You know, I see a lot of posts out there about dumb shit that players do and while all of those posts are incredibly valid, I feel like this is dumbass DM erasure. I dearly love every story about bards who seduce the final boss and warlocks with sugar daddies and all that BUT I think DMs are greatly misunderstood to all be these serious controlling entities who just want their players to follow through with their perfectly planned scenerios. Here’s to all the dumbass DMs out there who:
– forget their NPC names and constantly make up new names for unimportant recurring NPCs when the players see them in hopes that they wont remember
– plan a whole dungeon around one (1) spongebob reference that they really wanted to fit in
– accidentally give two NPCs the same name bc you just pull from a list and you forgot to cross it off
– choose to homebrew everything bc they have an Artistic Vision but the vision is just that you want there to be three gnomes in a trench coat selling sketchy magical items somewhere in the setting
– use the same dumbass voice for every NPC but with different 90s surfer slang for different characters
– make just awful items and make their players buy them (I’m currently working on the “Ross From Friends” tramp stamp of +1 AC)
– realize they only have 28 minutes before the next session to plan and instead make text posts on tumblr.com
Anyway if any DMs want to add onto this with some dumbass shit they’ve subjected their players to feel free
Realizing too late that a one off joke about grinches living in the Karloff mountains has given your PCs an plausible shortcut through what was going to be several sessions of wilderness exploration.
Fuck getting him fired why hasn’t the police tracked him down and arrested him like they do black kids they see posting questionable shit on Instagram?? He lost his job but he pulled a gun out on these people.
If I pulled out on every white person that made me uncomfortable I would be killed by the police before the week was up.
I’d apologize for all the “get your ass out there and vote” reblogs, but as a disabled (queer) woman who can’t vote yet due to my migrant status, I’m relying on others to do the right thing and use their vote on November 6th to get out there and turn this train wreck into a rescue mission.
And allow me to make it abundantly clear, if you are able to vote in this election and you choose not to for false equivalency “but they’re all the saaaaame” nonsense, you are complicit in the evil that is about to unfold, and I’ll see you in hell.
I am in a liberal county in California. It’s overwhelmingly Democratic. My vote for senate might not “matter,” but I don’t care.
I’m still voting. Why?
Because “down-ticket” votes matter, too.
Look into your school board. They set the textbooks that set the tone for your region. They educate future voters. They matter. Look into the city level, and county level. They set local ordinances that can change things. Look into your state propositions, those can make a huge difference. Look at your representatives. Even if you can’t vote someone out of office, vote against them if they’re a piece of shit. Make them realize they’re not loved.
Fuck.
People fought and died for our right to vote.
It’s a right. It’s a responsibility.
VOTE.
I don’t care if you hate the system. I hate it, too. I don’t care if you’re “only voting for the lesser evil” they’re still less evil. I don’t care if you want a revolution. Vote, and then get back to planning that revolution.
VOTE.
Here’s what a nice older hippie I used to work with told me:
She said that when her daughter turned eighteen and complained that “voting doesn’t matter anyway”, she looked at her child and she said in her firm Mom Voice
“Even if you don’t vote, you go to that polling site and you go and stand in that voting booth. You show up out of respect for everyone who has ever fought to give you that right that you want to throw away.”
people seem to forget a lot that the dm is ALSO one of the players whenever you sit down for a session, and that their comfort, enjoyment, and limitations matter just as much as everyone else’s. i think sometimes people get really used to treating the dm like they’re a game engine that can and will have to produce entertaining results for anything you do as a player without realizing that while improvisation is a valued and important skill for a dm, its also probably a sign of a bad player to take too much pride in burning your dm’s campaign to the ground. imagine if another player got smug about constantly pushing your pc off of cliffs. you wouldn’t be having a very good time if that happened.
So my husband tells a story about a guy he worked with at his first job. They’d regularly go to a Thai restaurant near their office – one of those really legit places where grandma is the chef. So the guy says one day to their server, looks this girl dead in the eye, and says “You can’t make it hot enough.”
Server gives him this look like “your funeral” and takes the order to the kitchen. GRANDMA COMES OUT AND LOOKS AT THIS POOR WHITE BOY, shakes her head, and goes back in the kitchen.
When the dish comes out, it’s a solid mass of just RED. Dudes at the table are dying just sitting near it. This guy tries his damnedest, gets about five bites in, and can’t do it. Mr You-cant-make-it-hot-enough was fucking obliterated by Chef Grandma.
And to add insult to injury, they replaced the dish for him, and GRANDMA BRINGS IT OUT, gives him a look and shakes her head.
I think there’s a reasonable chance this was his receipt.
HE BROUGHT IT ON HIMSELF BY TALKING SHIT ABOUT THEIR PAD THAI
