Dungeon Master Brennan Lee Mulligan Answers DnD Questions | Tech Support | WIRED

I'm Dungeon Master Brennan Lee Mulligan, here to answer your questions from the internet. This is Dungeons & Dragons Support. Okay, first question. Obama Prism VHS, the most iconic, parenthesis, 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 owl bear, 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 at 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 in D&D. That's my advice to you. This next question comes to us from at Iloveyourmom3. 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 **** is wrong with you? 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 fucked up. Just think about it for two seconds, all right? You can't be doing that. 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. At Rogelioval123. 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 ya. 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 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. 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 and 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 hard 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 have chewed that off when I was a kid. Regardless, this dragon has 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 Karlak and Astarion and these amazing characters and try 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. At 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 pitch up your voice for playing female characters. As a dungeon master, I have to play every different kind of person because 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. Ehehehe, where's my pet? You do the voice for the character. I don't think you need to do like a stereotypical woman voice. At JLMoonlight92 asks, can you tell me how D&D alignments work? How do I know if someone's lawful good or any one 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 don't know if you know this about human beings, they love personality charts. It's 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 simply don't have the time for. At Sizzletoopcos, 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 Nguyen Ren. 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? 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. 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, great axes, 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 long swords and battle axes. 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 at memes lich, 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. 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 a little homebrew index card with all the players' 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. Oh, 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. At ride the dirt, also just some leftist, hell yeah. What is a golden rule you try to follow for hashtag D&D or other hashtag 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're 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. At PHX Mall 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 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? Give me 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. At delusionaldo1, 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 torchlight. 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. At sessions canceled, 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 end of 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 At Rotten Work. 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 a 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 in your players. Just listen to them, tap into what is bringing them joy, and you will do wonders, my friend. Rooting for ya. This one's from atgary26817438. 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 is 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 hashtag dungeon masters. 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're 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 missed 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 on to 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 victory you thought it was. Maybe this is actually a setback. At Wild Magic Surge, what's your favorite D&D 5e spell? 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. At Lee, 51,765,627. I want to learn to play Dungeons and Dragons. How do I find people willing to play with a newbie? Well yeah, 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 is 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. There's also services online to find physical but also digital play groups. So Start Playing 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 Blue Sky. 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 Aabria Iyengar, Erik 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 shows. Pick your poison, right? A lot of DMs rely on pre-published modules. Exandria has incredible sourcebooks 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. At Floraroon, 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 Brysingwolf 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. Brysingwolf, 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. 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 out of Dodge, good luck. Well, that's kind of the story over. At actually, I am incorrect. 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 because they never kind of thought you were gonna go there, and then they built an addition 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. I always think of them as big, tall, white-haired Oos from Oovil, 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. At Aiden Lair says, why did people think playing D&D was satanic? You're literally fighting Hellspawn half the time. That's a great question, Aiden. 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, it 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? This next question comes to us from Shuffleupagus. I wonder how much prep a DM like hashtag Brennan Lee Mulligan 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 at Yum DM. How many different editions 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 second edition. You want to talk about crunch, come talk to me about Fayco, baby, to hit armor class zero. 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 Cthulhu, Blades in the Dark. My friend J. Dragon does Wander Home and Ysabe's Bed and 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 and Dragons, but I want a sci-fi experience or I want a more poetic experience or an even crunchier experience. The world of tabletop role-playing games awaits you. This next one comes to us from at Warforgedice. D&D players, how do we feel about the new D&D rules slash mechanics? Hey, I hear ya. 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 damage 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 them to be able to talk in Wild Shape. That's a rule that just helps DMs out. When has it ever been helpful for someone to not be able to speak? It's never helpful. Let the druids talk. I want that dog to talk. At NotCavid, 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, there's a live show where 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 Anarch Era 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 a different play style and all are valid and good. At Dickie Minaj, 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 miniseries called Dungeons & Drag Queens. Say hi, questing queens. Hi, questing queens. With some of the best drag performers in the world, Bob the Drag Queen, Alaska Thunderf**k, 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 want to 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 were just naturals right away. Took to the game so effortlessly. It was a joy and a privilege to behold. 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 in appearance to granite. But since they are 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.