About the Podcast

Your Standard Heroes (YSH) is a real play Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition podcast. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, it’s a group of friends recording themselves playing a role playing game based around rolling dice. YSH explores a world different from typical D&D settings and the podcast as a whole plays with the conventions of D&D characters, arcs, and plot contrivances. Why is everything set in the Prime Material Plane? Why do so many adventurers exist? Why all the dungeons, what’s up with those dragons, and what makes someone a Hero?

Of course, it’s also just us having a lot of fun playing a game we love and exploring characters we have deep connections to. There’s just as many trips to bars to try new drinks after exciting, dangerous fights as there are commentaries on D&D conventions, we promise

About Us

We’re a group of people who like playing D&D. We’ve played a lot of D&D. And now we’re playing D&D for you!

Liz: The Dungeon Master

Liz doesn’t know how long games should take. That’s not a joke, it’s a running theme in every game Liz runs. The first oneshot Liz ever DM’d wound up taking around 8 hours over two sessions and then became an over two-year long game that’s still running. That’s because Liz doesn’t know how to just make a oneshot; every new oneshot features a massive new world as well, with deep thought put into political drama that the players will literally never care about. This campaign world spawned out of a Valentine’s Day one-turned-threeshot that was just meant to be fantasy The Bachelor. It’s safe to say that Liz likes worldbuilding almost as much as plotting awful twists for players.

Alix: Aryn, Triton Fighter

Alix is a writer of romance visual novels (and, like Aryn, an enormous Useless Lesbian). And she is perhaps too invested in the romances of fictional characters--including those of the characters in YSH. This may make itself apparent when she does things like make absurdly long playlists for the campaign. She's spent probably more time than she should have overthinking all of the characters' relationships (platonic, romantic, antagonistic, or some combination of the above). At any given time, she is probably daydreaming about being as buff and badass as Aryn is.

Jane: Theo, Human Investigator

Jane is a psychologist who tries to sneak mental hygiene tips into D&D games when nobody’s looking. She’s spent far too much time studying pre-1600 science and technology for this campaign and occasionally needs to be interrupted when she talks too long about how exciting modern discoveries like electricity, magnification, and the Periodic Table are. She strongly discourages thinking too hard about how Theo’s potions affect the human body.

Rose: Euterpe, High Elf Bard

Rose’s experience playing string instruments consists of one roughly played scale on the cello after learning that, as an adult woman, she is too small to hold a full-sized cello. Nevertheless, between a strangely good memory for the rules of D&D and many years of playing piano to accompany fiddle playing, she’s decided to play a bard. When she’s not rolling a horrifying number of nat 1s as Euterpe, she DMs (which is secretly an excuse to adapt all of her favorite children’s books and Buffy the Vampire Slayer plots), knits, and spends a lot of time thinking about how both humans and computers interact with language. Secretly, D&D is a way to live her greatest fantasy of speaking many languages, and she will explain at length how kenku’s language capabilities as listed in the sourcebooks make no sense. (DM Note: Kenku are wonderful.)