 Oh my God! We did it! We're back! Max Revive Hyperbolic Wine Chamber! We did it, guys. It's only been fucking 10 million months, but we're back. We did it. Max Revive Tommy Oliver TV. Go check out the link in the description. I put out six, seven videos in two weeks. Fucking amazing. Did that, and now we're back here for the Hyperbolic Wine Chamber to bitch about shit! Yes! Today we have a new wine on the wine chamber we haven't had yet. Tis the season for this wine. We're going basic bitch and basic bro at the same time. Today we are drinking Captain Morgan's Jacko Blast Pumpkin Spiced Rum. Mixed with a little bit of Coca-Cola for good measure. It's fucking gay and I love it. If you would like to donate to the wine funds so I can try more wines on the Hyperbolic Wine Chamber, link to my PayPal is in the description down below. I've also decided to try and make the show more frequent since I don't know what to bitch about all the time. You can, in addition to sending some money and suggesting a wine, you can also suggest a topic for me to bitch about. Is there something you want to vicariously get off your chest? Let me know, send some money, suggest a wine, suggest a topic, and I'll fucking tear it a new asshole. So with that out of the way, I have no one to recommend or thank for donating this wine. I bought it myself. However, I still need to give a shout out to someone for this episode. And that is going to be Matt on Twitter at Tectonic Improv. Because they messaged me about five or so days ago saying that they were still waiting for my defense of Dungeons & Dragons. Because if you remember, resident shitfucker Ben St. has constantly shit on Dungeons & Dragons and told everybody that it's not fun and it's impossible to have fun playing Dungeons & Dragons. When you know what? He's fucking wrong. D&D is a fantastic game, Tabletop is a fantastic medium, and it shouldn't be shit on by this contrarian motherfucker. It's good shit with an asterisk, because Dungeons & Dragons' biggest strength is also its greatest weakness. It requires people. Those motherfucking shit stains that everybody hates. Yes, people is the key to D&D's appeal and also the chink in its armor, because it makes it difficult to have the game be in an optimal condition. Because you have to understand, what makes Dungeons & Dragons a good or a bad experience is entirely dependent upon the people you are playing with. Alright, D&D's rulesets, D&D's lore, D&D's mechanics on its own, not very interesting. Everything is dependent upon the people you're playing with and how they play the game and most importantly, the Dungeon Master and how creative and interesting they are. Finding a good DM is incredibly difficult, especially in this age where everyone is fucking used to instant gratification and shit. You gotta have somebody with a little bit going on upstairs if you get what I mean. They gotta be smart, they gotta be quick, they gotta be creative, they gotta be able to make shit up on the fly because the Dungeon Master, despite being probably the biggest barrier to playing something like D&D as opposed to any other tabletop or board game where you have a bunch of people like, hey, I wanna play the game, you wanna play the game, let's play the game. We sit down at the table, we open up the box, everybody picks their dude and you start playing the game. You know, I got a bunch of games like that, sitting on my chauffeur behind me, like Major Wars, portrayals of the house on the hill, even something more simple like Bunchkin. All you gotta do, sit down, play the game, the game basically runs itself and you just do the player part of the interaction. However, Dungeons & Dragons requires a human on the opposite side of the spectrum as well. You need someone to be playing the game itself. You know, the game doesn't run on autopilot and the players just have their interactions. You need the opposition, the challenge to have a human involved as well. And this makes it very difficult to get into D&D because finding people who wanna play D&D is easy. Finding people who want to actually run the campaign is very difficult, requires a lot more. However, when you find a good DM, that's where the magic happens, okay? Because the biggest strength of Dungeons & Dragons and other pen and paper role-playing games is that they break free of the biggest restraint of games in general. And that is the mechanics and the boundaries of the game itself. Video games are an amazing medium. Board games are an amazing medium. Games in general is an amazing medium. However, the biggest problem with things like games is that they limit the toolset available at your disposal in order to get things done. When you play a video game, you are limited to interacting with the game to how your character has been pre-assigned to do so. You have a limited moveset. You can only do certain techniques in the game that the developers have given you to use. When you want to interact with characters in story segments and something like a role-playing game, you have pre-assigned statements that you can use and pre-assigned actions you can take. And everything has to be done within the boundaries, within the sandbox that the developers have designed for you. Because you're interacting with a machine with a scripted preset of options. And you cannot go beyond those options without breaking the game in some way. If you go beyond the options, that's usually a glitch. That's usually a mistake. It's something the developers actively want to prevent you from doing. And the most successful games that feel the most immersive are when they give you all the options that you can possibly think of wanting to do. Because that makes you feel like you have a ton of options available to you. There's two ways that a traditional game can attack this problem. You want to A, have a world that gives players options. But at the same time, you want to mentally railroad your players as well. You want to put them in a situation where they feel as if all the options that they would think of are available to them. And so you put them in a situation where the things they would think of doing are very limited and then you give them those options. A game type that people never complain like, oh, it feels limited, is something like a fighting game. Because a fighting game is a one-on-one combat system. And the only thing that you want to do when you sit down and play a fighting game is beat the shit out of the guy on the other side of the screen. And the game gives you tons of ways of doing that. So you never really feel like you're starved for options in a fighting game because the entire game is crafted to only make you want to do one thing. You never play a fighting game and you're like, man, I wish I could talk it out. Because it's not an option. When you're in an RPG or something, there are times when you're just like, man, I wish I could have just tried a diplomatic option talking to this character. If the game doesn't give you the option for diplomacy, you have to engage in combat. Or you have to do certain things. Or it's like, man, I wish I could have done a specific moveset, but I can't do any moves with my character outside of these five or six different branch and combo systems that I can earn through the game. Games are limited. And that's the biggest problem with them. You have to work within their mechanics. What makes D&D so amazing, what makes D&D so fantastic is because it is not constrained in the same way because of the Dungeon Master. The Dungeon Master is a human being. So because it's not a pre-programmed system, the DM can respond in real time to anything you can think up. And this is the strength, the magic of D&D and pen and paper role-playing is that the rules are not set in stone. The mechanics of the game are just a set of suggestions and you are able to interact with the person. There's an actual person controlling the mechanisms of the game. And so anything you can think up and do, they can respond to and assign that task and push that specific idea you have and implement it into the rule structure of the game because everything's done around the D20 dice system. So anything you can think up can be assigned a difficulty on a D20 role or some sort of variation thereof. So you can do anything you want in D&D. You are not limited by a moveset, you are not limited by mechanics, you are not limited by anything because you have a human being on the other side working the mechanics of the game in charge of the system itself. Because the system itself has just as much human power and creativity behind it as the players playing the game, anything can happen. And this is why the people you play D&D with are essential for having a good time. I've played D&D with dumb motherfuckers and all they want to do is kill shit. All they want to do is run into a dungeon, roll dice and slash things. And I'm just asking myself the entire time, why the fuck are we playing D&D and not something like Dark Souls if you just want to run in a dungeon and slash things. There's nothing more fun about rolling a dice and slashing something in D&D than there is slashing something in a video game. A video game is designed to do that, to be a visceral combat simulation. There's so many games that let you do that. D&D is so much more than that and that's why you need good people. You need players who are willing to think outside the box and treat D&D as a pen and paper game where they can creatively solve problems as opposed to treating it like a video game on a table. Where, oh well I'm just going to use my sword because it has plus three strength and I'm going to roll and that's what I'm going to do. That's boring. If you're playing D&D like that, if you're playing D&D with a bunch of people who just want to play a fucking video game, that's going to suck. And if you're playing with a DM that treats everything very basic, that's going to suck. To play D&D and have a great time, you need to play with people who understand the strengths of pen and paper and leverage it by never doing things just by the book and trying to roll dice and approaching everything boring. You want people who want to literally role play, who want to become this character, think creatively in situations and always be trying to do different and interesting things. They never just want to swing a sword or cast magic missile. No, no, no, no. The people who are going to have a ton of fun playing D&D with are people who want to start shit just to start shit. I've said this story a couple times on social media, but my favorite thing I've ever done in D&D is when I played a dragonborn paladin who was a pacifist. He refused to fight anything because it was at a front to his god. So I put all of his stats into charisma and diplomacy. All he would do was talk to people and I gave him all of his feats. I just gave him a fuck ton of languages and so we're on this pirate ship or we're on a merchant ship and get attacked by pirates. And so everybody's upstairs fighting the fucking pirates because that's what the DM wanted us to do. And this is why you need a good D&D DM as well so they can handle these situations. That the person who's DMing can respond to these creative things. So I said I don't want to fight them. My guy would never fight. He's going down into the cargo hold of the ship. He's going to pray. He's going to pray that the conflict is resolved. And everyone's like pissing me. Like what the fuck dude? You're like a big fucking giant half dragon guy. Come help us fight. I'm like I don't have any weapons. I'm just going downstairs and my guy's going to pray. So he goes down and he starts praying to his god. So the DM gets mad at me and wants to force my hand into combat. So it's like the pirates breach the hull of the ship and the cargo hold and a bunch of giant alligators that are in the water around us enter the cargo hold. They're trying to kill you. They're trying to eat you. They're giant. They can actually eat you. So if I just approach this as a video game, I'm like I'm going to get out. I'll bear hand combat them or I'll do a perception check to see if I can find a sword or something down here in the cargo hold. But no, I was like, hmm, I tried to fudge it. I tried to like how can I creatively think of a situation out of this that is going to keep me in character. My guy is a diplomat. He likes to talk. He has an incredibly high charisma bonus and a stupidly high diplomacy check. And he knows a fuck ton of languages and he's part reptiles. So I'm like, I want to talk to the alligators. And they're like, are you fucking retarded? The DM's like, looks at me like I'm idiot. You want to talk to the alligators. I'm like, yeah, I want to try and talk to them. I know Draconic. I know a bunch of other weird primitive languages. I'm going to try talking to them. And I roll a natural 20 on it. And while everyone flees the sinking ship on boats, I surf out on a giant fucking alligator who's now my best friend. That is why D&D is the best fucking game of all time, because you could never do something like that in any other kind of medium. Pen and paper is magical when you have people who think creatively and you have a dungeon master who is able to entertain those out-of-the-box thoughts and not only entertains them, but actively encourages them and wants to think creatively too. D&D is so fucking good when people actually want to have fun with it. When they recognize and appreciate the strength of pen and paper, the ability to adapt any idea into a gameplay mechanic and you're not limited by prescripted tools and explore that to the best of your abilities. Dungeons and Dragons is amazing if you play with the right people and it's so fucking boring when you play with dumbasses who only treat it like a fucking video game with no graphics. So, find some people who are fun, play D&D, have a good time, drink some Captain Morgan's Jack-O-Blast, Hyperbolic Wine Chamber out, bitch!