High Level NPCs, Followers, and DMPCs | Running the Game

let's uh let's take a break from politics just for one or two videos and then we'll get back to it there's a couple more things I want to say we still haven't covered power and the uses thereof and how organizations come into conflict when they do come into conflict but if you want some homework to do I recommend you go play a game you can play it online called diplomacy pretty much everything I'm going to say in the upcoming power video is covered in that game and I want to start a series where we cover adventures that I have run and what I learned from them specifically adventures that I liked and that I thought were good and hopefully that will be useful to you but gosh I am burned out on politics right now for obvious reasons so I'd like to do a sequel to a video we did a little while ago the NPC video there were a couple of subjects regarding NPCs that I left out that I really wanted to cover but I ran out of time and so this is NPCs - this episode we're going to talk about running high-level NPCs and when and under what circumstances they should help the players and what happens when you end up having to run a character in the party there's a classic adventure written by Gary Gygax called t1 the village of Hamlet here's a picture of it and I've used this many times it's a great starting area for adventure it's a town it's a very well detailed it's probably over detailed because it describes all the NPC's in this town and like how much money they have and where they hide their copper pieces because it was written back in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons days where Gary imagined that thief's players would want to try out their skills even though they weren't it wasn't necessarily being evil it was just the thief it's like playing a video game you go house to house and you want to pick the pockets of all the people in the different houses and see what they've got so Gary detailed everything in this town including every NPCs belongings which is kind of crazy but it also has a nearby dungeon there are some high-level NPCs here in Hamlet and the question immediately arises if there are if there's a seventh level druid for instance in Hamlet and there is and he's not the only high level character and they're good guys and they're they're going to end up being the patrons of the heroes why aren't they dealing with the problems in this town and frankly I don't think there's a good answer in this adventure I think Gary Gygax the author of this adventure and the architect of our hobby put those high-level characters in here because they represent and they represent player characters his friends the people who played in his games played in this area and through these events and for Gary part of the fun of playing D&D was when you rolled up new characters and you started playing for the first time you were playing in the same world as all these other players who had come before you and many of them had achieved high level that's where these characters come from and had retired but retirement didn't mean they you know took up basket-weaving it meant retiring from adventuring they had bigger problems bigger fish to fry a wizard for instance somebody like Bern might be researching spells rather than going dungeon crawling so the purpose of having at least four Garry and at least in this adventure the reason I think there were high-level adventurers other high-level NPC's on the same side as the heroes was because he wanted the players to feel like wow these are other player characters that have been through these events and shaped the world the things they did shaped the world now it's our turn and the things we do will shape the world and then other players will come after us you will end up running for other people later on and they will meet our retired characters in Hamlet Garry explicitly talks about this by the way in the adventure he talks about these are friends of his characters and he likes the idea that they shaped the world and now you're gonna do it and that is a tradition that I am part of when I started playing D&D it was in a world run by a friend of mine Brad that he had inherited from his older brother Matt and so there were these high-level NPCs running around that used to be player characters and mask campaigns so anytime Brad needed to know what would this character do what would this high-level NPC do what would the fire Prince do he would just ask Matt's friends who play these characters and they would tell him and that's something that's been a really popular idea in my videos is the notion of when you have important NPC's in your world give them to your friends who can't play and then just call them up or text from everyone's the law and say hey the heroes are doing this and they're asking for help you know would you be willing to give them help for this what would you ask for in return and you'll find that when your friends are running high level NPC's in your world they think of stuff you would never thought of and it saves you a lot of work frankly so that's one use of high level NPCs but you sort of have to come up with an answer to the question because the players inevitably every time I've run this the players have inevitably asked wait why don't these high-level NPCs just take care of these problems why are they I mean these these bad guys in the nearby dungeon are threatening the town and if they succeed the world why don't these folks do anything about it well the answer I think is the implied answer I don't think it's stated in the Adventure is these high-level characters as I said earlier have bigger fish to fry for instance the players in my first game at work at Turtle Rock Studios where I am the lead writer when they were going through their low-level sandbox game first a fifth level eventually they met the Baron of Tor and her high level cleric Ally this was the guy who ran the church and he was somebody who could cast blessings on them give them potions and if they proved loyal to the bear and ultimately could cast raise dead on them very useful dude to know so why doesn't this guy just go take care of calor all the vile the villain of this low-level sandbox game well I talked about him always being away from the barony he was rarely there he was off fighting hobgoblins why was he fighting hog goblins well because I was setting up I was seeding the adventure that these players would be having after they hit fifth level after they dealt with Carol the vial the first boss they would go through this adventure they would go through the red hand of doom which I have run before and which is fantastic I think it's universally considered one of the best adventures TSR ever put out so knowing that this is the adventure they're going to be going through later and that this is a high level adventure and therefore the stakes are higher right the Tiamat is in danger of being summoned which is a bigger problem than what Carol the vial is dealing with then the players can plausibly imagine oh yeah that's why this high-level NPC is not worried about our problems you can always therefore imply that these high level NPCs the nearby wizard who can identify items for you right the Elrond character can identify your items and tell you oh that's a magic ring let me tell you what it does let me tell you the the provenance of these swords you found you can always tell your players that these high level NPCs like Elrond have bigger fish to fry than the little problems the heroes are dealing with and they just have to trust that the heroes will deal with it because they were once low level heroes themselves I mean Elrond is a bad example for that but you get what I mean but instead of implying that they're dealing with larger problems you can explicitly seed the hook for the next adventure these players will be dealing with once they've solved these local problems like the red hand of doom for instance so it helps to know where your campaign is going to be going so you can use these high-level NPCs for instance a great example is when Gandalf leaves in the middle of The Hobbit where is he going what's he dealing with he's going to deal with romancer you don't know who that is but it sounds super cool we can imagine that that's Tolkien ceding the next adventure if the players work for these high-level NPCs and show that they are loyal and do quests for them and show that they are capable then you can imagine that when the chips are down and their backs are against the wall these high-level NPCs might show up to get their fat out of the fire so to speak and I've done that I've done that successfully so you'll find a lot of advice online that says the players shouldn't ever rely on these high-level NPCs and I think that's accurate and the key there is rely right I have had my players in fact the first time I ran Knight below which was in the 1990s the players were I think fifth or sixth level in the end of the beta fight with this shadow dragon and back in advanced dungeons the dragon back in second edition shadow dragons breathed negative levels so if you failed your saving throw I mean forget failing if you succeeded you're saving throw you automatically lost levels just not as many levels as if you failed you're saving throw and that's a death spiral right that's one of those situations where once you start losing levels you are overwhelmingly more likely to fail that combat and just get annihilated so in that situation especially there was a point where two of the players paladin and a thief decided we are going to stand our ground and hold off this dragon with whatever power we have left so the rest of you can escape and I was like wow this is a really selfless act and I could have let those heroes die so the others could escape but I wanted to reward their selfless act so I had this high-level NPC wizard who had been a patron to the players up until now I had him show up in the middle of the Underdark and engage in battle with the shadow dragon it was very deus ex machina it would have been I think bad writing if it had been written down but because they had never relied on this high level NPC wizard for anything other than like scrolls and potions and advice when he suddenly showed up to save their lives they were thrilled they thought it was epic they had no idea he might do that they had never considered well we have to hope our high-level patron saves us because that wasn't a relationship they had with him I made sure to describe his arrival in an epic way and he commands the heroes to flee in the hill take care of this and they retreated to a safe distance and watched this epic battle between a shadow dragon which is a high-level dragon with its own spells and this high-level NPC it was really it was dramatic and cool and they felt like they felt validated as how they felt they felt like having this wizard as an ally and doing all those things for him and fine paid off in a way they had never considered before and I think that's an important point you can have you can use your high-level NPCs that the players have met and dealt with as opportunities to save the heroes and get them out of trouble when they get in over their heads it just has to feel earned it can't feel like a gimme it can't feel like DM Fiat right like you're just waving a magic wand and solving all their problems that's not how my players felt in that moment of course later I made their lives a bit more complex because when they tried to rely on that wizard later he had been kidnapped by the Apple F in Knight below which was kind of the whole plot of the adventure in the first place and then they were even more motivated to find out what was going on in the Underdark because this guy that had saved their lives was now his life was threatened and it was their opportunity to save him so you can see how it is possible to use high-level NPCs to help out the players when they need it it just can't be something that happens regularly it has to sort of come out of the blue and the players have to understand why they have to feel like yes we have helped this guy a lot he is a patron of ours we did quests for him and this is where all that finally pays off if they're sitting around looking at their watches going gosh I hope Gandalf shows up to save us then it doesn't feel the same it has to feel like it's kind of coming out of left field I'll tell you I've had two other instances that were notable where I as a player encountered notorious famous high-level NPCs and one of them I thought it worked really well and the other one it didn't work so well so let's talk about that I was playing my friend Steve Howard's DC heroes game alas Steve is no longer with us but it was a fantastic game he was a good friend of mine and he loved comics he loved DC heroes so did I we were playing relatively low-level superheroes in a kind of Long Beach California like Southern California area we had our own city you know that tradition where Batman has a city that's Gotham and Superman has his own city that's metropolis well we had our own city I don't know what he called it might have been San Angelo we'd been adventuring this campaign for a couple months and our quests finally took us to STAR Labs which is a famous high-tech research facility in the DC universe and when we went there the flash was there this was the first time in Steve's campaign where we had met a notorious famous character from this existing universe we were playing it we had all known the entire time that Superman's out there somewhere Batman's out there somewhere this was a role-playing game set in the DC Universe but we had never met any of those characters and this was the first time an AI was playing a speedster I was playing mister in-between who I remember his backstory was he experienced different plank the normal people so he's flickering in and out of reality and that lets some speed up or slow down and do crazy stuff so my character and is sort of semi-professional interest in the flash and I recognized and said you're Wally West which was playing on my knowledge of current DC continuity and that was super cool I remember being really kind of blown away that I got to even though I was in my 20s right I was an adult by any reasonable definition I got to interact with the flash and the way Steve played him was believable and grounded and I never felt like this is you know when the magic is working I didn't feel like I was talking to Steve I felt like my character was talking to the flash and that was neat suspension of disbelief becomes harder to pull off as you get older it just means you need to work harder for it that's why I tell everybody to get started playing D&D when you're young because that's when the belief comes easiest so it was super cool to spend part of a session talking to the flash it made us feel like we were playing in a DC comic book in that instance because the flash was there for his own reasons and he had some knowledge of what we were dealing with him was able to impart some information but he couldn't really solve our problems for us doing that didn't make us feel like we weren't important it didn't steal our thunder in fact it validated our existence it made us feel more like superheroes I want to contrast that with another game in which I met some famous NPCs that didn't work that well it was a game run by a friend of mine set in the legend of the Five Rings universe I've talked about this game before I talked about the collectible card game which I think has the best story in any game ever including any video game but this was the role-playing game and I sort of bullied a friend of mine into running a game for my friends a night work when I say bully it wasn't his idea and I kind of just pestered him about it over and over until he gave in my friends like he knew that my friends and I were huge fans of the original legend of the five ring story the story wasn't published anywhere you had to play the collectible card game to know what was going on and we loved it so he had the idea and this was a very clever idea of running us through a legend of the Five Rings campaign set during that era set during the clan war but in a kind of mirror universe where all the same actors are on the stage but they're all playing different parts this was a very clever idea the problem was it ended up being a tour of the setting and the famous NPCs and my friends and I never got to do anything we were always just standing around watching these famous characters solving problems I'm coming into conflict on their own and after a couple of weeks of this we cooled on the idea it didn't work because the high-level NPCs who were famous and notorious and we knew them were doing everything cool and we didn't get to do much now that wasn't because he was a bad DM far from it I had played many games with him and he was fantastic he is a famously good DM but this wasn't his idea so kind of backed into a corner he ran the game that he was interested in and that's always the DA's prerogative it's always the DM who has to be comfortable with the game that they are running this is the game I'm interested in running if no one's interested in playing then we'll do something else will play talisman or whatever that was the game my friend was interested in running and we went through it but ultimately it wasn't satisfying and we stopped and the lesson there is we weren't the ones doing the cool stuff in the instances where high-level NPCs have shown up and solved problems and it worked it was because it was super rare and felt earned when it happened all the time and it didn't feel and then we felt like well you don't need us there's nothing for us to do so you can deploy high-level NPCs to help your heroes out but it has to be the kind of thing that is done after the heroes have proved their worth and shown this high level NPC that they are loyal that they are capable and ideally it would happen in a moment where the heroes weren't expecting it then the heroes think this is amazing then the heroes feel like it's a reward like the story is rewarding them for being awesome then it validates everything they've done instead of pulling the rug out from under them okay that was high level NPCs now let's talk about you running a character because this is going to happen sooner or later you running a character in the party with the other players it used to be back in the old days that players would often hire kind of unskilled laborers to follow them around and maybe carry the torch for them because the players want to have their hands-free to carry weapons and shields or cart all their gold back to town and because they worked for pay these were called hirelings you can find rules in the old games for how many hirelings you could recruit based on your charisma it was kind of part of a game mechanic where Gary Gygax the designer was trying to challenge the players in different ways so for instance you kill the dragon you get his treasure congratulations splitting it up you all get eight thousand gold pieces but it's all in copper which means you each just found eight hundred thousand copper pieces or whatever that turns out to be and now the challenge isn't how do we kill the dragon we solved that problem that challenges how do we get all this copper back to town that's where hireling is come in and then negotiating with hirelings becomes its own challenge and that's how Gary ran a game back then he was always trying to come up with new ways once the players got used to something like finding treasure in gold pieces and not being a problem storing it now he tried to challenge them in a new way saying okay you find a whole bunch of money congratulations but it's all in copper pieces and now the challenge is how to get it back to town but we don't really use that tradition anymore so we don't really have the idea of hirelings as far as I know I worry a lot less about things like where is the light source in the group so the players don't have to worry about hiring someone who is just there hold a torch so they can have their hands for you to cast spells and stuff but you can end up having to run a character in the party with the other players for a lot of reasons for one thing something that happens every once in a while is somebody's not around and can't play and they need someone else to play their character how you deal with that is up to you sometimes I take it easy on new players and I will run their character for them if they're not around but typically what I say is you have to find another player to run your character for you I have enough stuff to do and if you can't then your character just sits the adventure out for some you know nonsense reason will come up with like you couldn't be roused from your slumber maybe you were poisoned in the last session back when we didn't really care about narrative and story we would describe characters as de-rezzing and then re-raising yeah literally like that but inevitably you'll end up in a situation where the players do not have every class they need to solve a problem for whatever reason they need a cleric for instance or they're trying to track somebody and they need a ranger and so they go to town or they go to the local druid or forest and they try to recruit someone to help them and you're gonna have to play that character and then you're stuck trying to figure out who plays this newly recruited NPC do I play the NPC does the player who recruited the play now there's no right answer you're free to do it however you want but what I typically do is I have the player who has recruited an NPC play that NPC in combat but I role play them I know their personality and their motivations and I will allow the player to run them in combat unless the player is going to do something ridiculous that I don't think that character would do because these characters are still free agents they're allies of the heroes but they're not a second character they're still independent agents that I am in charge of so I delegate some of the responsibilities and say here's their character sheet you run them in combat while I role play them and describe what they say and what they think and it's often very useful to have an NPC in the party with the other heroes because then you have a voice you can suggest things and that can help the players out of a jam if they haven't noticed something or if you've told them something that you expected to have some import and the players missed it if you have an NPC that you are running in the party then you can have that NPC notice that thing or make a connection and I will typically you know I better at this now that I was when I was 15 but I will typically make sure I've said this in other videos that if I am running an NPC in the party with the players at that NPC they cannot be trusted there's always going to be some degradation of signal fidelity that these NPCs are often wrong or are reckless or sometimes we're just dumb or just value different things than the players do and don't see the world the way the players do maybe the Ranger is a half-orc ranger and has a completely different mindset than these you know civilized adventuring heroes because I never want the players to feel like if this NPC says something it's the gospel and they can take it to the bank I don't know why you would take the gospel to the bank I think of those characters as allies because they're still independent agents they are on the side of the heroes they're willing to help the heroes out usually not for pay they're not hireling they are ideologically aligned with the heroes and trying to solve the same problems but there are times in your game where the heroes will recruit what is effectively a second character there will be other times in your game where your heroes will do something extraordinary and we'll end up recruiting what is effectively a second character for instance my friend Silvano was playing a dragon born paladin and had just saved the town of ore lane he had defeated the cult of the reptile God and the reptile God there will be other times in your game where your heroes will do something extraordinary and we'll end up recruiting what is effectively a second character for instance my friend Silvano was playing a dragon born paladin and had just saved the town of ore lane he had defeated the cult of the reptile God and the reptile god that's the part that's missing from the title of the classic adventure against the cult of the reptile God it should say against the cult of the reptile god oh and by the way the reptile God that they are the cult of kamma you also have to defeat her period that I think we can agree would be a much better title so he was now famous and he was one of Good King omens Dragon Knight so he was already sort of mythological and after having saved the town he's walking to the inn and he sees a young girl carrying a bunch of pots and pans he doesn't know but she's the blacksmith's daughter going and taking a bunch of stuff to be repaired to her father and she sees this famous Knight and drops everything and runs away a little while later she showed up at the end with the sword she couldn't wheel an armor that was too big for and pledged service to sir razzle acts and Silvana was like right on yeah this is cool and she became his Squire and she was his character I made her a bard right because she want to literally sing his praises she was like his Herald makes perfect sense for a night to have a Herald and that was a character that he and I basically shared he wasn't a hundred percent comfortable doesn't have to be black and white he wasn't a hundred percent comfortable deciding what this other character would do but he didn't mind running her in combat and also there were times when he decided what his squire would think or do or say to somebody else he was a brand new player so it's perfectly natural for him to feel weird meeting an NPC and then suddenly this NPC is his character but I definitely looked at it as she is your character she is yours to run and ultimately I thought and this is also useful if something happened to sir razzle axe and he couldn't be raised from the dead if they didn't have a priest Ally that could help them he would just end up playing his squire if you want to do it was just this other character he had this back pocket there's another way I use followers and that's in my stronghold system and this is stuff that I got from earlier editions of the game a lot of this stuff comes from various dragon magazines but if you get to around seventh level you will want to in my game typically not all players want to build a stronghold if you're a fighter you want to build to keep if your wizard you want to build Tower because you get cool wizard abilities and you get the ability to for instance if your wizard make new spells and once your keep is done and you've defended it you get to roll on the follower chart because you're famous now you are attracting attention people in the area know who you are and approve of you because you've probably saved the local area a couple times by now and then every time you improve your stronghold you get to roll in this charge it's the follower chart and a lot of the things on here are mundane a couple of scribes show up and pledge service to you and want to live in your keep now if you have scribes in your stronghold then you know a wizard or you are a wizard then they can make scrolls for you or maybe you roll on here and you get some number of carpenters who show up and pledge service they want to live in the village surrounding your keep and now you get improvements to your keep at a lower cost or if you're all really high it's a percentile chart if you roll nearly 0-0 you start getting crazy stuff like maybe a stone giant walks out of the forest and says hey I've heard a lot about you I approve of what you're doing I want to help you out now that stone giant doesn't belong to the players it's an ally of the players it's not another character for the player to run and the stone giant is kind of like one of these high level npcs he's doing his own thing he is living his own life he worries about stuff he worries about giant things right what's you up to not much just giant things out in the forest but he can't occasionally be counted on to defend the characters keep if their way for instance or arrived mysteriously and deliver ominous news about things happening in the forest the stones I might be a character that arrives to save the players bacon if things get tough and their stuff on this chart like a dragon might end up being your ally and when the dragon shows up and presents themselves and says hey I like what you've been doing good job building a Keith maybe they don't look like a dragon dragons are also powerful magic users and can cast polymorph maybe they show up looking like an elf princess in those instances these high-level followers I mean this is one of the reasons players in my game want to make strong holes is though they can roll on this chart I have rolled on these charts in earlier games that I played in the 80s and 90s in my friends campaigns it was really neat when I was playing in my friend Brad's campaign and I rolled on my chart because I was a paladin and I had built a temple or a church or something and I got a great dragon that pledged itself to me I think I rolled like a 98 on the chart and because of the way it was presented to me I never felt like this has a lot to do with tradition because of the way it was presented to me I never felt like this gray dragon was mine to command or anything like that I felt like I had been recognized by one of the great powers in the area and they did wanted to help me out that's it the great dragon could be relied upon to give me useful information at new things whenever we were trying to do research or find out what was going on I had this great dragon in my pocket I could go talk to them and say hey do you know anything about this and that great dragon could help and send us on quests or the great dragon might save him I'm not sure about that let me go do my own research and there was a time when a bunch of elves showed up at my keep when I wasn't there and tried to take it and my dragon defended it and that was a super useful cool thing to find out that notion that you leave your stronghold behind in the charge of a lieutenant and then you come back and lieutenant says let me tell you what happened while you were gone that is super neat it really helps sell the idea of your campaign as a living world so we talked about hirelings we talked about followers we talked about the players running like essentially a second NPC we talked about the kind of crazy followers you get when you make a stronghold but there is definitely a trap you can follow into a lot of dm's have fallen into it I am sure I have in the past especially when I was younger and that's called the DM PC meaning the dungeon masters player character the idea of you as a dungeon master really wishing you could play and being frustrated you can't play and so eventually you hit upon the idea perfectly natural saying listen it's my game why don't I just roll up my own character and I will play my own character in my own campaign for which I am the DM and that I mean anytime somebody tells me they're doing that I go uh alert alert because I've never seen that really work out well players even if they've never had this experience before very quickly recognize that this super cool unique flamboyant NPC that you've introduced is really the character you'd like to be playing and this is one of those instances where they start to feel like you're going to do all the cool stuff and they end up just being audience members there is a natural feedback loop when you're the dungeon master and you're a player in your own game to give your character the cool plot hooks and give your character the cool rewards that's one of the reasons I make sure if I'm running an NPC in the party they're either very inexperienced or they might just not be that clever or they might be so you know glory driven that they want to commit suicide at every turn and bad died in battle there's always something about the NPC's that I am running in the party I'm not talking about the high level characters that they meet out in the world I'm talking about folks that join them that I have to run there's always something about these characters that make them not the perfect hero somewhat obviously deficient in some way for instance if you go watch the one-on-one session I ran with my friend Kurtz we played for four hours there's a video of it on YouTube and he was all by himself it was a one-on-one session so and he was playing a fighter so I'm like okay well he's gonna need some help he's going to need an ally at least one and let's make it a cleric so there's somebody that can cast healing spells on him and so I created edrick and edrick was kind of useless but he was super fun to play he was a coward but he was loyal and he never gave Gertz any advice even when Gertz the player was turning to him trying to get information out of him what should i do let me know he was hoping Matt Colville would have edrick say something to to resolve ambiguity I'm like no man you're I didn't say this explicitly I'm like you I'm thinking to myself you curse are the hero he is your sidekick he's not gonna solve this problem for you he is with you thick or thin even if you make what turns out to be the wrong decision edrick is gonna back it so even though you want to play very badly and you feel like man I do all this work to run the game for my friends why can't I have a player in my game I have never seen that work out well so even though you very badly want to play and you feel like I've done all this work why can't I play a character in my game I strongly advise you against it instead I encourage you to tell your friends listen we're getting to a good stopping place in the next two or three weeks and at that point one of you has to run and I want to play otherwise let's just play talisman or something or given that we're in the middle of the politic series maybe play diplomacy or something just make sure that you're playing diplomacy with your friends and you're not in a concealed-carry state because if somebody in your diplomacy game has a weapon they are gonna kill somebody you don't know what I mean play diplomacy so that's the second NPC video we talked about high level NPCs when it is okay for them to save the characters bacon and also how to sort of avoid the idea of high level NPCs stealing the players Thunder it's perfectly reasonable for the players to meet famous high-level powerful characters as long as those characters are doing their own thing and only helping out the players incidentally we talked about higher leagues although only briefly because I think there are some one out of fashion we talked about followers we talked about players recruiting their own basically second character we talked about cool high-level followers the players can get like a stone giant or a dragon and that seems like a lot to cover so that's the second NPC video let me know in the comments down below if you have any other NPC related topics you'd like to hear me cover I knew when I did that first NPC video that I was almost certainly not going to cover everything I could think of in one video in other news people send stuff to my office to our work at total Rock Studios one of my subscribers Firth is a word sent me this awesome copy I've never seen this edition before of the once and future king by th white there is probably no book that had a bigger impact on my ethics my worldview on Who I am as an adult than this book so thank you for Darren Baldwin sent me this great adventure it's kind of a tie-in to some of the packs acquisitions incorporated content that they do with the guys at Penny Arcade and I think it also relates in some way to storm Kings Thunder I'm not sure exactly how I may do a contest I'm not doing a contest yet I may do a contest and give this away if I can find I was thinking about doing maybe like a trivia contest where I asked some obscure bit of information about my campaign setting that we've talked about in the campaign Diaries or something but I'm not sure every time we've done a contest it gets progressively harder to sift through the thousands of comments in the blahblah down below so I'm not sure maybe that's the name for the comments there's the doobly-doo which is the information about the video and then there's the blahblah which is the comments so I I'm god there's got to be a better way for us to do giveaways and stuff like that rather than just saying post in the comments below and then me later have to sift through thousands of comments right at no surprise right YouTube comments are not designed for contests and giveaways just one of many ways in which YouTube is ill-suited to the purposes that we are putting it to but I'll think of something we'll come up with some cool way to give this way thanks Darren I encourage anybody who might want to help support the channel to come by my Amazon page there's a link in the doobly-doo I write fantasy novels some people like them you might like them who knows next episode we will probably go back to politics I just thought that we needed a break for a little while talk about something else and in that spirit I wanted to say that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice and never let anybody tell you that a small group of dedicated people can't change the world in fact it's the only thing that ever has until next time peace out

Channel: Matthew Colville

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Id: dqth2dFlIzQ

Length: 29min 34sec (1774 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 18 2016