Wade Has An Interest

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1:04Plus, with installation starting at just 49 cents per square foot, upgrading your space is more affordable than ever at The Home Depot. Offer valid September 24th, 2026 through October 4th, 2026. Exclusions apply. For licenses, see homedepot.com slash license numbers. Good evening, gentle listeners or watchers, and welcome to Distractable. This face-to-face episode, Bemused Bob wants TM swinging, sacrifices saving throws for familial bonds, yet yearns for combat. Wearying Wade doesn't blow his own horn, questions his vocal dexterity and poisons himself. Morale raising Mark mauls Mr. Mercer, wants TPKs and bribes guild membership.

1:49From cancelling curses to sunsetting sportsmen. Yes! It's time for... Wade has an interest. now sit back and prepare to be distracted and enjoy the show

2:14i think we've officially run out of conversation topics been a really long week i was very busy played dnd last night till like four in the morning why didn't you say that i'm playing up good barbarian which is kind of crazy it's a unique kind of it wasn't intentional just happen that way see this is the thing you're the busiest person i know because you're always doing something and yet you come here and say like oh i don't know that that it feels like self-promotion so i don't want to be i don't know that interesting just talking about what talk about what you do it's what you do i self-promote all okay well i'm playing an invulnerable rager which means i get more damage reduction so i'm like i go in i get the shit beat out of me but i actually deal take slightly less damage and i have this big sword i just fucking cleave it cheating if you come into the game you know i'm gonna be invulnerable well yes if you say that invulnerable region just means you get more damage reduction early because we're doing what's called epic six so we cap at level six uh-huh and we just got to level four uh so it's like you only get so many powers so many feeds so many ability scores so if you have damage reduction and everything caps at level six it's like actually damage reduction of two or three is pretty strong so i was like okay i'll go with that people have been wanting us to play dnd for a long time we just don't have enough people i have an idea that i want to do i want to find a dm who i like get along with who will give us one shots where it's like they come up with the story they come up with we fought we use there are a lot of really simple structures where all you need is like you roll one die and and you could do you could figure anything out that needs to happen but they give us a bunch of different like a series of one shots and then we take turns being the host but also the host like doesn't have all the info so one of us is running so there's not a fourth person on the show running the game but they would like they would be in the background and the dm would be in the ear of whoever of us is running the show and be like actually suddenly this tap like then we get to take turns running it so it's not just like i'm the one who does the dnd or something and we all get take turns playing and it could be different characters i kind of think it'd be cool if we had like set characters and they just jumped from universe to universe.

4:23Like it was in space. Yeah. And we kept like looping around going into different... I want to do this, but I have not done the first step of I need to find someone who is on board with this idea who I like, I think gets our humor and would be good at this sort of... Because it's not a thing. Most DMs are like, it's a grand campaign or it's a small campaign, but it's like, it's for our group because they have a group that they play with or whatever. So I know my DM doesn't really like it. He'll do one shots. he's not really a big fan of them because he said it's like hard to tell a good story and yeah that amount of time it's a lot of cliche kind of stories but if i wasn't doing gaming stuff i 100 could see myself i could i don't think i'm critical role worthy but like having a really awesome setup where you have like the table everyone gets around that critical role does and like having like a full dnd thing why do you say why do you say you're not critical role worthy their voice acting capabilities i think is above like i can do some different voices but like i think theirs are truly like I'm not a voice actor as far as talent goes.

5:24Now, making a character and getting immersed and playing my character, I can do that like they can. But I think that they are more talented voice actors than I am. Matt Mercer, you're a bitch. I'm throwing down the gauntlet here. I've been trying for years. No, no. Call me. Call me. Call me. Please. This guy is so much better than you at voice acting and everyone on Critical Role. Put my phone number on the screen. Matt, call me. We're going to do what? Yeah, you call him right now. set this up. 1v5. 1v1 1v1. He'll take them all on at the same time. Voice to voice. He's got this. My money's on him.

5:58Mine too. I don't want this. Very funny. No, I watched, um, they did a campaign on Critical Role recently. They have a new system. I think it's called Daggerfall that, like, they came up with. They invented this new, like, D &D system. Daggerfall is the name of the first Elder Scrolls game. Or the second. I might be wrong about that. I thought it was Daggerfall. But they did, they released a whole system that you play that's a lot more RP intensive and a little bit less dice. But it seemed pretty brutal. I watched their campaign. It was pretty brutal. Pretty, like they died? It's a very like easy to die in system in the way they played it at least.

6:31Like in person they died? Well, if your character dies, don't you have to follow their lead? You're role playing, right? You have to play the role. I hope not because one of my characters died by being burned enough to flamethrowers and I really don't want to follow that role. That sounds terrible. I've been super into D &D. I really enjoy it and it's like I kind of wish I could play more than I do. So like having like a really cool in-person setup where everyone's like focused and paying attention doesn't have like distractions of screens and phones like sounds like a really fun idea if everyone's immersed and buys in it's so much fun build it well i'd want to but there's not a lot of people locally i know that play i i would this is the problem i run into is i love the i have not played a lot but every experience i've had with dnd i really love it yeah it's really fun and every group that i because i have been invited or i've had opportunities every group is full of people who are normal people who have jobs and i'm like i do my stuff during this is my job so i had to do like nine to five during the day is my availability and like after five i have a son and i'm not trying to play dnd for four hours one of the nights of the week when i'm supposed to be like cooking dinner and playing with jane like i do want to do it but that's a hard decision to make and every dnd group i've ever talked to they're like yeah we go from like 9 p.m to 4 in the morning on Thursday nights and I'm like ours is 8 p.m.

7:51it used to be 8 p.m. to midnight on Wednesdays right now it's 8 p.m. to like 2 or 3 a.m. yeah and like it's cool if I didn't have James like I would be way down for that but I'm like I really I'm luckier than a lot of people who have to work more hours than I do but I really try and reserve family time and it's like I don't I don't have four or six or ten hours a week to do nighttime D &D when I work during the day anyway. It's fine. First world problems. I would be fine if it was like a seven hour session. I am fine. But most of the D &D that I've played in or been a part of has been spending four of those hours in town trying to buy some things.

8:30Just walking around. Our current campaign is very RP heavy so there's a lot more of talking than there is action. But I'm like, it's more than it would be in real life. If I went to go get potions from a fucking in town, I'm not going to be there for four hours. I don't go to the grocery store for four hours. How are they talking to everybody? We did an hour of furniture shopping once. We got like at a house and we had to go furniture shopping. We spent an hour furniture shopping. In RP? Yeah. What? That's a long time. We were going to Ikea for an hour. Dude, one of the campaigns, we were doing it's not Vampire, Masquerade, but it's like that universe.

9:06It was called Hunter, I think. We played like Sam and Dean Winchester type characters, but weaker. My character went in he was like a rich content creator i was playing like kind of a douchey content creator so i was like that's fun but he had a lot of money what is that like really difficult for me i don't know how i channeled it he bought like this property they were gonna use for their base so like set up like get all their guns and have this like thing and i had to rp with like a tax accountant and attorney and i was like oh that was the worst that thing that I did. It was like, ah, let me negotiate my loan.

9:43What am I doing? You say have to. Who said you had to? I wasn't the one running the game, man. I was just a player. Oh my god. See, that's the kind of stuff that's like, no offense to that. You're a DM or any DM that does like that. People like that. There's probably people who like that. Who? I mean, all of the people. There are so many different... It was relatively well-resumed. Critical Role is not the only D &D that you can watch as a series on the internet and there are plenty of D &D series that I have or like podcasts where I was like oh I'll see what this is about and it's like an hour and a half of role playing of them doing almost nothing and to me I'm like do anything do something is Critical Role more action based or are they more RP based I'm not watching their longer form campaigns too much but yeah I've legitimately not watched them honestly that's probably I know them but I have probably watched almost zero actual critical other than clips.

10:37I mean, it's a hard balance. It depends what you're doing. There are definitely like times and games that you play that are more action focused and there's other systems that are definitely more RP focused. Yeah. If we were going to do something and we were going to take part, I would want it to be almost exclusively action. I want it to be very one-shotty, very action focused because the point is it's just an improv game, right? Like for our purposes, it's a fun structured improv game where you can have a goal that we don't all have to make up in our heads and agree upon because that doesn't always work out very well in our groups.

11:11Short form, especially you want to do more action. If you're in town out of combat, do you still take turns? Okay, good. No. Because I was about to say, if you're taking turns RPing with people in the tavern... You only earn initiative and take turns typically when you're fighting or like a fight is about to break out or something. If you're just role-playing, it's just like you do your thing. That was good because I was about to say, like I'm not saying it should be all fighting all the time but it's like man if you had to wait you go to buy a potion unfortunately Mark rolled higher initiative he bought the potion what do you do bitching him I guess that's a two-round action you've only got damn it no it's not like that okay good also everyone's gonna ask twitch.tv slash lost initiatives where I play I did a system though on a show called uh roll for it Tyler and it was taught was a part of like this bigger camp It was a Warhammer campaign.

11:59They wanted to do like, not a one shot, but like a four episode series where it was like, Tyler was like a general sending an army down to like a planet to do something. And they're like, what if we zoom in and we do like a mini campaign of that battle? That's pretty cool. So I got to join in as like one of the soldiers and the guy who DMed was named Sheepy. I forget his actual wandering in, I think is his at. But he DMed us on Warhammer game. It was very action oriented. He had us make like four character sheets that were pretty quick to make. but he's like there will probably be death in this game your character is expendable so we kind of made some silly characters but it was very action oriented it was just constantly like we were at war somehow we were great at war but we had to like cook meals in our downtime to eat we sucked at that so we kept poisoning ourselves and there was a point where we rolled like the it was like a d100 system where one is great a 100 is terrible and our cook rolled i think a one or a two on cooking our meal and he was like hmm interesting so we started hallucinating and we were like trying to stealth into this like combat situation and my character was seeing a bunch of like monkeys that were like shooting lasers i thought one was good i thought one was good i'm sorry he rolled a high he rolled the bad one okay he rolled very very bad got it so i started hallucinating seeing like space monkeys shooting lasers one of our characters actually just believed they were dead so they just laid down and thought they were dead and I forget what the other hallucination was but we were like hallucinating in the woods while we were trying to like sneak into this combat zone everything that went bad was from the fucking cooking because we were getting into combat and it's like oh dude one crit one crit awesome but that was a really fun system very action oriented it was just like the pace of being like a band of brothers style where it's just like war scene war scene moving trying to fight the action getting pushed back that was a really cool one it's so weird to hear you talk passionately and have a bunch of knowledge about a thing that you really like i know that you like things in life but you've never you don't ever share this stuff i don't know i feel like i talked about dnd before and just didn't want to like you've definitely talked about it but you'll be like i played dnd this week i got a cigar well i figure if people care they'll come watch us play like they're not gonna they don't want to hear me just talk about like rehashing that's not how that works no you have to bother the shit out of someone to get them to go click on something that they've never watched before and they don't know if they like it or not i mean i super enjoy role play like being different characters i've loved a lot of my character i did gtrp you did that for a little bit i had a normal guy i really love playing him i got too addicted to it i will never do gtrp again because there's a time where i got on at like 4 p.m and i was on till 7 a.m and i did that for like three weeks just all because the fomo the fear of missing out was crazy if i logged off i was like what if something crazy happens while I'm offline.

14:45Gotta be on the server. Who do you turn into when you pick the cameras around? I gotta be on a server. I see. Okay. Well, no, it's good to hear you talk about stuff. I really enjoy it, yeah. I would love to do more D &D-oriented stuff, but unfortunately, a lot of people I play with, nighttime is the time that works. Yeah, well, it makes sense, right? Like, if your job isn't content creation, why the fuck would you play D &D during the sunlight hours? You have, like, shit you're supposed to be doing. You have kids you're taking care of. You have work you're supposed to be doing like it just is tough because i really do want i have had several opportunities where i could have been like you where i could have like gotten into a group but it was always like lots of nights want to be multiple nights a week if we're it's like i can't i'm also the rare exclusive night owl like even right now i'm feeling like slightly out of it i hit my peak around like eight or nine o 'clock i'm like oh i'm so awake let's do whatever it's three in the afternoon just for context yeah right now where we are so like i don't get mark level of drive, but the closest I get to your level of drive to work is definitely evening and night.

15:47During the day, I'm just dragging along existing. This is basically your 4am. No, not quite that bad. Like, I'm awake after noon usually, but like the first four or five hours of being awake, I'm just kind of like... Like how people feel when they don't have their coffee yet, because I don't drink coffee, so I'm just perennially in that until I hit my like... You should try coffee. You should try coffee. I don't really want to start adding... I don't know. It's not really good for you. It's not bad for you. No, actually, they say it's pretty good. Having like... And multiple energy drinks a day levels of caffeine, like hundreds and hundreds of milligrams of caffeine.

16:17Oh, probably not very good for you. It's just the guy with an energy drinks. But like one coffee in the morning to like get going. Actually, not bad. And coffee is a lot of antioxidants. Yeah. They say. You do have acid reflux. So I know people with bad acid reflux can have, you might have to get like low acidity coffee to enjoy it more because you might have a bad reflux from it. But they make that and like it works. I have a friend I knew who had like the worst reflux. I have like everything gave him reflux. He just eats like plain rice because of, but low acid coffee also worked and he could enjoy his coffee.

16:51Interesting. I don't know that I'll be a coffee drinker, but maybe I'll try it. We also just get like decaf because that has a tiny, tiny amount of caffeine in it and it might give you a boost. If I'm not shaking violently from the amount of caffeine I had, I don't even feel like I'm alive. I've cut back on pop too quite a bit though. Oh, pop. Soda. whatever my little shoulder my little shoulder you've been watching all the k-pop demon hunters that's like james's golden is james's current favorite song so we have a lot of dance parties to the k-pop demon hunter soundtrack the lemonati has spent decades keeping lemon on top and lime in the shadows their lemon agenda has infiltrated everything even our music that hit song named after the color of lemons not a coincidence Big Lemon has been pulling strings in the industry for years.

17:42Think about it. But now, 7up is fighting back with their new lime lemon soda. Now lime comes first. 7up, flip the sip. Brussels clean up nicely at Sweetgreen. Maple glazed, roasted, and edges perfectly caramelized. Sweetgreen's fall harvest is back on the menu, and the season's most overlooked little green vegetable is dressed to be devoured. You know what to do. Order on the Sweet Green app.

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19:18can i talk to you about my unwavering natural charisma i don't know if i'll be able to withstand your assault i know right can i unleash this upon you so i'm playing that stupid mobile game right

19:33yeah did i tell you any more about it since i started talking uh the last update your group clan whatever had folded into another one and you had been folded into the leadership structure Yeah. Okay. Anyway, so I started on a new server because I was like, I bet I can run things better than these assholes ever could. I'm going to show them. I'll start my own guild. I'll start my own guild with my own rules. I'll do it my way. Fucking instantly number one on the server. Like from day one, our guild has been number one on the server because I'm the fucking best and I am giving them lots of...

20:21It's a play, right, buddy? It's a play. It's a play. So it turns out all you need to do to get people to call you king and boss and Chad is give them lots of diamonds. And boy, do they love the diamonds. That's so fucking funny. But we're number one, baby. We're number one. But at what cost? It's about$150.

20:50I'm going to assume it's not per day. It's per day.

20:57I've been spending all my life. Hey, running your own kingdom is expensive. I get it. It sure is. It's very expensive. Don't worry. Soon the profit will turn around. You'll start making it back. Oh, yeah, man. It's going to get back. Anyway, I don't know what's wrong with me. I need to clean it so well. Listen, I was the mobile game guy for a while. I get it. It's easy to get sucked in and like, oh, man. That streak of like wanting to be at the top or be the best is definitely there. That's why they work. That's why they work, yeah. Yeah. And so with this one, like they're all such helpless sheep and I need to lead them like the great herder, herder, shepherd that I am.

21:33A herdum, Mark. Herdum. I'm going to herdum, all right. No, I, uh. Oh, you poor bastard. But additionally, I have charisma and they definitely follow me for that. Yeah, it's definitely charisma. Definitely charisma. Yeah, that makes sense. You get a bonus to your charisma by giving out diamonds. Yeah, it turns out money. You get a plus two on the roll. That's so funny. Anyway, yeah, that's my... I really need to stop playing that game. Because I really need to get back to learning. I was there with Raid. Raid Shadow Legends guilds, man. You know, I had a campaign for that. I never played it. I got super into it.

22:09But, uh... Very big money pit. Very easy to fall into that one. I've been trying to find a thing to get addicted to that I could give money to. Because I had mine. I'm not above it. But I haven't played Valorant in a long time. My thing for a long time was I played Counter-Strike and then I got into Valorant because of competitive 5v5 shooters. And I would buy skins. I must have. I've never actually quantified it. It's probably an embarrassing amount of money in Valorant skins. Easily$600 or$700 total. probably because like i would i would generally i would not and maybe i'd buy one single one off the shop for like a few bucks when they went on sale but then they had a few sets in a row where it was like for a hundred bucks you get this whole set and man all of those are fucking great and this will be the one time but i haven't had anything like i've been trying to get addicted to something then the sun cost fallacy is real as soon as you put like your first two bucks in you're in.

23:12I've even been trying sports gambling. This sounds, this is a terrible take, but like, I like sports and I feel like I would like, like, I know you just lose money. I know that's not, but I'm like, I feel like I would enjoy sports gambling. Like, it's fun. You think about the game. You could make ridiculous, you know, prop bets or whatever they call them, parlays. You bet on anything you want. It's really, and you just, you'll just always lose because the more complicated your parlay, the more guaranteed to lose it is i don't even like that even when i win a sports bet i'm like oh well i mean like i don't know i need a vice i look at advice man the vice for me is in these games it's not so much about me buying for me it's they in this game has a gifting mechanic that's what gets me because i really like you know other people getting things other people so there was an event that just happened on the main server that i'm on and it's like suddenly there's nine more things i can get I'm like, maxed them all out immediately.

24:11Yeah. They were cheaper, but it was like, okay. We should take Mark shopping with us or something. I love gifts. Oh, yeah. All of a sudden, I do too. I would. I would. I buy you guys dinner all the time. Yeah, no, that's true. You want to go to like a Tim's Auto Mall? You want to go car shopping? My rentals look at me. Yeah, you don't have a car. Yeah, we got to get you a car. Yeah, that sounds great. I'll get you both e-bikes. I wouldn't well I do have an e-bike but I would enjoy one that was a little more casual I have a e-bike that's just a bike that also has that and I it's not it's like really tall because I'm huge but I really want like a super seven I want one that looks like a motorcycle I've not been on a bike of any kind in probably 10 years it's a good way to get in shape even if it's an e-bike so long as you paddle like you're still getting some kind of workout then yeah you could do that they are fun though I recently tuned mine up and ruined it for the first time in a while.

25:07We don't live in a great spot here to ride it anywhere useful, but it's really fun. Oh, you know what reminds me? Amy showed me Alt Park. I didn't know about Alt Park. It's a great place. Is that where the hobos went to sex? What? No. What are you talking about? Wasn't there a whole bit like 10 years ago when we were in LA, it was like, that's where the hobos people go to fuck. Alt Park is in Cincinnati. Oh. that place you never leave see this is why when we did the Cincinnati episode we did such a terrible job because I didn't know about Alt Park I guess I still I've never been there Cincinnati is probably one of the best park cities in the world it has incredibly maintained and beautiful parks everywhere I just never know they existed yeah I never really did park stuff until James but pretty much everywhere where we've gone anywhere in the city or in the suburbs.

26:06It's like, wow, this is beautiful. On a related note, isn't there also like a, there's a really beautiful cemetery here. I forget the name of it. That's not Alt Park, but it's a... Is that Spring Grove? That's not, no, that's down by UC. I don't know if that would be beautiful. That one's sketchy. There's one that's apparently really big and beautiful. I think I've been there once, but it's been since like 2010. I don't remember the name of it. It might be Spring Grove. I went to this, right. We were taking Chica and Henry out to random parks all over the place. There's one of the biggest dog parks I've ever seen in my life by these huge soccer fields that is just like by Lunkin.

26:35And then there's another one that this park behind a gold star, just randomly on this back row behind a gold star. I'm sure that it has a name and everyone knows about it, but it was like, it's one of the prettiest parks. There's like a circle in the front, two things in there, and a huge nature trail going through the whole woods there. And then in on that road, the main road is like, I'm looking down and there's, it's like this amphitheater style, but grass, like it's a grass that's been cut, But then it goes to tall, like, wildflowers. And it's just the trees funneled out. It looks like an amphitheater.

27:06It looks like intentionally. It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. And I'm like, this is just behind a gold star. There's a lot of people. I mean, the Nature Center where Molly and I got married, that's a beautiful place. They've got beautiful walking paths. There's all kinds of parks. I'm sure there's some I've even missed. There's parks behind churches. I swear they hide some of them intentionally so people don't know about them. Cincinnati has incredible features. Why didn't we name any of them in the episode where we talk about Cincinnati? That's not what we do. We don't even have the ones everyone talks about.

27:32Kings Island and that's it. Did you know Cincinnati used to, they sold it recently, own a railroad that stretched from Cincinnati down to Louisiana? No, they don't know that. The entire railroad. The city did? The city did, yeah. And they just sold it a couple years ago. It was on a vote. I wasn't here for it. You guys probably voted for it. We could have been well-known people. A couple years. I just got here. Right, right. You might have voted for it or against it. I might have. Yeah. Anyway, it was one of the propositions that you're supposed to read up. Anyway, they sold it for$1.5 billion.

28:07We could have been railroad folk. We could have bought that. I've always dreamed of running a railroad. Well, they sold it. It was controversial because they'd owned it since like the 1800s. And it had been making Cincinnati money ever since. I wouldn't have wanted to get rid of that. Well, and I'm a little, I mean, I know that railroads can be privately owned. But I'm a little surprised that they could. because that sort of thing, part of the problem modernly with railroads is that to make them, the government has to seize land, right? Like they use eminent domain to just take people's property or get huge easements on people's property.

28:42That doesn't work so well in the modern world where everything is pretty, especially around cities at least, everything's pretty jammed up. There's not like, it's not like there's just empty space and then no one is using it. But yeah, So they had a bunch of property tied up in that as well, which is why it was so valuable. But it's crazy that they could just convey that to a private party. Yeah. For$1.5 billion, you can do a lot of things. I feel like they could have got more. Yeah. That's what a lot of people are saying. But it went into a trust that has since appreciated in value. It's like$1.6 billion.

29:13And already there's been tens of millions. It's allocated to like road repair, bridge repair, public services, things like that. So it's actually, I'm not sure 100 % of the sense, but it was working out for Cincinnati. Road repair this year has been kind of brutal. We had a really tough winter last year, and the roads got really decimated over that course. I feel like this year I've seen so much more road construction and so much more that needs it. They were working on a thing years ago. I don't know if anyone ever came over it. Did we talk about it in the podcast where they had the self-repairing roads somewhere in Europe they were trying to work on?