kid, you don't know anything about the differences of a oil-based paint and an acrylic paint.

And then so like when I get into the GW stuff, everything's done with acrylic, I'm like, "Oh, this is water-based.

I can thin this down, I can do this."

But at the time, it was all, you know, opaque paints.

They've come such a long way in paints.

They've got a huge line to include.

Speed paints is what they call them now, which is kind of almost like a heavy ink where it coats in one coat.

You get your shade and your highlight in one go.

They've came out with inks that are just phenomenal for getting that little detail that you want to get it down into the recess of a face or something like that.

Dry paints for dry brushing.

Just, I've watched a ton of things happen.

(light music) - The hobby aspect is something that a lot of people when they're first starting out, they're overwhelmed by, but as they go on, they learn that they really enjoy it and it's something they didn't know that they were missing in their life, but they really found that they enjoy it.

- So when we first started playing, we were using my, okay, so it was 2018, so Dean would've been three years old when we started playing.

And we were using his little toys.

So we had happy meal toys on our map.

So immersion was not really our thing.

It was just like, yeah, here they go, yay.

I started painting just to kind of like, okay, this'll be, you know, just a couple of things to put on the table.

And what I ended up finding was it was really great for my anxiety and stress because I just focus on what I'm doing and I just let the noise drift away and everything I have is just being painted onto that tiny little eagle or that tiny little thing.

Like this little guy right here, the stress relief that occurs when you're just painting literally hundreds of teeth onto a thing is surprisingly very zen mode.

You know, very much just like.

And you know, for me I find it to be a very great stress reliever.

- I mean, I'm not good at it, but I love to paint.

It starts out as I need to get this mini painted because I'm gonna use it in my next session.

And then by the time I'm painting, it's definitely like, I could make him look a lot cooler if I did this or I could make him look a lot.

Oh yeah, artistic all the way.

Mostly, I start because of a need and then once I get started I'm like, "Oh, I could add this and I could add that."

I have to make it look nice or I can't be satisfied with it.

- I have built a monster and then struggled to find a mini for it and then I found a dope amazing mini and went, "Oh my god, I am so gonna make a monster exclusively for this."

This is my moldy beholder.

And he occurred because I was working on two different things at once.

And I got some of this fuzz stuck to him.

In the process, I was trying to do one thing while I was letting him dry and he got fuzz stuck to him.

And I was like, "Oh my god, he is ruined, he's done for," everything like that.

And then I realized, let's lean into this.

And I stuck more to him and more to him and more to him.

And he ended up becoming a beholder that was infected with a fungus very much like The Last of Us and there's rules for it in the D&D book where you can have something infected with mold and fungus.

And he became our fungal beholder and they had an encounter with him and they were just like, "What?"

And so yeah, just happy little accidents.

- There are plenty of PC minis that I've painted for a specific character that I'm like, "Now we can never get rid of it."

Because you paint it for these specific character you're playing and then after that, you have a hard time using that mini for anything else but that character and you're like, "No, that was my orc, you can't use that for that."

(gentle music) - So the way I like to describe it to people is that painting for tabletop games is like doing like a paint by number.

You know, all the colors go in the correct place, you make sure everything is clean and nice.

All the effects that I do are simplified to make it as quick as possible while still retaining a polished edge.

The mini looks cohesive but not too much time spent in it.

So in contrast to the paint by number painting for competition is more like painting on a canvas where not only you have to make sure that you get the colors in the right spots and they're clean, you have to think about how the piece rhymes as a whole.

You have to use cohesive colors that match each other, textures that blend well together.

In addition, you have to make sure that all of those details are very polished to the best of your ability.

That blends are clean, that edges are crisp, you know, perfection, seeking perfection.

(gentle music) So I'm working on right now, it's the model is Alarith, spirit of the mountain.

It's an Age of Sigmar model from the Lumineth Realm-Lord's faction.

It's a bunch of elves.

And so he's got this very big chest and this very big bullhead and a hammer that he's holding across like this.

I've also got a couple other models in the piece.

I've got a saven that's running through a tunnel out the back, like he's terrified, his hands are thrown up and this dramatic expression as he is running away and I've got his banner bearer that's on the crest of this mountain that he's appearingly just walked out of that's holding his banner with some more glow effects.

And then down beneath him, he's standing in a sitting pool of water that's got algae and different mosses and mushrooms and plants and things growing out of it.

It's been the single most time-consuming miniature I've ever painted.

But it should be.

This is golden demon.

The golden demon is almost like the Super Bowl of miniature painting.

It is for Warhammer about the best that a miniature can be.

There are many other painting competitions in the world.

This one is very specific to Warhammer.

So they have them twice a year, once in the USA and once in Europe.

And the very best miniature painters competes to earn the top three bronze, silver, and gold or finalist pins or commended pins.

There are thousands of entries a year and oftentimes, winning entries will be enough to launch careers.

(dramatic music) So I think the most important thing in Golden, even besides actual painting quality is composition.

You're thinking of it exactly like you would painting on a canvas because that's this kind of style it's seeking to mimic.

You want to make sure that your eye is drawn to the most important places, which usually is the face, the chest, and the weapon.

And make sure the colors all are... Make sure the colors are rhyme.

You use similar tones but not too similar to make it all blend together.

Sculpting is also a very big part of golden demon.

Now the roads that you're walking on have already been tread before.

There are dozens upon hundreds upon thousands of hours of YouTube videos that you can watch that are extraordinarily helpful.

- I start to pull ideas from everywhere.

So that's one thing that's great about nowadays.

You can hit Pinterest, you can hit YouTube, you can hit a ton of different places that you might see somebody has a different technique, a different scheme, a different way to do that.

So I'm always looking for those kinds of things.

And then not only that, but I've got kind of a community of buddies around me that they all do this too.

And it's like, "Hey man, what do you think I should do here?"

It's like, "Oh hey, have you ever tried this?"

You know, I use this for that.

And so I pull ideas from a lot of different places.

(gentle music) - Amarillo has had different points in time where it's had strong communities.

Right now, it has a strong community.

I think day two has done a great job.

I think them doing tournaments up here at AC has been amazing.

Colin and Borger with a game station is starting to come alive and really do stuff.

- D&D Guild of Canyon, that is a Facebook group I created with my husband in order to find other D&D players in the area 'cause I noticed we didn't have a group online for that.

And it is very hard to ask around and see, "Do you like D&D?

Do you like D&D?

Do you play any tabletop games?"

Because it's a little bit of a hard conversation starter while you're at work.

I joined All Things Canyon, then I posted there, I'm like, "Hey, do we have a D&D group?"

And people said no.

And so I thought, well it wouldn't hurt to start a link so people can just find each other.

So I posted that to the group and I have like 300 members now and it felt like it happened overnight almost 'cause I don't know what happened, honestly.

I posted the link.

I'm like, "Hey, anyone who wants to play D&D or other tabletop games, you are invited.

Here's a great place so we can all collect and find community and find people to play games with."

'Cause it can be hard.

- So when I got this group together that I have at my table, it started as just like we were watching, I was watching Critical Role and some other like live plays on YouTube and I was harkened back to when I would play.

And so I asked a couple of my friends, you know, "Hey, do you wanna play some Dungeons & Dragons with me?"

And you know, a couple of them were like, "Heck, yeah."

And so I put it out on Facebook and got some people in there and I mean, just the breadth of the people involved.

Like you assume all the same people know.

I mean, at our table we have a lawyer, we have an engineer, we had a psychologist at one point, teachers, retail workers, office junkies, finance workers, other tables I've got full on like construction workers and you know, I've got one person who's a deaf ed translator.

We come from a wide breadth and kind of just like fan out from there.

And so what ends up ultimately happening with that, because we meet all these different people which has hap it happened in this group, they go and they talk with their friends at work about it.

And so, you know, they're like, "Oh yeah, and I play this and I play and then we did this."

And all of a sudden their work people are like, "Well, can I play?"

And so they come to me at one point when I could not say no, our table ballooned up to 11 players.

I don't recommend doing that.

It shrunk back down.

But ultimately though, what we decided is tell those people, you know, they went off and they started their own table.

They started their own thing.

So there are other engineers out there who are now playing D&D with God knows whoever else they play with.

And they just kind of like spread out and it just sort of like fans out.

And you have these little groups that all started from one particular place.

(gentle music) - Community is everything that we're gaming.

If you don't have a solid community, then you're not gonna get a game off the ground.

- It's hard scheduling people to have, you know, consistent game nights.

You know, we kind of created like a little club where we, you know, had our train sets and stuff where we could set up at the store.

And getting people to show up on a regular basis was like, it's like pulling teeth.

- Most of the challenges that we experience here, a lot of them come down to timing.

Everybody's got a day that works well for them.

Everybody's got a day that doesn't work well for them.

And you know, we've kind of worked it out Thursday's our day and we at one point we're like, "What if we moved it to this?"

"No, we agreed on Thursday.

Thursday's great."

Out here, a lot of it is setting the right time because people are driving from different locations.

One of our players lives in Canyon, so it's 20, 25 minutes for him to get from his home to here.

One of them lives just down the block.

And I mean, it's just a variety of different places there.

And then of course, there's the weather out here.

Everybody kinda like, when it floods, it's like, are we gonna be able to make our game or stuff like that.

And I can't speak for the big, the metro cities or anything like that, but when the weather gets in your way out here, ooh, this town shuts down the streets flood, nobody's coming.

And we've had that happen a couple of times.

We've had it happen where, you know, we are playing and all of a sudden, it starts raining and it starts pouring and all of a sudden, someone's calling like, "Yo, I can't make it because our street's flooded."

And we're just gonna be stuck indoors.

And that happens.

I find that to be a very unique situation out here.

- It can be hard to find people with similar interests because naturally in a small town, cliques are already established.

There's already clubs and groups for everything.

And when you find out there's none for your interests, it can be a little difficult.

But the thing with tabletop gaming specifically is the people who are into it are really passionate about it.

So once you start getting conversations going, it actually becomes a lot easier to find people who are into the same things, who will make time in their schedules set aside for the hobby.

And I'd say the main challenge is starting the conversation in the first place.

But once you start doing that, once you get outta your little comfort bubble and reach out to people, say, "Hey, do you like the same thing as I do?

Do you wanna join a group?

Do you want to get together every week, every other week and play?"

It gets a lot easier from there.

- The main thing about any community is you need a store owner who's really involved, who really gets excited.

'Cause that's where you're gonna meet people initially and you may separate from the store.

The older you get, the more stubborn and grumpy you get.

I mean, now I don't get to go up to the store as much, most of my gaming's at my house with the people I've made over the years.

But I mean, that's kind of the stages of a gamer.

And some of the guys still get to up to the store.

I mean, the guy I played, he is as older as me or older the other day at the day two.

And I played him three or four times.

It just, it takes getting yourself outside of your comfort zone and you have to do it more in a place like Amarillo.

- For me, tabletop gaming, I do love the social aspect of tabletop gaming.

I love interacting with somebody from across the table.

The anonymity of an online game is just, it's not there, right?

So you have to, you have to be cordial, you know, in most cases.

There are always exceptions, you know, and you do have people that are not fun to play with in person.

But that's generally the exception of the rule.

Most of the time, they are people you know, and they're your friends, right?

Or you're getting your friends into it.

That's something you can do together as you know, you can have snacks and drinks and have this fun experience.

So that in person, that tactileness of it is really fun.

It is really nice.

It's, you know, measuring distance and getting down and checking line of sight.

It's a unique play experience that you don't get from a digital game.

Now people try to recreate that in a digital space through things like Tabletop Simulator or other stuff like that.

And you can play a game like that.

You totally can.

It's not the same.

There's something about walking up to a fully terrained out infinity table and just seeing all the buildings because Infinity is a very terrain-heavy game.

It requires it almost, you know, your miniatures have to have cover and broken lines aside or else, it's just a bloodbath that's seeing a four by four table with just tons of terrain on it.

It's just cool-looking, right?

And then seeing well painted miniatures and you get to move them around and you know, position them.

And yeah, you have to remember a lot of the rules in your head and sometimes you get it wrong and you know, the game doesn't take care of it for you.

But it's just fun to do that in person and it's fun to, you know, do that with someone.

(mysterious music) - Yeah, an apocalypse game, it's gonna be a big game one, it's gonna be multiplayers.

So minimum probably four players you could probably do it with three wouldn't be as fun in my opinion.

Four people, minimum 3,000 points of each person.

Just you're putting stuff you wouldn't put in a normal game like a Reaver Titan or a Storm Bird, something to just... It doesn't make sense in a normal game.

And you can just do stupid stuff and it doesn't really matter the outcome.

You're just really getting to put your minis out on a table can have fun.

I'm not gonna toot my own tune but Horn, but I've built some really good apocalypse game.

'cause I feel like you can make a good narrative with an apocalypse game.

It takes pre-planning and I feel like that's the problem with a lot of apocalypse games or like the bigger set games in Warhammer 40Ks.

People are like, "We'll just put all this stuff on the table."

You need it the go forward and like apocalypse games because you have so many models, you need to set up constraints, have something weird happening in the story.

Like my favorite one, I had it on like a space station and then I would have whole quadrants disappear at random.

Like, you might have had a 4,000 points on that disappeared.

That's gone.

We're on a space station, things are falling apart, it's going away.

It forces the game to move quicker and it creates a storyline.

Like in that same game, I had like boxes that you could open.

Maybe something cool happened, maybe a knight showed up and start shooting you.

You didn't know what happened.

You can do like on these big games, some great narratives.

Like I've been to some big tournaments where they're doing.

These big apocalypse game, but every day is a new piece of the narrative.

We started here on this planet.

We moved here to this planet.

Okay, the forces of good, failed to defend this stronghold.

So now they have to attack to take back this portion or just drives the story forward.

(excited music) - I think it's really cool to see like a bunch of people coming together for this like meet.

And like I'm seeing a whole bunch of new faces.

So I think it's a great thing.

I think it's super important to, you know, get together, share in the community and all that.

And you know, not me should just show off all the cool models.

And every day, I'm just shocked with like how people come up with new things.

Like one guy's got like his LEDs and the little models on his nights.

I'm like, that's incredible.

It's amazing.

(excited music) - It's the bread and butter for Warhammer.

That's how you're able to play.

You know, you need a community, you need a game store in order to be able to go up and play consistently every single week just to have people to play with 'cause Warhammer at the end of the day is, it's a one-on-one game.

You need someone else to be there.

So it's definitely very important to have community and have events in order to bring attention to it and bring more people into the hobby.

(excited music) - I think it's super important.

I think especially with a game like this, a lot of people forget that it's not just a game, it's a hobby.

It's a lot of artistic expression.

And in events like this, and even when we go play with our friends at like the comic book stores, you get the opportunity to show it to other people and like, this is how I present my things and I wanna see what your stuff looks like.

And so everybody gets to kind of express themselves through it.

(upbeat music) - I always tell people like, you get in or you get out of it what you put in.

So like you have a painted army, you got pride in it.

Seeing on the table's cool and then also playing with cool people really helps.

Community is a very big part of it.

(excited music) - I would say in 2025, it's a way easier to be a geek and to be open about being a geek, you know?

And a lot of that has to do with, you know, games being kind of infused in pop culture.

So, you know, watching kids play D&D in Stranger Things or on Big Bang Theory, you know, hearing, you know, big time actors like Henry Cavill, you know, talking about, you know, painting his adept to custodians and playing Warhammer 40,000 and just being, you know, a nerd for that.

- When I was in high school, it was a very small group that even knew what 40K was.

Now I could say 40K amongst almost anybody and somebody's gonna know what I'm talking about.

Now they may not know if I say 40K, they might need me to say Warhammer or Space Marine, but people who never knew anything about it now know something about it.

There's a guy at work knows nothing, but he knows to yell for the emperor at me.

And it's kind of entertaining.

'Cause like, I mean, for years, it was just such a small thing and now you see it everywhere.

Like this game, Space Marine has done a lot for recognition.

Magic, the gathering, having a card set that had 40K in it, like magic.

The gathering's done some cool stuff too.

I mean, I love them bringing in all the outside universes.

That's just cool.

It's just give something to everyone and everyone will play.

(gentle music) - All I would say is, is for anybody you know, who's even the slightest bit interested in tabletop miniatures gaming, it's a good time to start.

There's games that, you know, you can start at any level and really, you don't have to spend a lot of money to get into it.

And so you can get a couple armies and you can find that buddy and, you know, play on the kitchen counter and, and still have a good, fun experience.

And to anybody that's somewhat interested in it, don't let that opportunity, you know, pass you by.

You know, games in person are just fun.

You know, whether that's role playing, whether that's board gaming, whether that's miniatures gaming, you know, sitting around a table with your friends, rolling dice, you know, moving pieces around the table.

It's a good evening when you can, you know, play games with friends.

(gentle music) - There's so much to say about the hobby in general, I'd say that it's a very good place to start if you're looking for community.

If you want to step outta your bubble, learn how to teamwork, learn how to deal with people when they're frustrating.

Learn how to get along with people.

Learn the good side of humans, build stories together.

And there's a really a place for anyone in D&D.

(gentle music) - It's just like anything.

You're gonna make friends that you didn't know you were gonna make.

And then tabletop gaming is just a vehicle for that.

It's just another way for you to meet people and socialize and interact with them.

(gentle music) - I mean, I'd say most of my closest friends now, I'd say all of my closest friends now, I met through gaming.

I would've never met you without playing games.

Never would've played Adam Gonzalez without playing games.

All of my close friends are just gamers.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues)