Huzzah the Ringer!

Welcome to the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

I'm Bailiff Jesse Thorne.

We're in chambers this week, clearing the docket.

And with me, as always, is level 10 magic user

Judge John Hodgman.

I'm not 100% sure if that's a good level or a bad level.

Noteth you the garb I adorn mineself with today.

I don't note thine garb.

What are we doing?

It's just a sweatshirt.

It's a sweatshirt.

It is.

It's a sweatshirt from the no longer existing Cape Cod Coliseum, a hockey, a hockey arena in Cape Cod.

So I'm kind of like extinct hockey Ren Fair.

Yeah.

But I'm talking funny, of course, because today is our much threatened.

Dungeons and Dragons slash role-playing games dispute only episode of the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

And Jesse, you know, my experience with Dungeons and Dragons is minimal, very minimal.

So we decided to bring in what you call in the D ⁇ D game, a ringer.

Yeah.

Huzzah, the ringer.

I mean, John, I have a lot of Dungeons and Dragons experience.

What's your D ⁇ D X?

What are your X points?

I used to have a game called The Secret of the Silver Blades for my mom's IBM PC with a CGA monitor.

Bringing Bringing back some different but similar memories of Damon Graff's mom's digital equipment computer that we had to call into to play Zork One.

I have read between the ages of eight and twelve in the aisles of various used bookstores in San Francisco's Mission District, including but not limited to Aardvark books and dog-eared books.

Yeah.

I read

probably eight to ten Dragonlance novels, which are Dungeons and Dragons novels.

Right.

I don't remember anything about them.

And my babysitter, Darius de Belgadere,

was really into

Dungeons and Dragons.

Was actually a ninth level elven cleric.

He's just a guy with a lot of dice, but sometimes.

I'm sorry, don't write letters.

I forgot.

Elves don't have last names.

I apologize.

Who's to say Darius de Belgadere wasn't his first name?

Yeah, the whole thing was his first name.

Okay, great.

Or their first name.

It's a nice man, Darius.

Hey, but let us bring in the ringer.

Huzzah, the ringer.

Griffin McElroy from the Adventure Zone, my brother, my brother, and me, and all the McElroy family of podcasts.

You all have some experience with role-playing games, do you not, sir?

Really, just D and D, which is, I think, what is like the cool, kind of like sexy person's

like

RPG.

All the stuff you all were talking about, what, with your silver blades, I was hearing that and just like, it's hard not to e-wedgie you when I hear you talk that way.

For your listeners at home, that's electronic wedgie.

Electronic wedgie.

It's an electronic wedgie.

I sent you both a special apparatus that I have control over from my studio.

Oh, you got me.

Okay.

Yep.

But that was an adjustment, John.

You looked like

you were sagging a little bit and

they were about to fall in.

That's also a service I provide.

I am only wearing an extinct hockey sweatshirt, but I am wearing motley fool underwear.

Yeah, it's got little bells on it.

Every time you give me a wedgie, you will be able to hear the bells jingling on my motley underwear, right, Jennifer Marmor?

Right, Valerie Moffat, who are also in the room?

That's right.

That's right.

That's right.

It's not a sound effect.

Go ahead, give it a try.

Give me a number two on the e-wedgeometer.

Okay.

I mean, you might not even feel a number two, but here we go.

you could hear those bells i know you could uh thank you so much for being here you know what my experience with d and d is was what's that john what's that i was a young a young person in brookline massachusetts and all the cool kids were playing dungeons and dragons and i had played a few campaigns i believe john guaz did a dm campaign but of course i don't want to be a player of anything i want to run the game i want to be the dungeon master so i told my parents i'm taking my monster manual and my DM guide and my fiend folio, my favorite one.

I'm going to be going up into my room this weekend in complete seclusion and I shall emerge a dungeon master.

And I truly believed that through sincere monastic study in 48 hours, I would understand what the God or whatever all this math was.

And

I couldn't wrap my head around the math.

I was like, I'm all for being in a fantasy world pretending that I have power and don't feel terrible all the time.

I don't know why I need to roll all these dice to do it.

Griffin, as a precocious youngest sibling of three,

I don't think you could ever understand to or relate to the extent to which John and my only child nerdery involves going in your room by yourself.

Ultimately, the conflict between us and Dungeons and Dragons is not one of cultural positioning or anything like that.

It's really just that all of our nerd expressions involved going off to be by ourselves.

Solitude.

Complete solitude.

I don't think I had my own room until Justin left for college.

So that was that.

What you are describing sounds like a

tremendous luxury, honestly.

Yes.

It involves hanging out and reading Secret of the Silver Blades novels.

Right, exactly.

My experience and love of fantasy was only the first part of The Hobbit before Gandalf showed up.

When Bilbo Baggins just had breakfast, was sitting outside his big round door, a lonely bachelor, smoking his pipe weed, and no adventures whatsoever.

I was like, this is my fantasy.

And then this wizard shows up and makes him go to a mountain.

Forget it.

Yes.

You get 13 nearly identical names sort of rattled off at you.

And it's like, how am I supposed to keep Bofor and Bifer?

straight in my head.

And also, it's hard to read also the name Bofer without saying these nuts at the end of it.

Even Even as a child.

Yeah.

It's just reality.

Also, I was warded off from Dungeons and Dragons by the classic chick tract known as Dark Dungeons,

which let me know that if I did engage in Dungeons and Dragons, it was technically witchcraft and I would be sort of

brought into the Illuminati and would burn in hell forever.

You would lose sense of your own self and you would become a servant of Satan.

Right.

What we call the mazes and monsters effect.

If you play too much Dungeons and Dragons, Tom Hanks goes into the steam tunnels underneath his college and is never seen again.

I've also learned that they recently made a film adaptation of the chick track Dark Dungeons.

And I'm going to be certain.

Yes, apparently.

And I will be fighting this movie this evening and cannot wait to dive in.

Griffin, before you started the Adventure Zone, which is the podcast where you,

your siblings, and your dad

play role-playing games together.

Yes.

Particularly, but not exclusively, Dungeons and Dragons.

How expert were you in the form?

Not at all.

I had played a couple games.

I had never run one, certainly,

but

I was very curious.

I didn't get into D ⁇ D until I was,

you know, in my early 20s when everybody had jobs and stuff.

And so it was hard to,

you know, get a group of people together for an evening to sit around and do math and funny voices.

And

so, yes, I had very limited success, but then a new edition of D ⁇ D came out and I wanted to play with my family.

And

Justin and Sidney were expecting their first child.

And so we had some,

you know, a break coming up that we needed to fill with content.

And luckily, the stars aligned and the Adventure Zone became that content.

And you would run these games, or you have run these games as the game master, the dungeon master.

What does that, for those who do not know,

that takes work.

It's not just knowing the math, but you have to be a storyteller as well.

Explain.

Yeah, there's quite a bit of prep work that goes into it.

Depending on what kind of DM you are,

the level of prep work varies.

There's some people who just like have a starting prompt and then see where it goes from there.

And

we do a little bit more prep than that for the show because you can have a boring D and D session when you're playing it at home, but when you are doing it for a podcast,

you know, you lose the ratings.

And, you know, those Nielsen reports are, they mean everything to us.

That's why they say you can dance like no one's watching.

Right.

But if you're playing D ⁇ D, pretend you're doing a podcast.

Yeah, they say that.

I have that on several quilts

just to help me remember my place in life.

Can I ask you a sincere question, Griffin?

This is something that I

actually don't know and I'm interested to know.

Yes, please.

When people play Dungeons ⁇ Dragons together, you know, at their local, you know, game store or at a friend's house in the basement or wherever, just a casual social get-together.

It is important that it is a subterranean room.

It cannot be

a chamber.

If it is a city like New Orleans or something that is already sort of below sea level, there's some flexibility there, but otherwise you do need to be below ground.

I only play penthouse-based games.

So, sure.

Only when surrounded by plate glass windows am I able to really enjoy myself.

Yeah, that's when you play chess against by male, and the chess pieces are all made of glass.

Yeah.

And you're wearing a velvet tuxedo and drinking a brandy.

That's the stuff.

But no, DD is best played in a cistern for sure.

So

when everybody gets together in that cistern,

do people people do voices the whole time?

Not in my experience, not most people,

especially if you're playing with friends who are not.

Now, that said, I have grown up pretty much exclusively being surrounded by

community theater performers.

And so there is like

that level of.

What if you grow up

amidst a pack of siblings, all of whom are very smart, very performative, and crave to steal the attention from the other one?

Yeah, I mean, you know.

You should be a funny voice then.

You can expect a voice here or there.

Yeah, but you should also anticipate being upstaged by your dad.

Yeah, who is not going to do a voice.

He's just going to be louder than everyone else, which is a choice.

It's a choice that works too.

I have a genuine question too, Jesse.

By the way, I caught that shade you threw at me like I was asking insincere questions.

No,

I just didn't want anyone to think that I genuinely didn't know the answer to that question.

I wasn't trying to be weird or judgmental about people doing funny voices.

I was just curious.

Yeah, people should do funny voices if they want.

It's fantastic.

But I don't know what this, I was prompted here.

Jennifer Marmer, our producer, perhaps it was Valerie Moffat, our editor, put into the notes here, into the, into the briefing.

Rule of cool.

I don't know what that is.

What is the rule of cool?

That is

more of an ethos for DMs

where if a player has an idea of something they want their character to do that doesn't necessarily fit into the framework of the Dungeons and Dragons rules,

which are, you know,

pretty well codified at this point and

always up to, occasionally up to interpretation.

You go with the interpretation that makes a more cool moment happen.

So if somebody has an idea and it's like, oh yeah, that would be neat.

Let's let's try and make that happen.

But there are some DMs who say, well, no, that's not.

That's against the rules.

So no.

For Adventure Zone, we rely on that pretty heavily because it can get kind of dry otherwise yeah play by the rule of cool of course there are maps but at the edges of the maps in the uncharted territory there there be monsters and monsters be cool now i think that that rule should be sort of integrated into most professional sports where if somebody throws for instance in the game of football american

football yeah um if the quarterback does throw to the wide receiver who catches it i think the wide receiver should then be able to throw to a second further down wide receiver, not lateral or backwards, but just a whole nother pass altogether.

I think that would make the sport a whole lot more enjoyable.

Basketball, if they don't feel like dribbling and then they get a good dunk at the end of it,

let it ride.

If it's cool, let it ride.

If it looks cool, let it ride.

Here's another sincere question I have.

Did you guys know that there's a Dungeons and Dragons of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?

Because I definitely had that when I was in middle school.

I did not know that.

An RPG, a role-playing game of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?

Yeah, a lot of people would think that it would be based on the TV show, but that's because they're not cool enough to know about the comic book, which is what it was actually based on, which is why it was so cool to have a Dungeons and Dragons of being a rabbit that does karate.

I have a memory of an RPG that was introduced right after Dungeons and Dragons came out.

based on a very terrifying animated film that is not for children and book called Watership Down.

And the RPG was called Burrows and Bunnies.

And to this moment.

Watership Down.

Yeah, to this moment.

And yeah,

you choose what Warren you belong to.

You choose if you have magic forecasting of

rabbit genocide like Fiverr did in Watership Down or whether you're just a warrior rabbit like Bigwig, aka Flaley.

By the way, that's not his last name.

I guess, John, I was too busy playing the Velveteen Rabbit RBG.

Saddest one of them all.

Heartbreaker.

Tears every time.

But listen, to this moment, I have no idea whether that is an invented memory.

Maybe that was a game that John Wolf tried to design.

That's a friend of mine, John Wolf, who I played D and D with.

Or maybe it really existed.

My finger hovers over the return key on my search engine search.

Let's find out.

Yeah, it was a real game.

Wow.

Good.

Yeah.

Inspired by the 1972 novel Watership Down, published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1976.

Burroughs and Bunnies, the fantasy world of intelligent rabbits.

That rolls.

Okay, I've got a new podcast for coming up too, by the way.

Griffin, you're not the only one.

John, it would slay.

It would

absolutely slay.

The world's ready.

But I don't know whether I can run it.

Maybe you can.

Do your bunny voice now for me?

Do the voice of your bunny character now for me?

I'd have to do my imitation of John Hurt.

Okay, do that.

What is it, Fiverr?

You see blood across the field?

Sometimes I can get into John Hurt mode.

John Hurt had this incredible, I mean, it's just an an English accent, but also this like, this like

it was like he was talking through a bag of sand.

Oh,

John Hurt as Hazel.

I'm ready to dispense justice.

How about you guys?

I suppose.

Sure.

Here's a case from Jeremy.

I'm the dungeon master for a party of D ⁇ D players.

We just finished a campaign set in this world's version of hell, Avernus.

While in hell, one of my party members attempted the spell heat metal to attempt to superheat the metal of one of the quote infernal war machines.

I ruled Infernal Steel was not susceptible to this spell as it and the denizens of hell are immune to fire damage.

Please rule A, I am the DM and my party member needs to deal with it.

And B, see request A.

What is a Vernus, Griffin?

I only recognized the name from a series of

video games that I believe must have spawned off of this.

John Madden Football.

It was called NHL 96.

Bulls versus Blazers in the NBA player.

Right.

I mean, it is what they said.

It is hell.

It is one of...

Several hells.

One of the fresh hells.

And it's one of the, I think, one of the

outer hells.

So it's not like the worst hell you can be in, but it's still like hell.

So

you don't want to go there.

Right.

I've never.

How does it compare to the Underdark?

Is that something else?

I think the Underdark is just like a place where

folks live by choice.

Heed, listener, we shall delve into the Underdark later in this episode.

But anyway, Avernus is hell.

Yes.

And the heat metal spell, I mean,

what's this all about?

If you're a mage or whatever, it's a pretty early.

Yeah, it's a pretty early thing.

You use it on a, you know, you might use it on someone's armor, and then all of a sudden they have, you know, they've got to get that armor off because now it's, now there's a sort of like, you know, nipular.

discomfort that must be

and that's why actually a lot of breastplates that you see like the george clooney batman breastplate you see the elevated nipples that's actually to provide a sort of buffer in case the armor is heated to an uncomfortable degree.

Yeah, no, of course.

The heat metal spell is essentially to a magic user as

putting a bunch of matches into someone's shoe and then lighting it on fire in a baseball bullpen is to a relief pitcher.

Precisely.

And I'm glad you said it because one of us needed to.

It's hotting up the metal.

It's not making it molten.

Or is it?

No.

And I honestly can't believe we've spent this long discussing what the heat heat metal.

Here's why I'm so interested in it.

Because unless you can melt that metal, I think this spell is dumb.

I'm putting this on my list of dumb spells.

Well, tell that to Kevin McAllister, who accomplished quite a bit with the heat metal spell that he did on the doorknob.

That was essentially the first shot across the bow.

of the sticky bandits.

That, of course, was in

the Smash Hit Escapade film, Denizens of Hell and Their Infernal War Machines.

Yes, exactly.

No, those infernal war machines.

I think the debate here is whoever devised these war machines to defend hell would almost certainly create them out of some sort of...

They wouldn't create them to be melted by hell, just...

radiant heat that you just sort of experience when you are in it would be like pretty hot-proof metal, or it's metal that's so hot it doesn't matter that it's hot if it gets a little hotter.

Unless, unless these war machines were not built in hell, but are in fact subject to the punishment of hell, in which case, maybe they are not.

Maybe they are there to be slowly melted by the by the heat.

You mean hell, hell is buying armaments from the surface world because they can't make it themselves because they're melting too fast?

Or alternatively, these war machines died on Earth, and then their spirits or programming or whatever was sent to hell.

Uh, and so they're, of course, their forms would be uncomfortable there.

Well, this, of course, is the quoth unquoth fun of Dungeons and Dragons.

There's a lot of wiggle room for the dungeon master to decide.

If you were the running this game, if you were the DM in this situation, and I, Jonas Hodgmanis, cast heat metal upon the infernal machine,

would you agree with

Jeremy's DM that it wouldn't do anything or would you you melt that thing?

Well, it would depend which of my players is the one who did it.

Because, for instance, if it was my father, I like to rib him by making his choices all turn out to be like pretty

foolish and

having unintended consequences.

In my book, this is a fun unintended consequences opportunity than it is for a

traditional success or failure.

Maybe the hot metal metal

turns off the

heat-seeking combat radar or whatever.

I don't know how techy you're.

I think, would you think?

I mean, my instinct is, having just learned the rule of cool for the very first time in my 50-year-old life,

it's more cool if there is an unintended consequence and the story is difficult rather than easy.

And yes, maybe that's a overclocks.

That's a good plot point.

It's like, I cast heat metal.

Too bad, you dope.

It's already hot down there.

It doesn't make a difference.

That's fun.

Griffin, I like that all of your ideas sound like they're from a role-playing game based on the movie War Games.

You know, I like to fold in

all kinds of inspiration.

My punch cards light on fire.

Yes, exactly.

Hold on.

There's a dial-up connection, and it's going to you have to concentrate on it.

Before I make a final ruling, Griffin, does the DM have the right to interpret this any way they want to?

Of course.

Then

Jeremy the DM is correct.

Yes.

Yeah.

Because there's also a chance we did not address this.

I'm all for the rule of cool, but this could also be

a real stinker of a player.

And at the end of the day, a rule of stool.

At the end of the day, you can't jump into the ocean and then cast create water to drown a whale.

So

classic.

And that's actually an old Yiddish proverb

that I

well, I agree.

Jeremy, you are correct, and I rule in your favor.

You're the DM and the party member needs to deal with it.

And B, you're the DM and the party member needs to deal with it.

Here's something from Brandon C.

My dungeon master Zach has ruled that player characters cannot use spells or attacks against each other.

other than actions that would help the other person, i.e., healing someone.

I believe it's most true to reality that people sometimes hurt their friends, and that this can lead to really interesting storylines for the group.

I ask the court to rule that our fantasy D ⁇ D game reflects reality in this way, and allow me to read the minds of my friends and force my friends to sleep.

Not maliciously, but because their character is losing it, while we play.

Can you force another player's character to sleep?

Can you cast spells upon each other or only outward?

Because in D D, you travel with a party and you are supposedly working together, not undermining each other and causing them to go to sleep against their will.

What is your reaction?

This is true.

However, there are many, many, many spells that do not

differentiate between friend or foe.

And sometimes you have to deal with, if you try to set a big room on fire that everyone is standing in, everyone's going to have to roll the save against that bad boy.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Stop.

Roll a save.

What are are you talking about?

Roll save.

Traditionally, if you are about to be

subject to some ill effect, you have an opportunity to stave it off, whether it is with a dexterous dodge or just

your own sort of supple constitution.

You have an opportunity to not have the bad thing happen.

So that's in the in-game world.

In our world, what you're doing is you roll a die or some dice.

You roll a 20-sided dice.

dice.

A 20-sided die.

Yeah.

And then you get above or below, like you have to hit a certain point in order to not freeze it,

not catch on fire in this case.

And we are describing pretty much the sole mechanic of Dungeons and Dragons

with small variations at this point.

I also love those dice.

I wanted to roll those dice so much.

They were so tactily pleasing and weird.

And the, what's the one that's like a pyramid?

Is that a

four?

Yeah.

Delicious.

Ooh.

So whoever invented those dice was

truly on some extremely mind-altering drugs.

They had a spell cast on them, let me say.

You're describing a pyramid.

So that might actually be true.

Yeah, no, I know.

Yeah, for sure.

The person who woke up and said, maybe a, maybe a die has 20 sides.

That person

had been touched by a certain kind of magic, let me put it that way.

But I still, it still was, it still was all math.

He's still like, I loved rolling the dice and like counting the numbers.

You know, that's the way it goes, I guess.

It's a little weird to me with the dice that they know how to make them glow in the dark or be sparkly, and some of them don't glow in the dark or aren't sparkly.

Sure.

I have one that's covered in Swarovski crystals, and it's the only one I use now.

That's one you can use in a penthouse.

Yes, exactly.

That's a penthouse die.

Maybe there is an instance where you do need your party members to go to sleep.

Maybe everyone's just had a bunch of candy

And watched a scary movie.

Yeah.

You can't have a candy headache all night and

wake up unfresh for the next day's adventure.

Got to get some get your Z's.

I have had evenings where I have prayed for the intervention of some mysterious warlock to come into my house and

charm me into my bed, but in a fully platonic and sort of

medical way.

What if you're, I mean, what if your party member is a fighter and her armor is too cold?

You know what I mean?

It's too chilly.

Yeah, there's a spell I know, I just learned about it.

Heat metal.

That would be helpful.

That would be helpful.

Yeah, but I would say be careful with it.

Of course.

There will be a break.

You have to be careful with heat metal.

Heating of anything.

Magic is a powerful tool.

Sure, it can be used as a weapon.

Please be careful, everyone.

I would say that intra-party conflict is a sauce and not a soup.

And

there are many players who are misanthropic enough to make it the main course just by hey and then my guy kills your guy and steals all the stuff and fortunately those players can be uninvited from unless it's somebody's uh you know spouse or partner and then you get into all kinds of dynamics that we don't have time to to dive into here But people have people have seen season eight of Real Housewives of New Jersey.

Exactly.

They know about that.

You can get disinvited from the island.

Right.

Okay.

I agree with Griffin once again.

The rules are mutable, strange, and

flexible in this world.

That is the pleasure of the game.

Intention of the cast sleep spell is as important as the cast sleep spell itself.

So if you're not doing it maliciously, I think it's absolutely fine.

I would say, if I were running the game, it's fine by me.

And

what if a party member

is a warrior wearing a suit of armor and her suit of armor is too cold?

Guess what?

I just learned of a spell you can use to hot it right up.

Heat metal.

Or you could also just get a blanket.

You can use a blanket.

Yeah.

Blankets are made of metal, Griffin.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're right.

Yeah.

What about

is there a weave blankie spell?

Conjure blankie?

I cast weave blankie.

I think that most people would preserve their spell slots for a more sort of,

you know, it's more of a round peg square hole.

Conjure Binky.

What's your favorite spell?

If you could just have one.

Yeah, if you have a spell,

aside from remotely e-wedgying me,

which, as you will remember, sounds like this.

Please go ahead, Griffin.

Hit me with a nine.

Oh, a nine.

A nine would tear you in half.

No, okay.

So a seven.

Give me a seven.

It's still, okay, here I go.

You're going to want to, you're going to want to

have a salt bath after this.

I already had one plan.

I already have one plan.

Okay, good.

If I could do one spell, it would be pressed to digitation, which is a minor cantrip.

It's like a spell that babies learn.

And it has the most random assortment of effects.

You can create an instantaneous, harmless sensory effect, such as a shower of sparks, a puff of wind, faint musical notes, or an odd odor.

You can light or snuff a candle.

You can clean or soil an object.

You can chill, warm, or flavor up to one cubic foot of non-living material.

You can make a color, a small mark, or a symbol appear, or you create a non-magical trinket or illusory image you can fit in your hand.

It's like that's a lot of things you can do with one spell.

But a solid 20% of those are just being gross.

Yes, the foul odor, which is, I think, the only version of pressed digitation that has appeared on the Adventure Zone podcast.

Yeah, it's the one spell that's sold at Jack's joke and novelty shop.

Yeah.

That no longer exists in Boston, but on a dimension of its own.

You buy it on a scroll at Spencer's Gifts.

Yeah, you can produce a fake dog poop for your friends.

Right.

Yeah.

I tried to buy it at Lids, and they didn't have it.

Let's take a quick break to hear from this week's partners.

We'll be back with more cases on the docket on the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

You're listening to Judge John Hodgman.

I'm Bailiff Jesse Thorne.

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but she wants that non-stick.

And I know that she can, you know, she can heat that thing up hot if she wants to use it hot uh she can use it to braise if she wants to use it to braise

it's an immensely useful piece of kitchen toolery and and it will last a long time and and whether it's uh uh griddles or pots and pans or knives or glassware or tableware i mean you know jesse i'm sad to be leaving maine soon but i am very very happy to be getting back to my beloved made-in entree bowls all of it is incredibly solid, beautiful, functional, and as you point out, a lot more affordable because they sell it directly to you.

If you want to take your cooking to the next level, remember what so many great dishes on menus all around the world have in common.

They're made in, made in.

For full details, visit madeincookware.com.

That's M-A-D-E-I-N Cookware.com.

Let them know Jesse and John sent you.

Welcome back to the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

We're We're talking about Dungeons and Dragons disputes this week with our guest, Griffin McElroy, host of Maximum Funds Dungeons and Dragons actual play podcast, The Adventure Zone.

No false play podcasts for us.

Here's something from Brandon.

All the world shall be your enemy, prince with a thousand enemies.

And whenever they catch you, they will kill you.

But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with swift warning.

Be cunning and full of tricks, and your people shall never be destroyed.

I recognize that impression.

Yeah.

That's Morris Day from Under a Cherry Moon, isn't it?

Absolutely.

Prince!

It is I, Morris Day of Morris Day and the Time.

Very

bringeth my mirror.

Here's something from Brandon E.

As a CPA by trade and a dungeon master by hobby, I tried to introduce the idea of taxation into my D ⁇ D game.

First of all, I'm annoyed that it's a CPA by trade and a DM by hobby.

I'd like to reverse them.

Yeah.

DM by trade and a CPA by hobby.

I'd like to mix those, mix the letters up and just see what fun words I can spell.

Mac ad.

Yeah, I like that too.

I don't think I put in the P, though.

All five of my players nearly killed me out of character at the thought of taxing the gold they had earned.

They immediately came up with ways to commit tax fraud against my fantasy government and devised plans to capture any tax collectors I sent their way.

Should taxation be an allowed mechanic in any D ⁇ D game?

So out of character means in IRL, right?

In real life?

The attempted murder occurred in real life, but the plans to prevent tax collectors from coming occurred within the fantasy realm.

I hope that that is fantastical hyperbole.

I mean, it's, you know, this crowd.

Pretty much everything we say is fantastical hyperbole.

Right.

But things can get heated in the game.

Like metal.

Like metal.

Like

things can get metal style hot.

Yeah.

Among real people when the game,

there are real conflicts that arise

in real life.

yeah like

stuff like this people you might join the Illuminati um you know one of your friends might just wander into a cavern when their character dies these are real dangers and I would encourage everybody to speak to their pastor about them

Griffin is there taxation in D D I mean there can be anything in D and D it's a it's a it is a fantasy world I would say uh I have never

uh I think I have read the whole Dungeon Masters manual at this point I do not remember getting to a part that did discuss taxation or sort of any kind of

bylaws.

But

you encourage your players to start a Roth IRA pretty early on in the campaign, right?

Yeah.

Accessional savings accounts.

If they put just a few of their...

you know, silver coins that they got from beheading the ogre in that at level one, by the time they reach level 10, they will be, they can retire, basically.

Yeah, you know what?

You know what spell is even better than press to digitation, Griffin?

The magic of compounding interest.

Exactly.

Every dad will tell you at one point or another, they'll tell you about the magic of compounding interest.

You got to play what you know, right?

Especially when you're running the game.

You got to include stuff in there that you know about and you feel strongly about.

And if taxes is that for you, that's a life I can't imagine living, but you do, and I think that's special.

And so go ahead and put taxes in your game and then teach them how to get around this.

You know what?

Actually, it would be pretty sick to have a CPA friend that could just be like, oh, you want to save some money on taxes this year.

Well, let me tell you the secret.

Yeah.

Kidnap tax assessors, I suppose.

What you need to do is open up a tavern to launder your doubloons or whatever.

Right, exactly.

Yeah, I think that's going to be.

you want to run your treasure loot through

a front business like

a metal heater or something.

I guess that would be called.

I guess that would be called a,

what do you call that?

A sword black.

Well, any fire, I think, can heat metal.

Any fire can.

Yeah.

Why do you even need a spell?

Put it away.

Put that spell.

Open your spell slot for weave blankie.

I think the heist genre has been done a lot in the fantasy space, but I have not read a sort of organized fraud plot

in a fantasy world.

And I wouldn't read that because it doesn't sound very fun to me, but it probably is to other like-minded Dungeons ⁇ Dragons playing tax preparation professionals.

So I needed some more information before I could make this ruling.

And I reached out to Brandon this morning via electronic mail.

And Brandon wrote back right away, I'm glad to say.

Because what I wanted to know was

who was collecting these taxes and what services were they providing?

And Brandon wrote back saying the taxes were being paid to the city of Waterdeep.

Oh, sure.

Where the players had inherited and operated a gluten-free bakery.

Now, you may know Waterdeep government is an oligarchy with one executive head open lord.

It's not an entirely corrupt government, as the current open lord, Lady Silverhand, employed the party in future in profitable endeavors later in the campaign.

The taxes were paying for city guard protection and other municipal services, such as horse dung street shoveling, lighting of city street lanterns, sewer services, and public schooling of the city's wizard school.

Valerie Moffat, I see you nodding your head along.

Do you have some knowledge of Water Deep?

Yeah, so

it's in the module Water Deep Dragon Heist

that does have a published rule system for collecting taxes and stuff like that.

Yeah.

Have you played this module?

I haven't.

No.

One of my friends has the source book, and I'm meaning to get it from him and run it at some point, but I haven't.

I have last week, I did run a one-shot for some friends where the plot hook was tax evasion.

Oh.

We did a bootlegging one-shot where the kingdom had jacked up excise taxes on alcohol and led to a cottage industry of bootleggers and rum runners.

And so I had the players take a ship out and find a lost rum running ship and secure the cargo.

If I had known that there were Dungeons and Dragons games based on the Burt Reynolds films White Lightning and Gator, I would be at the hobby store right now.

I would not have come into work today.

Boy, oh boy, if there were some Elmore Leonard RPGs

or some, you know, like Travis McGee RPGs.

Oh, my goodness.

I'm get

and I'm loving all these references.

All right, Griffin, what do you say?

It sounds to me like you agree with me that obviously the rules can include the levy of taxation.

And if it inspires your players to come up with imaginative ways to evade taxation, all the more fun.

Absolutely.

I think that that's a fun hook.

I would love to explore

the sort of more rote economic side of things

because you got a lot to play with.

Waterdeep is such a shady spot.

You know,

you got the masked lords, and any system that sort of favors a governmental anonymity like that is just like, is just waiting to be exploited by the

overexploited working class, which is what it sounds like your party is.

And I also advocate for the

abolition of educational debt in Water Deep.

All student loans should be wiped out.

Starting only at 10,000 gold coins, though.

Let's not go crazy here.

Yeah, some people played by the rules and they

don't play by the rules.

There are no rules.

That's what we're coming to understand about D ⁇ D.

The rule is cool.

You know what's cool?

Eradicating student debt.

Here's something from Charlie.

I run a campaign for teenagers in the school library where I work.

The other day, one of them tried to cast the spell, animal friendship.

Looks like I've got a new favorite spell.

That's a great spell.

You have to get to level two before you can cast unlikely animal friendship.

Yeah, but when that one wears off, oh God.

Oh, no.

You don't want to be anywhere near it.

The alligator ate the bird.

I like casting a spell of animal professional collegiality.

You know, not too personal, but you get along and you get the work done together.

The other day, one of them tried to cast the spell animal friendship on a hook horror.

I explained to them a hook horror is a monster, not an animal, so they couldn't do that.

The rest of the session, of course, devolved into an argument about what an animal is.

Later in the day, someone took a picture to the biology teacher who was cajoled into agreeing a hook horror is an animal.

And I was thereby outwitted by teens.

Look at those teens.

Judge, I seek a higher ruling.

There's only one office in the land that stands above biology teacher.

In your highly qualified opinion, does the hook horror appear to be an animal?

If you rule against me as well, I will gladly let this teen have their creepy animal companion.

But I think the hook horror is clearly no natural beast.

Well, first of all, I'm not a biology teacher, so I am not so easily cajoled as apparently this one was.

I will look at the evidence and make my decision fairly.

First of all, what is a hook horror?

Whoa.

A hook horror belongs to what is, I believe, to be a fairly wrong-headed category of

beings.

in Dungeons and Dragons called a monstrosity, which basically, if you are an animal in Dungeons and Dragons, like a bear or a bird

or a rabbit, that's another one.

They would call you like a beast or a creature, right?

But if you have several animal body parts from different animals, now all of a sudden you're a monstrosity.

And I think that's...

So there are beasts and there are monstrosities, but there are also monsters, right?

I mean, no, monstrosity

is what you would classify as a monster.

And again, these are taxonomies that exist for game mechanics purposes.

Yeah, you want to know if an enemy is undead so that your

cleric's spells will be especially effective.

But a monstrosity specifically is a chimera, a combo of different monsters.

Most of the time, yes.

Like a rogue taxonomy.

Yes.

A squid is a...

is a beast.

A kraken is a monstrosity.

That's another thing.

If the animal gets too big, sometimes it's just now you're a monster.

I was going to say, like, I mean, I always thought a Kraken was just a big squid, but I thought maybe as a monstrosity, it would be like a squid body with an eagle head.

I think that would earn you the monstrosity,

the monstrosity title as well.

If you're a one-headed dog, congratulations.

You're a beast.

If you have multiple heads as a dog.

Squiggle exists now in the D ⁇ D universe.

I doth deem it.

Okay, it is deemed.

It is so deemed.

But you don't like monstrosities.

Why?

I just don't like that if you give a, you know.

Wait, wait, wait.

Wait, wait, hang on.

Hang on one second, Griffin.

I'm sorry.

We've talked a lot already.

I still don't know what a hook horror is.

It's got...

I have never dabbled in this particular

monstrosity.

I will say, despite all the things I have just said, it does, I would say, earn the title.

We're looking at a vulture sort of face with whiskers,

a torso that I could only describe as rippling with two big sort of bony hooks coming out and some sort of talons situation on the on the feet area.

And abs.

Yeah, just ripped.

Ripped abs.

It's humanoid, but it's got a vulture head and bony hooks for arms.

And ripped abs.

And I'm looking it up right now, and the two facts that I found are it lives in the upper levels of the underdark.

Good to know.

And they have a a lifespan of about 40.

They tend to die around 40 because they're susceptible to parasites and infections.

This is true.

All right.

Is it an animal?

Is it a beast?

Can you cast

friendship with animals upon a hook whore?

Well, let's start by discussing animal friendship because it is not.

It is not this domestication sort of.

First of all, it lasts for 24 hours and then you got to do it again.

And they can wisdom save out of it.

So it's like, yeah, that's a high-stakes pet you've got there, where every day you have to see, hey, are you still going to be my pet?

Or are you going to try to embed your apparently disease-ridden hooks into my supple flesh?

I love, you know, I used to have a cat that I had the same arrangement with, and it did not work out that relationship.

You're saying that if I deem that a hookhorr is an animal and you cast animal friendship upon this animal, the hook horror has an opportunity to save roll against becoming your friend?

Yes, if it has a certain intelligence score over a certain level.

Let me ask you a question.

How is it going to roll a dice with its hooks?

Its big bony hooks.

That's a really good point.

I'm just saying what it sounds like your player wants to cast is dominate monster.

And

that's an eighth level spell.

So that's going to be a while before they can pull something like that off.

I'll say right now, the thing that I've enjoyed a lot about this podcast, but one of the things I enjoyed the most was when you, Griffin, said, what you want to cast is dominate monster and Valerie Moffat just nodding her head so strongly.

That really spoke to you, didn't it, Val?

Yep.

Yeah.

You'd have to be like level 15 or 16 to cast it.

Yep.

To cast Dominate Monster.

And what do you get out of a Dominate Monster?

Total control over any creature that

fails the save against the spell.

Got it.

Look, you win this one, Charlie.

You're not an angry old guy in a trap having been foiled by those meddling teens and their animal friend, Scooby-Doo.

Those teens lose.

They can't cast animal friendship on a hook horror, not only because it's a monstrosity, not a beast,

but also because they don't have the skills.

Isn't that right, Griffin?

Teens don't have the skills to dominate monsters.

I mean, if they're particularly high-level tween teens, then...

I almost said tweens.

There's no way there's tweens making it to 15 or 16th level.

You know, impatience will get the best of them at some point.

What about the wizards of Waverly Place?

Those wizards at Waverly Place, there's no way they could dominate a monster.

I'm just saying.

They could press to digitate.

They could make as many odd odors as they would like.

They could even heat metal from time to time if they had had a long rest.

But there is no way they could dominate a hook horror.

We'll talk about gelatinous cubes when we come back in just a second.

You know, we've been doing my brother, my brother, me for 15 years.

And

maybe you stopped listening for a while.

Maybe you never listened.

And you're probably assuming three white guys talking for 15 years, I know where this has ended up.

But no, no, you would be wrong.

We're as shocked as you are that we have not fallen into some sort of horrific scandal or just turned into a big crypto thing.

Yeah.

You don't even really know how crypto works.

The only NFTs I'm into are naughty, funny things, which is what we talk about on My Brother, My Brother, and me.

We serve it up every Monday for you if you're listening.

And if not, we just leave it out back and goes rotten.

So check it out on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, we're over 70 episodes into our show.

Let's learn everything.

So let's do a quick progress check.

Have we learned about quantum physics?

Yes, episode 59.

We haven't learned about the history of gossip yet, have we?

Yes, we have.

Same episode, actually.

Have we talked to Tom Scott about his love of roller coasters?

Episode 64.

So how close are we to learning everything?

Bad news.

We still haven't learned everything yet.

Oh, we're ruined.

No, no, no, it's good news as well.

There is still a lot to learn.

Woo!

I'm Dr.

Ella Hubber.

I'm regular Tom Lum.

I'm Caroline Roper, and on Let's Learn Everything, we learn about science and a bit of everything else, too.

And although we haven't learned everything yet, I've got a pretty good feeling about this next episode.

Join us every other Thursday on Maximum Fun.

It's Judge John Hodgman.

We're headed to New York City and Lincoln Center.

So I hope that if you are in the New York Metroplex, is that something?

The four corners of New York City.

It's called the Megacity.

The Megacity.

Megacity one.

If you're anywhere that the Amtrak Acela rolls, we demand that you join us at Lincoln Center for a free Judge John Hodgman in June.

Not just nearly free, Jesse Thornton, but also outdoors.

You know, there's a guy that we hung around with when we were in our 20s here in New York City.

We were out sitting for a friend who had an outdoor deck.

So we had some friends over, including this guy Rana.

And we were all sitting around in our 20s.

You know, we didn't get to sit around on a rooftop all that often.

You know, we didn't have access to rooftops.

Never mind one that had some chairs on it.

And Rana looked around with this look on his face of just sheer delight.

And he said,

Outdoors,

outstanding.

And it's true.

Never thought it.

Being outdoors is outstanding, especially if you live in a city.

In New York City, there aren't a lot of outdoor shows you can see.

And Lincoln Center's Summer Festival has invited us, the Judge John Hodgman podcast, to be a part of it in the amphitheater outdoors where they had the circus.

And you can go for free?

Why wouldn't you?

I hope you will.

Bit.ly slash JJ H.

O.

Lincoln.

Sorry, I had to make one.

Bit.lee slash J J H O L I N C O L N, all capital letters, all one word.

Come join us, won't you, at Lincoln Center for live Judge John Hodgman?

Ooh, under the stars, justice under the stars, it will be a blast.

Jesse, what do you've got going on?

Well, I just want to mention a couple of cool guests that have just appeared or are just upcoming on my interview show, Bullseye with Jesse Thorne.

A lot of Judge John Hodgman listeners have been sending me nice notes that they checked out the show because they heard about it on JJHO and I am very grateful to them.

So

this week on the program,

interviews with an archive interview with the late Gilbert Gottfried.

Oh my gosh.

An amazing guy, a totally fascinating guy and a great interview.

An interview with the three busy Deborahs from the show Three Busy Deborahs.

Have you seen Three Busy Deborah's, John?

No, I'm not sure.

Three Busy Deborahs is so funny.

It is so funny.

Oh, my God.

That show is so funny.

They're so cool.

And then next week on the show, Jenna Fisher and Angela Kinsey from The Office and Office Ladies.

Two like total, brilliant geniuses and kind, friendly, nice people.

And then in coming weeks, John,

Tryon for Size, the great Claudio O'Doherty, the hilarious Claudio O'Doherty, Michael Stipe from a band called Rem.

Oh, wow.

And Robin Thedy, the creator, showrunner, and star of a black lady sketch show, who's a phenomenon.

You know what that lineup is, Jesse?

What's that, John?

Stacked.

Lineup is stacked.

Oh, yeah, baby.

And I haven't even gotten to when Keith Phipps comes on to talk about Nicholas Cage for an hour.

They don't call this radio show wide of the mark.

Do you know what I mean?

They do.

They don't call this radio show whiff and a miss.

They call it bullseye.

That's when you hit a dart or an arrow right into the center of the target where it counts and get maximum points.

You've got your podcast app in your pocket right now.

So just pull your phone or whatever out and search for bullseye and hit subscribe right now.

Let's get back to the show.

Welcome back to the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

We're addressing Dungeons and Dragons Matters with our friend Griffin McElroy of the Adventure Zone.

Here is a case.

Wait, wait, Jesse.

Jesse, it's me, Judge John Hodgman.

I just realized we don't have characters.

We're We're playing this game with Griffin.

We don't have characters.

So I quickly went to a website called fastcharacter.com

that rolls up characters based on some specifications.

I put in player name Hodgman.

I said it should use a random character name.

It's going to generate its own name.

I am going to be of random ancestry slash heritage and of random class.

I could be an artificer, alchemist, barbarian.

I don't know yet.

I'm going to use for me, he, him pronouns.

I'm setting myself at level 20.

And let's roll it up and see what my character is.

Tyne Lutor, Rogue 20 arcane trickster with 369,000 experience points.

I am Dragonborn of the Silver Dragon line, and my background is Charlatan.

Jesse, you ready to get your character?

I guess.

Okay, so

I had to add personality traits in order to roll the character.

And my personality traits were judgmental, interested in extinguishing.

And

my flaw was talks too much and takes up a lot of time during the podcast.

What would be your personality trait one?

Artsy.

Artsy.

This is true.

I saw you dig deep there.

Personality trait two.

Do you want to pick it yourself or do you want Jennifer Marmor to pick it for you?

She's known you your whole life.

Jen and I have known each other for about 20 years.

So Jen, besides artsy, I mean, that's probably my most famous character trait.

Inquisitive.

Inquisitive

loves tacos.

Okay.

I'm going to just add that.

I do love tacos.

That's true.

And your ideal?

What would be your ideal?

I put justice down for me.

Decency?

Sure.

You could put tacos for that too if you want to.

Tacos tacabesa?

I'm putting tacos down for bond.

I don't know what bond means in this context.

Valerie, do you know what bond means?

It's your favorite bond.

It's your favorite Bond movie.

You're supposed to be.

I put Tomorrow Never Dies for mine, and it made a pretty badass character, actually.

And your flaw, Jesse?

Cares too much.

Cares too much.

Sometimes I work too hard.

Okay.

You are Chalutil.

You are a level 20 monk, way of the open hand.

You have 365,000, all round up, 367,000 experience points.

You are also dragon-born, though of the bronze dragon ancestry.

And your background is as a hermit.

Your alignment, neutral.

I will help others, but avoid serious personal risks or loyalties that don't benefit me.

That's not true.

That is the only child's creed.

I wanted to point out that I accidentally went to fastcharacters.com, which is the plural version of this website and not the correct one.

And

this is a firm that does design mascots.

And just the top sort of characters that they've created here at the top of the page

do not instill in me, I would say, great confidence that they would be able to make a mascot for my business

that would earn me even the amount that I spent on the design of the mascot.

They have characters like Rich Elephant and Pizza Tiger and

Dog holding its own leash, which I assume is for a dog walking business, but this is a bipedal dog holding a leash, which lets me know that it can probably handle most of the heavy lifting here by itself.

It's like those barbecue restaurants where like a pig is holding like a platter of meat to serve.

Yeah, it's it's uh I don't want to be confronted.

uh with with this vision.

If I may continue sending you all random JPEGs that I have captured on my computer, there's three more further down on the page that I love even much more, actually, than

the top cast here.

Here we're looking at rack armor, which is a man made out of skyscrapers and buckets, I do believe.

There's just a strong football player.

Right.

That's one of them is strong football player.

And then there is what appears to be an HVAC person whose body is made out of a furnace, but they have an air conditioner hand and a heater hand, and they are wearing a hat with the red cross symbol on it.

Also a stethoscope around their neck and sneakers, red sneakers.

So I'm guessing this is a business that is literally titled HVAC Doctor.

If I was just to guess the name of the business that required this mascot.

Speedy HVAC Doctor, I believe is the name of the business.

Speedy HVAC Docs.

These are exceptional.

Thank you, FastCaractors.com.

And yes, we will feature some of these images on our show page, maximumcump.org, as well as our Instagram, Instagram.com slash judgejohnhodgman.

And of course, I'm going to send you these character sheets because there's a lot of information and it's really, really fun.

I got to know more about Detective Dinosaur that they have on there.

What possible business could Detective Dinosaur be?

The rocket.

I would, I'm honestly, I'm going to say it's probably for people who are trying to find oil to drill.

Also, why does Detective Dinosaur hold his magnifying glass with his tail when he's got two perfectly good hands?

He's also smoking a pipe, which you don't see a lot of mascots doing anymore for legal reasons.

Sure.

And could you cast animal friendship on any of these?

Or do you need to

cast mascot domination?

Do you think that that dinosaur has an intelligence score of under four?

No, that dinosaur not only has an intelligence score of 1,000, but also, as Jesse points out, has hands to roll the dice.

Yeah.

Here's a case from Stephen.

I'm a longtime dungeon master and have an ongoing debate with my friend Tim.

The gelatinous cube is, as the judge knows, a popular monster in DD.

It's essentially a giant quasi-sentient jell-o-cube that consumes anything it touches and dissolves what it has consumed.

I've always maintained the cube should grow given adequate food and time, though that process is not described in the Monster Manual.

Now, place said cube in a limited space, such as an indigestible corridor that's 20 feet long, 10 feet tall, and 10 feet wide.

The cube is 10 by 10 by 10.

I contend given enough time and food, the cube should grow to fill the corridor until it has completely filled the space.

Tim maintains the cube never increases in size and that all consumed material is completely dissolved with a total loss of mass.

The monster manual is vague on this point.

I still think it's fair to make a dungeon that's entirely filled by one huge gelatinous cube.

Tim thinks it could only be filled by other gelatinous cubes, but it's also unclear if cubes can eat other cubes.

What does that mean?

Can a cube eat another cube?

I don't know how else to phrase it other than how it has been provided for us here.

Can one cube eat another gelatinous cube?

Can I cube eat another gelatinous cube?

And the answer is

the amount of brain power that is gathered here is truly staggering, but I do believe it would require

more of a scientific level of expertise to discuss the sort of like surface tension reactions that would be happening in the provided examples.

If there is one thing that has just happened on this podcast that has happened, I would argue on almost every episode of this podcast, it is this.

I have failed my role for wisdom.

How big of you to

admit to that?

But I do appreciate your animal collegiality, Jesse.

And

you really heated my metal.

With your heated my metal.

With your honesty.

One of the things I remember from that day that I tried to become a dungeon master, a master dungeon master, as it were,

was my love for the gelatinous cube.

The gelatinous cube is as described complicatedly by Stephen, but it's very simple.

It's a 10 by 10 by 10 foot cube of jell-o that is clear, and it is one of the original monsters designed by Gary Gygax in the earliest versions of Dungeons and Dragons, the white box set, as they say on the internet.

And it was designed to fill what was then a standard dungeon hallway, 10 feet by 10 feet.

And if you want it to be a cube, cube,

then it's another 10 feet.

Here's what I learned about gelatinous cubes, Griffin, please.

Because I looked it up, because I love a gelatinous cube, and I want to see the integrity of the gelatinous cube preserved.

This is a legacy.

Would you call this a monstrosity?

It's not made up of other beasts.

No, this is a

gosh, it's more of a plasmoid

situation.

No, I think you could call it a, I think you could call it a monster.

I would call it a monster

in a colloquial sense.

Yeah.

But specifically, it belongs to the class of oozes and slimes

that are the spawn of the demon lord Jubileex.

Jubileex being the dark god of ooze and slime.

You're sure it's not Gubilex.

It's not Gubilex.

In the one website I found.

that had an

extremely detailed description of gelatinous cubes, including one of my favorite subheadings of all time on any wiki, notable gelatinous cubes.

There is one notable gelatinous cube, Glaba Ghoul, the only known sentient gelatinous cube who lived in the underdark sometime in the late 1480s or 1490s.

Hey, I'm cubing here.

Yeah.

And the cube...

just moves along down the corridor, filling up every inch and millimeter of it, stupidly eating anything that comes in its way.

And if you get caught in it, it eats you up, and it's got usually got a lot of armor and swords floating around in it.

And then it'll get rid of that.

I learned that a gelatinous cube reproduces by

dividing into two cubes.

It plops off a smaller cube.

that is usually eight by eight by eight, and then it grows to be 10 by 10 by 10.

But it's a very good one.

So it can grow.

So it does grow.

It does grow, but can it exceed 10 by 10 by 10 in a neutral environment?

Like if it were in a larger cavern, could it get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger?

They do not experience senescence.

Much like the lobster, they age pretty much interminably unless they are forcibly killed.

And

they do not naturally degrade on a cellular level.

But do, like the lobster, do they continue to grow bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger?

And here's the thing.

Stephen, as far as I can tell, is correct.

Through

all of the internet research I did about this cube, all the iterations of its description through all the different editions of the monster manual, including one in which it is able to grow a pseudopod, a fake arm to slap you around, and then they took that power back and then they gave it back again.

There's no discussion of whether or not a gelatinous cube could grow indefinitely in an unhindered environment.

What do you think, Griffin?

Well, I mean,

energy can't be created or destroyed, right?

Just changed.

I guess one thing I would need to know to calculate this is, do gelatinous cubes leave behind any kind of residue?

As they leave, as they leave the slime.

Okay, so

they are reducing in mass as

they just sort of move around the world.

And as they consume things, I imagine they turn it into more cube stuff.

I can only imagine.

Then, yes, I believe if they do not age and they consume things without, you know, unchecked, they would continue to grow unchecked.

The real question to me is:

can they

become

irregular shaped, or at the very least, more column-like than cube?

Yeah,

I do know, based on my reading, that they can ooze through smaller passages.

This is important.

Right.

So So

if a gelatinous cube comes to the terminus of a 10-foot by 10-foot passage, they can squeeze through a 8-foot by 4-foot door,

but then they will retake their 10-foot by 10-foot by 10-foot shape on the other side, presuming there is space to allow it.

So

they are mutable in that sense.

But would they grow?

Would they grow?

If they ate and ate and ate, would they grow longer and longer and longer?

Much like, okay, I said this is a non-explicit podcast and this isn't explicit.

It's just science.

Would they grow longer and longer and longer like a poop in the large intestine?

I think, yes, I think if you put a gelatinous cube in a 10 by 10 hallway and you let it eat and eat and eat and eat, it'll stretch out to fill the hallway, no longer being in cuboid shape.

But if there was some sort of collapse and the ooze then, you know, escapes into a larger environment, I think it would regain its cube form, thereby spreading that additional sort of dimensional growth across all of its axes, thereby wanting to be a cube shape again.

Here's what I've learned from talking to an actual dungeon master and from my readings and our discussions and our disputes so far, Griffin.

The rule of cool would suggest that a giant gelatinous cube is definitely possible because it's cool.

The idea that if you have a hallway that is 100 feet by 100 feet in its dimensions and of endless length, that there would be a 100 by 100 by 100 foot gelatinous cube in that hallway, that is amazing to think about.

That is totally cool.

So in that sense, I agree with Stephen.

However, a gelatinous cube that is in a 10 foot by 10 foot hallway

that gets longer than 10 feet, in other words, it it grows longer like a poop

in a bowel.

That is not cool.

That is gross.

In my campaign, that would not be allowed because it's right there in the title, gelatinous cube.

It is not a thing that can exist in nature.

It's not a gelatinous blob.

It's not just an amorphous goo.

It wants, as you point out, it wants to be a cube.

That's what makes it cool.

Of course it wants to be a cube.

It wants to be a cube and reforms a cube wherever it is.

There's no reason that blob, how does that blob form into a cube?

It's like a flat surface.

If I had a half, half, a six inch by six inch by six inch gelatinous cube and I squished my hands together on it like that, it would turn into a non-cuboid shape for a moment until I released it.

What makes the what make, and I only realize this now after many, many years from that first day that I tried to become a master dungeon master alone in my room.

when I first fell in love with the gelatinous cube to now, decades later, I get it now, in part because what I've learned through doing this podcast is in nature, there are very few cubes.

True.

You got some crystalline forms, and then you have wombat poop.

Other than that, nature doesn't want to make a cube.

And I love the fact that this thing is so unwholesome.

I thought why I loved the gelatinous cube was that it was called gelatinous cube, which is a silly name and it's jello.

But I realize now I really love it for its uncanny cubed-ness.

And I would defy, in my game, anyone who would mess with the cubity or the cubedness of a gelatinous cube.

I don't want a gelatinous log, even if it's square-shaped.

Give me that gelatinous cube.

Can it be giant?

Yes.

Can it stretch down a hallway?

Not in my game.

But then again, what's cool for me may not be cool for you.

Griffin, you love to stretch out that cube is what I hear.

Oh,

yeah.

Hold on, wait.

Was that long enough?

Because I can.

Oh

yeah.

Ow, ow, ow, Griffin, you're writhing with pleasure and you're accidentally e-wedging me.

That's not accidental, John.

I just wanted us to share a moment.

Whoa.

Well,

now I have to reform my...

My gelatinous self into a human shape.

Thank you so much for joining us on the Judge John Odwin podcast, Griffin.

Yes, it has been a pleasure.

Sorry I said so much nasty stuff about these cubes.

Their cubes are cookies.

It makes sense.

Sure.

Griffin McElroy is one of the hosts of the Adventure Zone podcast right here at maximumfun.org as

well as

one of the hosts of wonderful podcasts that I bet Judge John Hodgman listeners would love to hear about things that are great in life.

I think that is maybe the most natural Judge John Hodgman companion in the MaxFun universe.

Jennifer Marmour and Valerie Moffat and I, Judge John Hodgman, are nodding in agreement to that.

It's a wonderful podcast.

A lot of Cube talk in that one.

So you're going to like what you hear.

Griffin also dispenses

semi-advice with his brothers on the My Brother, My Brother, and Me podcast.

All of those shows, wonderful programs.

We hope that you will keep in touch with Griffin across the Maximum Fun Network.

Griffin McElroy, thanks for joining us.

It was a joy to have you.

Thank you for having me.

I adjourn myself.

The docket is clear.

That's it for another episode of Judge John Hodgman.

Our producer, Jennifer Marmer, our editor, Valerie Moffat.

You can follow us on Twitter at Jesse Thorne and at Hodgman.

We're on Instagram at judgejohnhodgman.

Make sure to hashtag your judgejohodgman tweets, hashtag jjho.

Check out the maximum fun subreddit at maximumfun.reddit.com to discuss this episode.

I'm really excited for people to go on the Instagram, John, and see these mascots.

They're so weird,

so plain.

It's not even that they're, it's not that they're strange.

They're so aggressively,

I don't even know.

There's something just upsetting about they're monstrosities.

They're monstrosities.

It's like when you're watching a movie and somebody is on a social media network, but they've changed it just enough.

Right, exactly.

There is an uncanny resemblance to something that exists that is not this.

Yeah.

It's unnerving.

We are looking for your prom disputes.

Look, we'll accept disputes about any formal dance.

If you've got homecoming disputes, we'll take those, even semi-formals.

Even quasi-formals.

Casuals like the sock hop down at the community center.

We are actually getting some really great prom disputes in, but we do still need some more.

So if you have any disputes surrounding the concept of prom,

anything that happened on prom, anything you believe about prom, even just disputes about corsages, anything to do with wearable floral arrangements, let us know.

Write us at maximumfund.org slash jjho.

And of course, we don't want to just hear about prom if you have any kind of dispute, right, Jesse?

Big or small,

hit us up, maximumfund.org/slash jjho, and let us know about your beeves.

We'll talk to you next time on the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

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