Howdy howdy! I’m King_Fuffy (she/her), self-described author and ridiculous japester. Why don’t you check out my about me page and maybe drop a dollar on my Ko-Fi?
You’re probably looking for my work Killjoy Fizz, a magical girl story about emotions, memory, escapism, gender norms, workplace unionization, and the inexorable passage of time. Too bad it’s not out yet. Ah well. That’ll change eventually, and this pinned post will link to it when it DOES come out.
look, if i catch sight of a mutual's unfortunately popular post in the wild dragging their flailing body behind it, i am obligated to smack that pony's ass and send them for another round of the pasture. i'm sorry, it's nothing personal, but it's in my contract
an aging newspaper cartoonist is drawing dilbert arriving at the pearly gates as we speak
an actually funny version of this would be st peter rejecting scott's application and telling him he's not a good culture fit
some of u should have an OnlyClowns account
what the fuck do you think a tumblr is
I think D&D players, even 5e players, who treat the idea of death being on the table in the game as a matter of "mmmmm I don't know I mean it's nice to ask players first what they feel because losing a character can really make them feel bad" are in active denial about the game. This is one of those things where D&D, the game as it exists within all those books, is pretty clear: a character who loses all their hit points is at the risk of dying and combat (the activity these games are the most opinionated about) is a leading cause of losing hit points. This is not an accident of design. Saying that death being on the table in a game of D&D should be something the group needs to discuss beforehand is just rejecting the buy-in of the game.
I swear, if you don't like death as the main failure state in the game there are other games out there. But this attitude is just further indicative of the idea that running the game as written is just seen as dysfunctional by its own players.
Part of the reason this is the case is, of course, the ever-present idea that D&D should make a narratively satisfying story, and dying randomly isn't narratively satisfying (no matter how many ASOIAF books GRRM writes). But then, putting this aside, even if you aren't going into the game to make a narrative, the other reason -outside of character investment that can happen in any game no matter how dreary, hard, and OSR it is- is that in 5e, every combat is expected to be balanced and that the player's can over come it. Running away or alternate solutions are almost never on the table for a 5e player. Funnily enough, it is almost always said that it is on the GMs to make combat anything other than a fight to the death (just add one more ritual. It'll fix 5e combat forever), when one of the aspects of old school dungeon crawling is either bypassing encounters by stealth or doing the good old-fashioned talking thing.
So since they have this expectation that they will always win, they never think to retreat, stack a combat in their favour, or anything else. And this does also largely work because 5e just isn't lethal. Something has to go terribly wrong for someone to die.
An unfortunate side effect is that if a group plays this way for long enough, it becomes very difficult to convince people that you aren’t bluffing when you set up a really dangerous situation. The assumption becomes “the GM is just building narrative tension, we’re still meant to win this in a head-on fight.”
And then when it is as dangerous as the GM foreshadowed (or even outright said), it feels unfair.
(Another one of those things where it’s not really even 5e itself but the dominant play culture doing it, too.)
In a way it’s a different permutation of the “low trust table” that can kinda short-circuit OSR-style play. Usually it means players don’t trust GMs to play fair, but in this case, they’re not trusting a GM who is trying to play fair to make good on their threats. GMs in many OSR games are instructed to clearly signpost danger and make it clear that a direct fight is rarely the ideal approach, but if players assume that’s bluffing for narrative tension, no amount of warning in the world will make a totally avoidable TPK feel fair.
do you ever think about how if you dive into the ocean and go deeper and deeper you will pass through layers of darker and darker blue until everything is black and cold and the pressure will be so intense that it will kill you without protection but if you keep going you will find little glowing specks of light, and if you go up into the sky and go higher and higher you will pass through layers of darker and darker blue until everything is black and cold and the pressure will be so intense that it will kill you without protection but if you keep going you will find little glowing specks of light
sometimes a post makes you get out of bed at 230am to spend a quick hour on something like this
[Image description: A color image in portrait orientation. The background transitions smoothly from a starfield on black at the top, through dark blue, medium blue, lighter blue, then back to medium, dark, and another starfield at the bottom. In the very center is a black silhouette of a human figure, appearing to float on its back as on the surface of water. Above it in the blue "sky" area are a curved, thin white line like the contrail of a jet aircraft, and two small black silhouettes of seabirds. Below in the deep dark blue, just before the starfield, are some silhouettes of fish. /end description]
