Whether you believe you need a methodologist is very much dependent on academic training and your experience working with methodologists in pursuit of research. Methodologists are indispensable at all phases of the research process but perhaps nowhere more than at the beginning, when formulating your research questions and specifying what it is you want to know. There is a temptation among many researchers to go straight from idea (I wonder if games can promote mathematics learning) to research design (I'll give some students some games, others no games, and give them all pre- and posttests on mathematics). A good methodologist won't let you get away with this. Far more than being someone who can "run all my statistics," methodologists push you to operationalize your variables, define your terms, defend your decisions using theoretical frameworks, and to use all of this analysis to design a blueprint for answering the real questions you didn't know you were asking. My first experience with methodology was as a graduate student at the University of South Alabama, where the question I posed for my dissertation began with "I wonder if games can promote mathematics learning," and my design was to "give some students some math games, give others no games, and give all of them pre- and posttests on mathematics." By the time I was ready to conduct the study and after working with my chair and two methodologists, my research design was informed by 9 research questions, 12 related alternative hypotheses, and 7 operational definitions. That is what methodologists bring to the table, along with a deep theoretical foundation for all of the analyses and research practices one needs throughout the research process. And yes, they also know how to run, to interpret, to adjust, and to suggest a boatload of statistical analyses in popular statistics software. But it is this last skill for which most novice researchers seek out methodologists, usually too late in the process to truly benefit from their expertise. It's like the joke about the autobody repair person who, when challenged by the client on her $150 price for removing a dent ("all you did was hit it with a hammer!") agrees to modify the bill to say: $10 for hitting the dent with a hammer; $140 for knowing where to hit it, how to hit it, whether it is appropriate to hit it, and how hard." Statistical analysis is best when preceded by rigorous design and preparation, which is why you need methodologists. The other question that doesn't get asked as often is whether methodologists need "you." The answer to that question depends on many things, some of which I have learned over my last 25 years as a researcher and which I will share in this article.