Interview with The Friendly Dungeon Master!

In our never ending quest to support independent content creators that are doing wonderful projects, we have a new interview! We recently came across The Friendly Dungeon Master after they began supporting us on our various social medias!

Curious by their brand, we got to check out their recent collaboration with our friends over at Almost Heroic!

Watch Waterdeep: Dragon Heist from fdmnomore on www.twitch.tv

It didn’t take long for us to become fans of The Friendly Dungeon Master and everything they were up to! We reached out for an interview, and he was kind enough to agree!

The Geek Lyfe: Although I am a huge fan of your work, there may be readers out there that have never heard of you! Could you introduce yourself?

The Friendly Dungeon Master: My name is Hobert Church. I use the nickname “The Friendly Dungeon Master,” and my livestream group goes by the name of “Forever DM No More”.  You can find me on Twitter on my personal account @Friendly_DM, and the official “Forever DM No More” Twitter is @fdmnomore.

The Geek Lyfe: What inspired you to create your brand?

FDM: When I started playing Dungeons & Dragons a couple of years ago, and joined the online communities on social media, I was immediately surprised at the number of Dungeon Masters and Game Masters who suffer from being “Forever DMs” or “Forever GMs”.  Basically, they started running games for their friends, and haven’t been able to get anyone else to take the reins so they could be a player again. This isn’t something that all DMs and GMs feel, but the vast majority of us, after running games for a long time, feel like we’d like to be a player now and again.

I looked online, and didn’t really find any streams or online games that specifically catered to this group, and I decided that, “If nobody else will do it, I will.”  Thus, “Forever DM No More” was born! I sent out some tweets, got a lot of responses, and ended up (mostly) with the group we have today.

The Geek Lyfe: Since you began, what has been your most cherished memory and why?

FDM: Oh, the very first few episodes are some of my favorite times with this stream!  We were all strangers before the stream, so we were still learning each other’s personalities, what each of us was looking for in a D&D game and group…it was chaos, but it was wonderful chaos.

More recently, I think my most cherished memory is the Holiday special we did. I made a world based off of Rankin/Bass’s The Year Without a Santa Claus, and it was a lot of fun.  The party ended up performing family counseling for Heat Miser and Snow Miser and got to ask Santa for things for Christmas.  It was weird and wonderful.

The Geek Lyfe: What was one aspect of your content creation that you loved but was not as well received by fans as you thought it’d be?

FDM: Oooh, that’s a tough one.  When we first started, I was making these intro/recap videos that I put a fair amount of time and work into. I learned how to do simple animation, used video editing knowledge that I had from previous YouTube projects, and wrote what I thought, was some lovely text.  People didn’t seem to enjoy those segments quite as much. So, I stopped doing that. I loved doing them, and would do them again, but only if people really wanted them. Now I just do spoken recaps.

The Geek Lyfe: If you could give one piece of advice to content creators who are just starting out, what would it be?

FDM: Be consistent. If your upload schedule, streaming schedule, or posting schedule is all over the place, people will lose interest quickly.  We’ve had to cancel the stream a few times due to illnesses and personal issues. That kills me every time it happens, because I know we have people who won’t tune in the next time because we’ve shown inconsistency with scheduling.  This also applies to your content. Try to keep all content under the same branding. We ran into this issue early on, where I was using my personal Twitter account for the stream. As we grew, we just didn’t think about setting up a new Twitter for the show, and now that I finally have, it’s growing very slowly.  If I had kept the branding consistent from the beginning, I think it would have been much easier on myself and given the show a bit more exposure. It seems simple, but consistency is absolutely key in any kind of content creation.

The Geek Lyfe: What exciting projects do you have coming up or are already doing that you think folks would enjoy the most?

FDM: I’m a bit biased, because I think everything we do is exciting and something people would enjoy, but I’d have to say that, right now, our most exciting project is the Sunday night livestream. We’re calling it “Fortune’s Tide”, and it airs from 5pm EST to 8:30 pm EST. This campaign is a completely homebrewed setting, and is a collaborative effort between the entire cast of the Sunday show.  We will be rotating DMs through various arcs, but keeping the same characters, and it’s going to be epic, and massive, and have a ton of lore behind it. We’re only one episode in, so it’s great for people to jump in and follow along with.

The Geek Lyfe: What was one aspect of the content creating process that you, never in a million years, would have ever considered?

FDM: That it would absolutely consume me.  This channel, this show, this brand…it’s become my passion.  It’s connected me with some astounding individuals, many of whom I now consider my closest friends.  It’s provided us a platform to talk about some social issues, even in small ways, and it’s provided us with a way to give back to a community that has nurtured, accepted, and shaped all of us.  I’m honored and humbled to have the support of so many people, and I just want to keep producing content that makes people happy. That’s our goal at the end of the day, is just to make people happy.

The Geek Lyfe: How can folks best support you and your brand?

FDM: There are a few ways to support us.  Financially, you can go to our Patreon page (patreon.com/foreverdmnomore) and become a Patron!  You’ll get access to lore drops, exclusive polls, and even have your own NPC put into the game for the party to interact with.  Subscribing on Twitch is also a great way to support us financially (twitch.tv/thefriendlydungeonmaster), and donations are always welcome.

If you can’t afford to support us financially, there is still a lot you can do to help us out!  Liking and retweeting tweets from the official FDMNM account (@fdmnomore) helps spread the word about the channel, and following, watching, and engaging with us on Twitch is a huge boost!  We also have a public Discord server you can join and talk about the show, D&D, and even find other people to play with!

Lastly, if you want to support the “Forever DM No More” philosophy, it’s very simple.  If you play in a game and your DM has been running for a long time, offer to take over for a session or two so they can play.  If you’re the DM, ask your players if any of them would like to take the reins for a couple of weeks. And most importantly, whether it’s in a game or out of one:  Remember to keep it friendly, folks.

If you want to find out more information on everything that The Friendly Dungeon Master is up to, be sure to check out their Twitch page and Twitter!