Finding Fun in Failure with Siobhan Thompson 

Siobhan really put a point to what I couldn’t express and that is why I find Terry Pratchett so funny, he really is a master of justifications: it’s all ludicrous, but within the stupid world he sets his stories in those justifications make perfect sense

God I could keep listening to them forever. The combination of their minds is somehow really soothing and inspiring at the same time

I'm glad to see that Brennan is a GM that's willing to let his player's fail AND it not be the end of the world or the character. So many times you see GM's that are incredibly punishing when it comes to failure, denying character growth and making rolling low even on more mundane rolls incredibly anxiety inducing for the player. Other times you see GM's that are hesitant to let player's fail at all, as it has the chance of disrupting the flow of a precisely constructed narrative. Brennan and the players seem to navigate these waters expertly in every episode. Can't wait for more episodes and live shows!

"I need to play this character" And now we have Hob ♥️

Brennan is the reason im considering getting drop out. The world needs more of your talent brother.

Loved the part about justification, my 8 int half orc paladin has a high perception score but on the first session, drastic failed an investigation check to, and I kid you not, read a sign. We joked that he is far-sighted and probably needs glasses and every failed intelligence check gets attributed to this. We also laughed that he ended up knowing 4 languages including sylvan and celestial, so when the DM expressed surprise that he could casually speak sylvan to the angry centaur and someone pointed out that an 8 int half-orc knows so many languages and I just said "he's a verbal learner" and the DM was like "YES, and that's why his charisma is high!" Finding the reasoning for success and failure is so much fun

I loved hearing Brennan pretty much come up with K.P. Hobb around minute 36, hear him say, “I need to make and play this character now,” and know that he did. ❤

We gotta get the next season to be a group of randomly generated characters vs a randomly generated BBEG

Why does it cut away from Siobhan for so much of tbe video? Like even when she's talking or explaining something it keeps watching Brennan instead. It cuts to her for only a few seconds at a time at multiple instances in the video.

‘Ooh, season 5! What’s going on... who could I be?’ *cries in twin speak*

Yes! I loooove nat 1’s when they can be used for comedic purposes. I tend to get a lot of low rolls and I secretly love it. What I truly fear is a 7. Low enough that you fail but not a spectacular fail. Like watching a balloon deflate from a tiny hole... it doesn’t even make the farting noise and fly around.

Colbert for D20 guest star!

As a homeschooled kid, incredible to hear Brennan was homeschooled too. You LOVE to see it. Maybe one day I can be as emotionally healthy too.

Love this! I would just add that even a seemingly stereotypical character can be incredibly unique. Having contradictions in the character building is one way to get creative juices, but making a largely stereotypical character relatable is also really fun by giving them history, coping tools (life is never perfect, and even if it is for someone, adventuring will prove that wrong pretty quick), priorities and such can really be a blast!

The worst thing about these videos is that they make me want to play a dozen different campaigns and seriously, I can barely keep up with one. The best thing of these videos is everything else.

Wild warlock idea for the New York campaign: Banker. Sell the souls of those who are in need of a loan. :D

I love the idea of the archetype concept for Unsleeping City! I think everyone in the cast fits in to the setting super well (although it'd be pretty fun to bring in a Wall Street d-bag and have him turn into a Yuan-Ti pureblood or something...)

Can we have an hour-long video of Brennen and Siobhan creating characters out of randomly set selections. It’s like, the most fun thing ever

I always liked the idea of subverting tropes with characters. One of my favourites was a Paladin, from a long and famous line of paladins who treated adventuring and his class as a job, a 7-to-5 thing he was trained in, he s good at etc. It was tempting at times to go the more edgy route of making him a paladin asshole, or a cynic with a heart of gold but that felt trope too. He was just a guy doing a job: - Thank you good, Sir you saved my life from this evil demon. Have my body brave adventure - Ma'am, if you could please stand behind me, we still have to return to the surface and it's my personal policy not to engage in relations with rescues

Siobhan had made so many bad rolls as Adaine but I found it actually went really well with Adaine as a character and shaped her as the amazing character she is today! There's two things you can have a character go through when they get a critical fail, Simply punish them. Or punish them and have them learn from it! *That* is the epitome of *Adaine Abernant*

As a "groovy type" homeschooling dad, so much about Brennan makes sense now that I know that about him.

Watching this 3 years late, funny how Brennan and Siobhan talk about this yeti warrior who's intelligent and dignified, and fast forward to present and he's playing almost that exact character in Fey & Flowers 🌺 :D Ooooh Knickolas Pnackolis Hobb

Is this where the inspiration for Hob the Bugbear "Goblin" Battlemaster came from? Because I love it.

Ooh new series? This sounds fun. Whisk me away oh masterful GM Brennan!

I love the idea of toying with character tropes, like a bard who instead of being charismatic and charming was slightly insane. Like every time he speaks to you he has a different persona and changes his backstory every time someone asks. He sees every moment as a performance and changes up the act every time

I love the evil philosophy bit.

This and other Dimension 20 content is so helpful to me. My family and I play D&D together and sometimes I struggle to play the character. Then I watch Dimension 20 and related content which helps me to play better.

Dang Siobhan! Ive been waiting for an interview like this for so long! So good!

A great resource for cheap and good looking minis is the Order of the Stick papercraft minis. They started as a backer reward for the reprint drive the comic creator did on kickstarter. There are 5 PDFs available, each between 40 and 80 pages. Each page is a sheet of about a dozen two sided minis that can be cut out and folded into a free standing A frame. All the characters and monsters are drawn in the art style of the comic.

This is fantastic. A hoot the entire show, but the bang near the end was SO HELPFUL

This is so great! I hope this podcast has like 100x more views because it has so much value

The camera close ups seem back to front with who's talking.

This is an interesting take on the Stormwind Fallacy. I like it.

I love a Terry Pratchett call out! I agree completely, he satires life so hard it makes life seem like it’s not trying hard enough. His comment about Ankh Morporks lack of murders but high levels of “suicide” was brilliant. Dont walk into a dwarf bar and make a joke about how short they are that’s a suicide in process. His thieves guild leaves receipts. The seamstresses guild occasionally...actually sews.

I'm just addicted to this channel! Thank you for everything you do!

35:52 And he did make that character

“There are 2 types of homeschool kids and you’re the good type” As a homeschool, I agree wholeheartedly. I’d say I’m bit of a third category- when I got out of school I really just awful in a lot of ways and also extremely mentally unstable- a bad combination. But I’ve grown out of a lot of my toxic mindsets and gotten more comfortable with myself as well.

I see a lot of people taking about the Tiefling Druid, and that concept was great but I really loved the Yeti Fighter with the kind of like Janissary background. Not sure of what race yet, but I now I want to incorporate that into the setting I’m working on for my first campaign! Thanks a lot!

Love both of these people and the topic is super interesting to boot. Great video!

"elves don't make good rogues" Laughs in +2dex, darkvision, proficiency in perception, advantage vs charm, and trance

I love this because that teifling druid character is literally my character completely by coincidence( I created her before I listened to this) she was found by a Druid man who wanted to raise her but when his Druidic tribe told him he could not keep her and remain within the society so he left with her and when she got older and he died she decided to go off in the woods in pursuit of proving that she was not evil and valued life and nature above all things by spending most of her time as a bear before she ran into the party battling skeletons in session 1

realizing that Fantasy High came out a year ago

I like the behind the sence defently will implment this into my games.

That assessment of homeschool kids is so spot on😂 I was the first kind of HS kid, hoping my kid turns into the second kind of

I could watch hours and hours and hours of Brennan and Siobhan justifying random Race/Class combinations. I want moreee!

Subscribe and ring the bell to catch all new episodes and other surprises! Come hang with Brennan on our Discord! Sign up for DROPOUT: bit.ly/2KOHLyr Not in in CANADA, AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND or the U.S.? Sign up HERE: bit.ly/2OiNNoP

32:40 KP Hobb gets made in real time.

My favorite part of this video is that the most replayed part currently is at the end 45:20 when Brennan winks and blows a kiss at the camera lol

WRT playing with miniatures, we used to play with dice as stand-ins for characters (we had way too many dice) and a knotted string. For elevation we would use D6s like wooden blocks.

I have to say, I love that Brennan introduces his guests with an honorific like "Miss Siobhan Thompson". I approve of the class.

so this is where k. p. hob came from

I love her voice

This has made me realize that the best role playing opportunities come with character failure, and that as a player, I need to see those moments as assets to make the game more enjoyable for everyone. It also brings up a real character question, which is "How does your character react to failure?" Do they roll with it, do they curse the gods, do they tap their spell book and say "Is this thing on?" A running bit from failure can be a community builder like "Are you my dad?", a way that the group bonds around someone's honest efforts to understand or change the world. Gold! Re: minis and props: there are two layers of meaning for tabletop props: size & distance (for tactical interest) and aesthetic (for immersion/world building.) If all you want to convey on the table is the tactical situation, and leave the rest to description, using jenga blocks, Legos, or other simple constuction tools can create obstacles, lines of sight, choke points, corridors, elevation, etc. without investing your time in building props (which is fun and cool but not always possilbe or even desirable.)

Know I'm watching this late, but Adaine was my favorite character in Fantasy High, and I'm loving the series.

Rewatching this and Siobhan makes the same groan/scream that I've made the last 5ish years! Fun!

It was so funny to see a tiefling druid get mentioned, I played a tiefling druid who was raised in the woods by an old druid, who started learning druidic magic but took on her own personal path with cantrips like summon flame. I didn't know a ton about D&D at the time (and still really don't lol) but it was fun to break away from the hippie, summery druidic stereotype and try a more autumnal, cozy druid :>

Discovering a character through mechanics is indeed very fun! I once made a thiefling necromancer, and somehow rolled up her constitution modifier to be -1. Which was VERY stupid, but so freakin fun, since it gave me the ground to realize: oh, she spends so much time with dead bodies, she's really sick! Her charisma was pretty high tho, thanks to thiefling bonus, so... yea, just imagine this spindly, red, but somehow pale, demon person with dark circles around her eyes and a giant raven familiar on her shoulder, - freaking scary, right? And then, she opens her mouth to speak, and stutters. God, I love her so much x)

anyone else notice the editing on this episode? it seemed like whenever Brennan was talking, the camera was focused on Siobhan, and vice versa.

As per usual, brennon's a god. I was wondering if you were ever going to enable us to use different paying methods for dropout (the one thats available now is not working for me, this happens allot with other sites aswell but I can usually pay with paypal or other alternatives. Sadly this isnt the case with dropout). I really want to see more d20 but sadly I cant at the moment.

Hey! I’m playing a Tiefling Druid in my campaign right now! What a neat coincidence!

I wish nothing more than to have friends like Siobhan and the rest off the gang

What the hell is going on with the camera? When Brennan speaks, it's on Siobhan. When Siobhan speaks, it's on Brennan. Then it goes to a wideshot for seemingly no reason.

Coming back to this video after ACOFAF, their Alight is basically K.P. Hob right ?

Wow I know this is from years ago - but it’s easy to see that Brennan just invented KP Hobb from A Court of Fey and Flowers here.

Watching this after seeing the D&D: Honor Among Thieves trailer that has a Tiefling Druid and just chuckling

As another kid that was homeschooled for a while it's honestly so cool to see other people who had the same experience. Same unorthodox education!

My PC has crazy high Insight and decent Perception, but most of the time I roll terribly low. She's a classic loner ranger, but her saying she's better off alone is a front. She is terrible alone, she messes almost everything up with her stubborn pride, and these terrible rolls solidify this. She has a layer where she desperately wants companionship.

*looks directly into the camera* *sighs/groans heavily* I love Siobhan so, so, much

Watching this 3 years after it posted so idk who will see this but I finally started my first campaign and my DM has been using Lego to make the board and we all make our own character in Lego mini figures form. I know it’s expensive now a days but my dm has collected since his childhood so he has loadssssssss of stuff. Super fun and immersive. Not as detailed obviously as normal minis but it just adds to the charming world he made!

I really admire Brennan's consistency of mentioning that he uses Othello pieces - I've heard about it in the Exandria GM round table and the AA episode with Murph

My favorite thing to do in character creation is to just go wild making a character with a full life and get to the end of the backstory, like 50s, and then ask myself, ok, why is this guy with a full life starting at level 1 and leaving comfort for adventure.

this is a good video.

My thought on the Druid tiefling is like a sheep dog that’s part wolf. Druids have that shepherd energy of being deeply tied to the land, guiding the flock to derive the most from the natural environment. And adding some demonic influence to that is just leaning them more towards the apex predator aspect of nature. Like the game keeper who culls the weaker members on the herd during a bad winter. Strong chaotic good vibes, in the “what is normal to the spider is chaos to the fly” sense.

One of the most fun characters I've ever gotten to play is one I have active right now at Level 11 in D&D 5E: A changeling Star Druid (genderfluid; she/they). Backstory-wise, they come from a culture that has a cavalier attitude towards gender and sexuality since Changelings as a race are just so flexible in that regard, and their family lived in the wilds, communing with the stars to learn magical power. As they grew up and started to learn the druidic arts, they found themselves to have an eye for detail and a heightened sense of pattern recognition, so her parents sent her to refine her brain in that respect as well, and as such, she became the oddest officially-licensed investigator (she can be her own bloodhound). Typically, you'd expect a Changeling to be warlock, sorcerer, or rogue. But as you illustrated with the Tiefling druid, you can make damn near anything work that's atypical. (And it also helps that her personality's just really fun, because she's smart and snarky, but they're also socially-awkward and blind to some closer forms of interpersonal relations.)

shoutout to Brennan making KP Hobb without expecting to in this video

42:10 "I think use toys" I feel like this is just great life advice. I mean, there's the obvious parallel ;), but also like, make shit more fun. You can find ways to make your office job fun. Idk, it could be that I have aphantasia. That keeps me from visualizing, or having a visual imagination. So, I'm basically constantly weaving narratives about my life or the world in my head, and that just sorta leaks through with how I interact with things. Maybe not literally toys while you write up a boring document, but also maybe? Idk, my document writing tends to be essays these days, so they're already fun for me. But even with that, since I can't type for long, I've been using LLMs to help me draft and edit essays, and that's added a whole layer of fun just experimenting with the AI technologies. I used to help my dad at his office when I was a kid. Me and my brothers. We found ways to make that fun, and it never bothered a thing. I think the reason we don't have fun while we work, or sometimes in general, as adults, is because we don't think we're supposed to. 90% of the time, we're not bothered by kids goofing off, as long as it's not hurting anything, so why do we feel like grown-ups, who probably can goof off more responsibly, shouldn't be allowed to goof off? What's more, I feel like we've been asking that question since before I existed, and for some reason we're still calling casual Friday, the day we don't wear a tie.

Early like always love this show and this content never stop dimension 20!

Your first random generation was literally my second character ever :)

The Aasimar Divine Soul is basically my Dwarven Cleric and I love it.

I love that there is a new channel for Dimension 20 but you guys should look at what the game grumps are doing with they’re new channel; you guys both made new channels based on a specific series, but the execution is completely different. Do some Q n A’s, talk about why/how the channel was made, plug the channel on your other channels. I don’t want this channel to die because I love it, but you guys aren’t playing it too smart.

I've been trying to google that amazing sounding yeti race from 3.5. Can't figure it out! Is it alugai? Elugae? I must know! Love D20! 🖤❤️

When you talked unusual combinations like Orc Wizard I was like "I feel like my Tiefling Druid was pretty uncommon" and then you rolled a Tiefling Druid :´) love it

Omg, im early!!! Love your content. So sad fantasy high is only on dropout now, brennan is the best dm in the history of dnd

I thought I had Night Shift turned on when I started watching lol. Great vid tho!

I think that explains why I've developed such an attachment to one of my characters in particular... She's a great great great great grandchild of a character I played in a game set much earlier in the timeline. That character was a morose, sarcastic bastard, but he was also a bard and a good healer. So in my mind, she's heard all this stuff about her great ancestor, and even found some of his (VERY biased) memoirs, and that defines what she strives for: to be great in a way that puts her on the same level as her ancestor, without following in his footsteps. Plus she's highly intelligent and an artificer, so she's determined to leave her mark on the world in arcanotech. She also has some history in the world: she was kicked out of the girl scouts equivalent because she ran a scam to sell the most cookies for their fundraiser... 😂

The talk about the Aasimar "Angel Socorceror" reminded me of a PC I rolled up that is an Assimar Bard/Cleric Multiclass whose shtick was being a Fantasy equivalent of a Evangelical worship leader

I like that they talked about a teifling druid three years ago, and now, just by happenstance, that’s a character in the new d&d movie.

26:58 my first thought was ecofascist tiefling druid and now this character is *Absolutely* showing up in a campaign

Playing a Teifling Druid in BG3. I’m trying to play her in a sense that pain/death/struggle is part of nature and is part of what gives life meaning.

Oh man, late to the party but has there been a Dimension20 campaign with the 4e Gamma World? Because that system is great, and the default method of character gen is randomly combining two origins and deciding why. They even have a suggestion for some like felinoid plus rat swarm equals swarm of kittens.

A saying I use a lot when talking about "bad" people is - "No one is the villain in their own story."

It takes a few beats to cut to the camera on Siobhan at the beginning of the vid; please have fun pretending her voice is coming out of that skeleton next to Brennan

can’t believe brennen wrote the base for K.P hob in this episode

I made an Orc Blade Singer. He was a prank by Mystra on both Corellon Larethian and Gruumsh One Eye.

Oh god. Them joking about old SAT scores sounding bad but actually being good actually in fact... as someone who managed to get a 1600 Verbal SAT back in the late 90s but did not actually go to university until 2013... I had those exact words come out of my mouth a few too many times. Brennan and Siobhan have shamed me.

I actually play a tiefling druid in my friends game who shunned from society so they lived in the forest for their younger years so that's pretty fun so I guess my idea wasn't as creative as I thought

Every time i make a character for DnD i end up playing it as a satire of some aspect of myself. "lets crank my ADHD to 11 and play a chaotic barbarian" or " Let's be an anxious lil nerd wizard" its so hard to escape yourself in your character, but seeing aspects and even perceived flaws enjoyed by your fellow players really feels great.

i recently made a teifling druid and their just really into the flora and fauna of the hells

I'm DMing my first game and don't have miniatures so I'm using a chess board. Everybody picked a monopoly piece to represent their character and I use various chess pieces to show the enemies. It's not perfect but it's a great way to keep track of the battle space.

Is that aasimar Brennan's describing the inspo for Garthy?