Popverse's top stories

• Avengers: Doomsday is already ignoring one of the biggest lessons of the success of James Gunn’s Superman
• What to Watch This Weekend: All the Alien movies before Alien: Earth next week
• Luigi Mangione is "a story about the American Dream Gone Wrong," says James Patterson, and he's writing a book to prove it

For the past 5 years, the name Brennan Lee Mulligan has been synonymous with TTRPG liveplay. Perhaps that's even more true now, after the longtime host of Dropout's Dimension 20 was revealed to be the next GM for the hotly anticipated Critical Role Campaign 4, replacing Matthew Mercer for the first time in CR history. But even before Mulligan first set D20's Intrepid Heroes on their first adventure, the internet's favorite doll shoemaker was on the rise for another kind of entertainment. That is, improv comedy.

Recently, Popverse was able to snag a spot in Mulligan's impossibly busy schedule for a wide-ranging conversation on all things Dimension 20, the TTRPG podcast World Beyond Numbers, and as you might've guessed by now, the links between improv culture and TTRPGs. And the first link he brought up was how TTRPGs make use of that classic improv staple, 'Yes, And.'

Er, rather, how they don't.

"It's sort of like a first rule of improv," Mulligan says, "But 'Yes, And' isn't always appropriate for D&D. Sometimes there is a dungeon that has been pre-drawn, and the traps are either there or they're not there. We can fudge it a little bit; we can have some fun, we can make an NPC where maybe there wasn't one before. But occasionally, if you're making a big scheme for your evil villain, you don't always want to wing that, because it might start to sap away at the reality of the world. You need a little pre-established something."

It's true - anyone who's ever DM'd before knows that it's about walking a fine line. While you've got to keep the story loose enough that your players' choices actually matter, you've also got to be prepared enough with a fleshed-out world for your players to explore. Pure, spontaneous creation, in this case, can be harmful to the story. But that's not where the longtime host has found the two mediums' relationship anyway.

"What I think the two actually have in common that doesn't get talked about as much," Mulligan reveals, "Is the strength of pattern in creating meaning and structure. And pattern is often way easier than people realize."

"For example," he explains, "You're playing D&D and you're pursuing a masked individual through a crowded marketplace. They turn a corner, capture the masked assailant, pull the mask off and... [gasp] It's the guy from before! It's the guy we met at the harbor! What's so interesting about that is, no matter how many times I see that trope in a story, I will gasp and I will go, 'I can't believe it! This is brilliant.' But that's also easy! It's the guy from before."

Anyone who's been invited to their work friend's improv show already knows that repetition and pattern are crucial to the medium, especially in a structure like a Harold, which is when a series of improv sketches find their way back to themes explored in the very first one performed. That said, the Harold's structure is hardly the biggest reason Mulligan does something similar when he DMs.

The truth of the matter is, it's just easier to do it that way.

"Literally, I'm doing less work," Mulligan tells us, "That's a real trick in improv; you're doing a series of scenes over and over, and you keep bringing back the same joke. You bring back the same joke is a tool you are using to succeed. Once you learn to do it, it makes everything easier. But for some reason, this thing that's making your life easier is often being reacted to by your players or your audience as being like, 'That was incredible!'"

You don't need to beat the game to prepare for the next one—here are all the major new and upcoming games coming our way.