Dungeon Master Brennan Lee Mulligan Answers DnD Questions

I'm Dungeon Master Brennan Lee Mulligan,

here to answer your questions from the internet.

This is Dungeons & Dragons Support.

[upbeat music]

Okay, first question. Obama_prism_VHS?

The most iconic, parentheses, famous D&D monster?

You gotta love a mimic,

a monster disguised as a treasure chest.

Now, I love these monsters

because they only make sense in a world

where so many people are going into haunted dungeons,

that entire strains of monsters can evolve

just to eat adventurers.

Think about how rare of a food source

an adventurer is on earth

and think about the fact

that there's so many monsters out here being like,

If I disguise myself as a treasure chest,

at least one person a week

is gonna open me and I'm gonna eat them.

I would say my favorite D&D monster

has to go to the owlbear.

Hoot! Growl!

The mascot of the Aguefort Adventuring Academy

and our favorite monster over at Dimension 20.

Why would you mix an owl and a bear together?

Bears are more dangerous than owls.

Just have a regular bear.

But no, we made them half owl.

Incredible. No notes.

This next question comes to us from @_sparrowboy.

Is there any secret,

how do you come up with such great character design

and personality wise?

I always feel empty headed

when having to create a D&D character.

The things that not only are fun right away,

but stay fun and sustainable a long time

are creating characters that are wrestling

with a heroic problem that I can keep coming back to.

Perhaps their wizarding academy was burned down

or their parents were heroes that were betrayed.

Perhaps a war is raging across these Five Kingdoms.

Pick someone from one of those kingdoms

with something to lose, not only on a physical level,

but an emotional one as well.

Pick characters who care about the world they are in,

and you will find yourself swept away

by adventure very quickly indeed.

That's my advice to you.

This next question comes to us from @i_love_ur_mom3.

Provocative.

Question. What's the greatest magic of all?

Answer: Friendship, right?

The greatest magic of all is not friendship.

It's chronomancy, the ability to control and warp time.

If friendship were the greatest magic,

look, it's a pet peeve of mine.

Greatest magic of all, do you remember?

Is friendship.

What the [beep] is wrong with you?

The greatest- There's a lot

of stories out there where the greatest magic of all

is love or friendship and it's like,

Oh, because you loved so well

it created a magic spell that protected you.

That is so cruel to everybody else

in that fictional world who died.

Do you get it?

If your love can magically protect you,

then what follows from that

is anyone who died didn't love hard enough.

It's [beep] up.

Just think about it for two seconds. All right?

You can't be doing that.

But the greatest magic of all is powerful magic,

and you should use that magic to help the people you love.

They're not the same thing.

Greatest magic of all? Chronomancy.

@rogeliovall123.

So exactly what are the stuff that you need

to play Dungeons & Dragons?

Do you need to buy separate sets of stuff

or do you make it yourself?

Rogelio, my friend, first thing you need is friends,

and that's hard to come by.

I gotta tell you.

The hustle needed to get six people

to clear a Wednesday night is the stuff of legend.

The rules of the game are contained

in typically three books.

We refer to them as like the core rule books.

Sometimes the dungeon master

will have those books available for you to come play.

Sometimes they'll have them digitally

like on a service like D&D Beyond,

pencil and papers to record your character sheet.

This is what a typical character sheet looks like,

but you can get these online

and print them out for yourselves,

or you can store your character information

on a digital character sheet as well.

And some dice

that generate random chance throughout the game.

You wanna attack a dragon?

Well, we don't just decide that. Where's the fun in that?

We roll dice to see if you strike true or not.

So with dice, pencil and paper,

some rule books and some pals,

you could be playing Dungeons & Dragons right away.

Now you may have seen a lot of D&D tables in popular media

with cool little figurines

and miniatures like my friends right here.

These miniatures are, listen,

we can all agree, dope as hell,

but they are optional.

Miniatures and counters and tokens are there

to physically represent battle and combat,

but that is technically an extra.

You can, at your table,

play in a style that is known as theater of the mind.

I like to use the minis and the counters

because there's a lot of abilities in D&D

that are harder to keep track of

and having a battlefield set out I think is worthwhile

so that if someone casts a Fireball,

with one quick glance of my eyes,

I know exactly how many enemies just blew up.

This dragon has been one of my most long-used miniatures.

I think I was like two, one or two years old

when I got this dragon.

He used to have a little spout of fire,

but I might've chewed that off when I was a kid.

Regardless, this dragon's been with me for a long, long time

and served faithfully and well.

Good boy. Next question.

From DrinkYourHaterade on Reddit.

What is the best representation of D&D in pop culture?

With 'Stranger Things' boosting D&D nostalgia,

I've been thinking a lot

about pop culture representations of D&D.

What show or movie do you think has done

the best job and why?

I think what Stranger Things did

that really helped D&D at a moment

when a lot of cultural forces were conspiring to lift it up

and actually showed it as being really fun,

inherently social, inherently thrilling, a activity

that brings people together in shared storytelling.

Baldur's Gate people got to fall in love with Karlach

and Astarian and these amazing characters

and trying to smooch, which is a part

that they don't write about a lot in the textbooks,

but believe me, when you get to play in the game,

people wanna know if they can smooch.

And at my table,

as long as all parties involved

have talked about it at session zero

and everyone has their thumbs up across the board,

if we're gonna be out here slaying and smiting,

why not add smooching into the mix?

What's so wrong with a nice smooch?

I tell ya.

There was also a D&D movie that came out recently

that I think did a very good job.

It had the tone and tenor.

The worlds of Dungeons & Dragons

are these arch, epic fantasy universes.

But the experience

that most people have playing at the table

is that things get goofy.

There will be moments of romance,

there will be moments of shock and danger and dismay,

and so that movie did a good job

of showing some of the lightheartedness

that exists when you're actually playing through

these D&D worlds together.

@buckducky.

I'm DMing a game for a bit and I'm trying to learn

how to make a female voice for an NPC,

but I'm very bad with voices.

I think that it's a mistake to try

to like pitch up your voice for playing female characters.

As a dungeon master,

I have to play every different kind of person

'cause I'm playing everybody in the world

that my players are going through.

Someone told me recently that the characters

that I make sound like me,

meaning when I voice the character,

I just use my regular voice, are women and bad guys.

That's something I should unpack with a professional.

I don't know why that is, but that's who gets my real voice.

I just use my regular voice when I'm playing women,

unless there's like a regional accent

or they're older,

you know like if I'm playing the Baba Yaga,

Did someone say a little bit of piss?

Ancient folkloric Russian witch.

[cackles] Well, my pet.

You do the voice for the character.

I don't think you need to do

like a stereotypical woman voice.

@JLMoonlight92 asks,

Can you tell me how D&D alignments work?

How do I know if someone's lawful good

or anyone of the others?

Alignment is an element of tracking player character ideals.

From earlier editions of the game,

it was identified along two axes,

your ethical and moral axes,

and it produced nine alignments:

Lawful good, paladins, heroic.

Neutral good, most aligned with the good sphere above.

Chaotic good, Robin Hood.

Those that stand against tyranny and oppression

and fight for freedom.

You have lawful neutral,

which is a sort of automaton rules for their own sake,

neither good nor evil.

True neutral, no values at all,

kind of cool cynics, maybe.

Chaotic neutral, pure chaos for its own sake.

Utter rebellion, anarchy.

Lawful evil, the alignment of devils

and those who seek conquest, tyranny, and oppression.

Neutral evil, pure cruelty and oblivion.

Chaotic evil, slaughter, rampage, ruin,

sort of violence of the demonic realms.

Those nine alignments, people love them

because, I dunno if you know this about human beings,

they love personality charts.

It stuck around for a long time

even though it's not the most robust way

to categorize moral philosophy,

but, goddamn, people love a chart

that tells them what kind of person they are.

From CamilleDoesDND.

The difference between Paladins and Warlocks

is one's got an employer and the other's got a sugar daddy.

But like which one is which?

If anyone's got a sugar daddy, it's Clerics.

You know it and I know it.

When we talk about Paladins in D&D,

we talk about heroic holy knights

that swear an oath to an ideal.

When we talk about Warlocks, we talk about people

that have sworn a pact to an otherworldly entity

capable of granting them magic.

I believe that technically Warlocks

have the sugar daddy reputation kind of locked down,

but I would argue that Clerics

are in a very similar relationship.

I think the difference between a Warlock and a Cleric

is aesthetic more than it is anything sort of more tangible,

but that's getting into fantasy cosmology and theology,

which we [chuckles] we simply don't have the time for.

@sizzleitupcos, Why are Wizards so squishy?

What, you want hit points

in addition to being able to bend reality with your mind?

Wizards are so powerful,

they're like the most powerful class in the game.

If you can survive those low levels,

you're gonna be dominating battlefields

from here till the end game.

A D6 is fine.

I come from 3.5 where they had D4 hit points

and I think we should go back to that.

I think they got it too easy as it is now. D6 hit dice.

They should be squishy.

Stay on the back line,

let your Barbarian have some fun.

This next question comes to us from Nuiihren.

Among things I don't know

and I'm at this point kind of afraid to ask,

don't be afraid.

How many sets of dice do D&D players have and why?

Do you have separate sets

for different characters or for different quests?

Or just because they look cool?

They look cool, my friend.

Why not have as many as you can?

I have an enormous pouch of dice.

This is filled with dice.

If I'm gonna throw an upcast Cone of Cold

at my adventuring party,

I need to have a ton of dice ready for that,

in the moment, ready to go.

As you play the game longer, it actually is worthwhile

to invest in more than one set.

In your first set of dice,

you will get seven different dice typically.

The first and greatest of them all is the D20.

We say the letter D for dice

and then the number of sides on the die.

So this is a D20 because it's a 20-sided die.

Then we come down to the D12.

I'm not gonna lie, it doesn't get a lot of action.

It's sort of for Barbarian hit dice,

greataxes and not too much else in common play,

but we love the D12.

Fun fact about the D12, it never stops rolling.

These next two dice, I'm gonna show together:

D10 and another D10,

but you'll notice that this one

has two digits in every place.

So you roll these together

and here in the tens digit

you produce a number, so that's an eight.

And then in this other digit you produce a nine,

that's an 89.

Coming down from the D10, you have the D8.

This one sees a lot of play.

You're talking longswords and battleaxes.

There's a lot of cool higher-level spells

that do D8 damage.

That's a real fun one.

And then there's one,

for folks that have been strapped in,

Going, what the hell is this guy talking about?

The D6. You know this guy, you love the D6.

This is like the normal die. We use the normal die.

We're talking about fireball damage,

talking about wizard hit dice.

I use the D6 for recharging breath weapons,

which you always hate to see, but you have to do it.

It scares your PCs. It's great, it's fun.

You will have these somewhere in your house,

probably in a normal board game.

Maybe you're playing

with like a new board game night with friends

and someone goes like, Pass me the D6.

You're like, Ah, I caught you.

You're a secret TTRPG player.

Normal people don't call it a D6, they just call it dice.

And then the D4, this one always trips people up

because it's got multiple numbers on each side

because it lands with its point pointing up

and you have to see which numeral is upright.

The D4 is the bane

of messy housekeepers everywhere

because if you let dice fall on the floor

and you're walking at night to get a glass of water,

this bad boy's going right in your foot like a LEGO.

I have stepped on these so many times.

And additionally, these are used

for the smallest numbers possible.

So like attacking with a dagger,

like the damage of a small knife is a D4.

Your D4 will always be the last dice on the table

because they're hard to pick up

and so you're there looking foolish, grasping at your hands

with these up-pointed dice, frankly annoying dice.

I find the D4 annoying.

I can say that, we have a long relationship.

You're not going anywhere.

Some of these dice are reliable

and their personalities are good

and the D4 is not on that list, sorry to say.

Question here from @memeslich.

Should dungeon masters stop fudging dice rolls

in Dungeons & Dragons?

Fudging a die roll is something that a dungeon master can do

with the aid of this handy little screen.

It's called a dungeon master screen.

You put that up at the table

and all of a sudden, what am I up to back here?

This screen enables you to do really fun stuff like this

where you go, Okay, the monster's gonna attack.

[dice rattle]

Oh no.

If you were to see that I rolled a two and still hit you,

that might prompt you to be like,

We need to run away from this battle right now.

There's a lot of stuff

that is reasonable to stay hidden behind a DM screen.

A DM hides their stat blocks behind here.

I usually make it little homebrew index card

with all the players like game stats on it,

but there is then a temptation

for some DMs to fudge die rolls.

Typically, this is done

to spare the player characters from a terrible fate.

You're attacking your PC, it's the last one standing

and they've got 10 hit points left

and you roll that monster attack roll.

Ooh, it's a nat 20. They're about to do double damage.

This is about to be the end of the campaign.

Maybe they didn't roll a nat 20.

Maybe you could say that they rolled something else.

That temptation is there for DMs

that suddenly get a soft heart for their PCs.

@ridethedirt, also just some leftist, hell yeah.

What is a golden rule you try to follow

for #dnd or other #ttrpg?

For folks at home, that's tabletop role playing game.

The golden rule I try to follow is you're playing

with your fellow players first and foremost.

If you follow every rule

and stay completely in line with the module,

the books are never gonna say thank you.

You are playing with other human beings at the table.

Stay tapped in to what their experience is.

Are they having fun? Are you all telling a story together?

That is the measure of a great tabletop game.

@PHXMall asks, What's your favorite character race

and class combo for D&D?

I tend to come back to Paladin and Wizard.

I love a Paladin's oath. Striving for honor and justice.

We did a photo shoot a while back

with the wonderful Andrew Max Levy as a Paladin.

Who doesn't love a knight in shining armor?

It's a classic hero archetype.

And you get to Smite. Who doesn't love to Smite?

Gimme those D8s.

And I also like Wizards because they're very magical,

but they weren't born that way.

They had to work very hard to get magical

and I identify with that.

But for the person asking this question

of is there a certain advantage,

typically there are certain things that dovetail,

like, if you're gonna play a Barbarian,

which is a strength-based class,

there are gonna be certain ancestries

that give you a bonus to strength

in some editions of the game.

There's also some fun stuff about playing a character

that's a little bit more well-rounded.

Every so often it can be cool

even if you're playing a strength-based character

to go, Oh, and because of this part of my background,

I have a weird little cantrip or a magic spell I can do.

Even though it might not be optimal,

that weird little power

that doesn't exactly fit into your build

may be the thing that saves you and your friends

from a total party kill.

@delusionaldoo1. How do you handle a TPK?

Do you full reset or just pick up at the last save spot?

Any other things you like to do after a party wipe?

Handling a TPK,

which for folks at home is a total party kill,

it is when every member

of an adventuring party dies all at once.

I think sometimes the best way to handle a TPK

is before it happens.

If you're heading towards a battle

that is absolutely punishing

and stands a chance

of really wiping out everybody in the party, say it.

Say it above the table and say it in game.

Have a moment where you check in with your players

and go, Hey, no shame in running.

This has a chance of killing everybody in the party.

Take your time.

You approach the dungeon, drums beat in the dark.

Fires flicker from torch light.

The smell of death is everywhere.

Taking the time to add some gravitas

can sometimes wake your players up and go,

Oh, our buddy is suddenly being very dramatic and serious.

I think we might be in trouble.

If you do all that due diligence

and say, Hey, you can make a brave last stand here.

You all may die.

When they do, they had some agency in it.

The thing that makes a TPK really unbearable

is when players feel like it happened for no reason.

@SessionsCanceld.

Why do we always start games in tavern?

Some groups tend to make

their characters isolated from one another.

Where do people congregate in a medieval setting?

In a public house,

in a place of drink and libation and revelry.

I would say probably there's a deeper answer here,

and I haven't seen anything written about this,

but I would hazard a guess

that it is in maybe unconscious homage

to the inn at the Prancing Pony in Bree

where Strider first meets the hobbits

in Lord of the Rings, which is a seminal text

and serves as the basis

for a lot of the lore within Dungeons & Dragons.

This next question comes to us from @rotten_werk.

Does anyone have any tips for a first-time DM?

I'm having my first session zero for a campaign tomorrow

and I am nervous, LOL.

First of all, laughter will help,

so I'm glad that you're lolling.

Second of all, you're doing a session zero.

My friend, you're way ahead of the curve.

Session zero, for those who don't know,

is a pre-campaign session where DMs will line up,

sometimes people will do character creation there,

sometimes that happens beforehand and the session zero

is just to line up what the adventure's gonna be about,

any rules of engagement.

So the fact that you have got

your situation buttoned up enough

that you're doing a session zero,

you're off to a great start.

Second of all tips. What's the nugget, Brennan?

What's the secret little sauce?

There's not one.

You gotta slug it out like the rest of us.

You gotta get your hands dirty.

You gotta jump in two boots first and run the game.

Is your first session gonna be clean?

Are you gonna remember every rule?

Are you gonna nail every NPC? Maybe yes, maybe no.

But the point is this,

your first session is the learning experience.

You're gonna jump in and you're gonna learn

so much more in that first session

than any internet dungeon master could tell you.

That being said, the answers lie on your players.

Just listen to them, tap into what is bringing them joy

and you will do wonders, my friend.

Rooting for you.

This one's from @Gary26817438.

26 million and some odd Gary's before this one.

What in the world is a critical roll?

Don't you mean a nat 20?

You're thinking of a critical hit.

A nat 20 is the highest possible roll on a 20-sided die.

When you get that nat 20 roll on an attack roll,

it's an automatic hit and it deals double damage.

Thrilling.

Most DMs, and I would say the fun ones,

not to put myself on one side of a fence,

will homebrew that a nat 20's

also an automatic success on a skill check.

Now this does certain things to game balance.

The game rules as written

does not say that a nat one is an automatic failure

or a nat 20 is an automatic success.

But I am part of a camp of dungeon masters

that believe if the possibility

for success or failure does not exist on a given roll,

why are you asking for it in the first place?

Just say it's impossible.

If you're gonna ask someone to roll a die

and they roll a nat 20

and they still don't succeed,

it doesn't feel very good.

And we're here to feel good, so.

This next question is from Andydoodle56.

Question for #DungeonMasters:

If D&D is improv, in parentheses, yes and, with dice,

what do you do when the dice really

don't want to tell the same story that you do?

There's a great expression,

which is that the dice tell the story.

You are taking a D20, you're rolling it.

It's the most climactic roll of the campaign.

I attack and get an 11.

I needed a 19 or higher.

I miss my opportunity.

Perhaps I will be struck down the mountainside here.

Your job as a dungeon master is to immediately start

to think about what the story beat is

that accompanies failure.

Failure is not anathema to storytelling.

Failure is a key and critical component of storytelling.

Downbeats, moments of ruin and wrath,

these are what drive heroes onto greater and greater ends.

The reason we play with these dice

is so that we can surrender control.

Maybe this isn't the big heroic picture you thought it was.

Maybe this is actually a setback.

@WildMagic_Surge.

What's your favorite #dnd5e spell?

[exhales sharply] Oh man, is it Shield? I love Shield.

It's just really fun.

Reaction, plus five to your armor class.

I think favorite D&D 5E spell?

Fireball, Fly, they're all good.

Third, I will say this,

third level is the best spell level.

All the most fun spells are third-level spells.

@Lee51765627.

I want to learn to play Dungeons & Dragons.

How do I find people willing to play with a newbie?

Lee, I love playing with newbies.

Playing with newbies is the best.

But you are right, it is hard to find a group to play with.

I think the best thing to do honestly is

if you have people you're close with,

you have a group of friends all learn the game together.

It doesn't matter if you're stumbling through it,

it doesn't matter if it feels arcane or byzantine

or it's hard to get through.

The important thing's you're spending time

with people you care about and you love.

If the crew around you, if your friends and network

aren't as interested in tabletop games as you are,

frequenting game nights at your local game store,

have game nights where you can come

and meet people and join a table.

And there's also services online

to find physical but also digital playgroups.

So StartPlaying Games is a company that serves

as a sort of matchmaker

to not only hook people up with other people to play with,

but also dungeon masters.

Matching services for dungeon masters

that charge for their services.

There's free dungeon masters,

there's free groups that get together there.

All these things are available for you at your disposal.

So there's a range of options,

but yes, it is a challenge, but there are ways to do it.

Here's one from bex schwartz on Bluesky. Thanks, Bex.

Hi, Intrepid hero, Brennan Lee Mulligan.

How does your prep for an adventure

in someone else's campaign,

such as Exandria in Critical Role's Calamity,

differ from preparation for the Worlds Beyond Number

that you are building?

Thank you for the question, Bex. I deeply appreciate it.

Shout out to Worlds Beyond Number,

the podcast that I do

with Abria Iyengar, Erika Ishii and Lou Wilson,

edited by Taylor Moore.

I was fortunate enough to get invited

to come and run a series in Exandria for Critical Role

as a part of their Exandria Unlimited series.

Basically whenever they need someone

to crash a flying city somewhere in the history of Exandria,

Matt calls me up, they light the little bat signal

and I come in and make everybody sad.

At the core of your question

is how do you create your own world from scratch

versus how do you create a meaningful story

in a world created by someone else?

Creating the homebrew world of Umora from scratch

for this epic fantasy podcast, to stepping into Exandria,

the incredible world of Matt Mercer and Critical Role

that has been established over now three full campaigns

and adapted into The Legend of Vox Machina animated show.

Pick your poison, right?

A lot of DMs rely on pre-published modules.

Exandria has incredible source books

that give a DM the tools to jump into an established

and exhaustively beautiful and rich fantasy world

to just start telling your story in it.

Other DMs actually sort of tend towards wanting

to create from homebrew themselves,

wanting to make their own setting

and to be sort of the ultimate authority

on where that world was

and what was gonna be going on in it.

The prep is very different and they're both wonderful.

Short answer is you gotta do

a lot more reading for this one,

and in this one you gotta do a lot more writing.

There's something really beautiful and delightful

about writing fiction in someone else's setting.

Anyone now who's writing a Star Wars show

is someone who grew up probably loving Star Wars.

So there's an amazing focus on coming to something

that you are a fan of

and getting to light a little candle in that world.

@florarune_.

A question for D&D and TTRPG friends.

What is your favorite magical item?

The immovable rod.

Small metal wand that has a button on it

and when you click it, it cannot be moved in space.

That might sound trivial.

The amount of shenanigans people get up to

clicking it to fly, like jumping up like an acrobat.

Someone was on an airship being chased by another airship,

leaned off the back, clicked it, and left it in the air.

And then you have to decide what happens

when an airship collides with a ruler-sized bar of metal

that cannot be moved, no matter what.

Chaos. The immovable rod.

This next one's from Bricingwolf on Reddit.

What common D&D-related behavior or quirk

really grinds your gears?

Mine is when people call the Fighter class the warrior

or call the Wizard the mage.

Not even sure why, but it makes me hate you a little.

Bricingwolf do not give in to hate.

They know not what they do.

I think for me, probably the biggest pet peeve

has to do with a player making a choice as a character

that really grinds the adventure to a halt.

I think sometimes people will hide behind

the sort of lens of, It's what my character would do,

and will do things

that are a little bit antisocial at the table.

And ultimately, there's not that much a dungeon master

can do if you decide

that your character wouldn't go on an adventure.

If a DM comes out and says, Your village is in danger,

your loved ones are in jeopardy,

the fate of the world hangs in the balance,

and you and you alone hold the Sword of Destiny,

and you go, I run.

I'm getting outta Dodge. Good luck.

Well, that's kind of the story over.

@ActuallyIAmIncorrect.

What's your favorite weird niche bit of lore

that isn't fully developed?

D&D created a cosmology for the afterlife called Planescape,

and it made it really, really weird

'cause they never kind of thought you were gonna go there.

And then they built an edition that was actually set there.

An infinite tower arises

and ends in a torus of stone, like a big stone donut.

On the inside rim of that donut is the city of Sigil.

And within Sigil, there is a Lady of Pain

who has forbade all gods from entering that city.

And her servants are known as the dabus.

Tony DiTerlizzi, the original illustrator for them,

I always think of them as big, tall

white-haired Whos from Whoville

and they speak through emoji.

They make little weird hieroglyphs out of light

over their heads that only the dabus can read.

I think about them every day.

What a crazy bit of lore.

@AdenLehr says,

Why did people think playing D&D was satanic?

You're literally fighting hellspawn half the time.

That's a great question, Aden.

There's sort of two answers to this.

One is D&D, by involving elements of folklore and mythology,

had elements of things adjacent to the occult.

There's a deeper answer, which is that back in the 1980s

was, like, evangelical moral panic about that.

But really the evangelical right in this country

needs to manufacture outrage to hold onto its voting block.

So that's your real answer.

It was arbitrary,

as the targets of their outrage always are.

You know, fight the power.

Are you gonna include that? [laughs]

This next question comes to us from shufflupaguss.

I wonder how much prep a DM like #BrennanLeeMulligan does?

Like, dot, dot, dot, what do his notes look like?

My notes are garbage. I have terrible notes.

My 14-year home game that I ran, the system I had

for how to manage the lore was a,

at the end of 14 years,

412-page indecipherable Google Doc.

Paragraphs of lore interspersed

with random initiative counts,

unlabeled as to what battle they referenced.

Terrible stuff.

So if there's any part of you

that doubts your abilities as a GM

based on having seen a GM out there in the world

with like an incredible digital spreadsheet,

or I know DMs whose prep work is flawless.

Matt Mercer rolls up to the table

with stapled sheets of paper

with all of the lore of the setting

and I got like a bullet point list on a Google Doc

and a wish and a prayer and that's about it.

I rely a lot on improvisation.

That stresses some DMs out.

Other people rely a lot on preparation.

That stresses other DMs out.

Find your style that's right for you,

that brings the most joy to your players and your table.

This one's from @yum_dm.

How many different additions of D&D do you actively play?

I play most actively 5E.

Up until last year

I was also playing 3.5 extremely actively.

There are many editions of the game.

I came into the game playing 2nd Edition.

You wanna talk about crunch?

Come talk to me about THAC0, baby.

To Hit Armor Class 0.

Imagine a 10-year-old boy

with two sliding sheets of graph paper

to align a set of negative integers

with the value of a die roll.

That required some math.

Negative numbers are good, tough.

However, there are also many other games

aside from D&D that I play.

Other big ones like Vampire: The Masquerade,

Call of Cthulu, Blades in the Dark.

My friend Jay Dragon does Wanderhome

and Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast.

There's great indie games out there.

For anyone who is like,

Oh, I've had a taste of heroic fantasy

in playing Dungeons & Dragons, but want a sci-fi experience

or I want a more poetic experience

or an even crunchier experience,

the world of tabletop roleplaying games awaits you.

The next one comes to us from @War_Forged_Dice.

D&D players, how do we feel

about the new D&D rules/mechanics?

Hey, I hear you.

I know that we loved so much of the old way,

the game was played,

the changes to Counterspell and to Divine Smite.

Ask yourself this.

If you were making a Wizard or a Paladin,

were you allowed to do anything other than those abilities?

No, you were not.

Counterspell needed to be altered a little bit.

Divine Smite needed to be altered a little bit.

Every damaged-dealing build

that was a super damage dealer had to involve Divine Smite.

It was mandatory.

Counterspell? Mandatory.

And any time an ability in a game is mandatory,

you have to ask yourself

if it's a little bit out of balance.

And the Druids, letting them talk in Wild Shape,

yes, let them talk.

I always want 'em to be able to talk in Wild Shape.

That's a rule that just helps DMs out.

When is it ever helpful

for someone to not be able to speak?

It's never helpful.

Let the Druids talk.

I want that dog to talk.

@notkavvid.

Okay, but what if I said I wanted

to play a Wild West setting D&D campaign?

What then?

We've played in many, many different kinds of settings

and genres all across the spectrum.

We have Fantasy High where we play D&D

in a high school for fantasy heroes.

We play The Unsleeping City.

At Madison Square Garden's live show

we're playing D&D at the Garden in New York City

because The Unsleeping City is set

in a magical version of New York City.

We even played A Starstruck Odyssey

set in the sci-fi setting of AnarchEra,

written by noted comics author Elaine Lee.

Also my mom, if you can believe that.

I adapted my mom's comic book series

into a D&D campaign.

There's a lot of people who enjoy homebrewing

and stretching the creative boundaries,

chop shopping or jury rigging

what they want their game to be about.

Everyone has different play style

and all are valid and good.

@DICKIMINAJ.

So there's a 'Dungeons & Drag Queens' show

and I'm just finding out about this?

Yes, you can come over to Dropout TV

where we play a mini series

called Dungeons & Drag Queens.

Say hi, questing queens.

[All] Hi questing queens!

With some of the best drag performers in the world.

Bob the Drag Queen, Alaska Thunder[beep],

Jujubee, and Monet X Change,

who are so wonderful and incredible players

and had the bravery and the chutzpah

to sit down and play D&D

for the first time on camera with me.

They were phenomenal.

The number one thing that you wanna look for in a new player

is how much they care and how invested they are,

and all of them went into it with their full heart

and we're just naturals right away.

Took to the game so effortlessly.

It was a joy and a privilege to behold.

The next one comes to us from BughopD.

My son just asked a D&D question

I don't know how to answer.

What does a mimic look like

when it's not mimicking?

In their natural state, Mimics appear as amorphous shapes

with speckled gray skin,

similar and appearance to granite.

But since they're such shape-changing extraordinaires,

you'll rarely encounter one in its regular form.

Mimics are shape changers much like doppelgangers.

We had a mimic

in our high-school-for-heroes setting Fantasy High

that looked like a standard examination room desk.

I like to imagine that they have a penchant

for disguising themselves exclusively as furniture.

So those are all our questions for today.

I'm wishing all the best to you and your table.

May all your hits be crits

and I hope you learned a lot here

about the wonderful world of tabletop role playing games.

From here at D&D Support,

Brennan Lee Mulligan signing off.

[mellow music]