That’s an interesting point you make and I partly agree. There are certain undertones and sometimes you can create a better story by engaging these undertones and creating a monster in noble clothing and a metaphor for the societal corset women are forced ro wear.

Well, I’m glad we’re approaching some common ground.

No one here is making the argument that you’re seriously “encouraging mindless slaughter of people based on some regular dungeon crawling”. No one’s saying you’re, like, recommending people go out and do that in real life. The argument is there is a message, even if it’s unintentional.

But other times I just want to enjoy a trash movie or 15$ airport library book.

There’s little wrong with enjoying a trash movie, but

And the undertones there are purely accidental and shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

Why? What authority says subtext shouldn’t be taken seriously?

There’s a lot of rich material for analysis, for talking about what our society values among other things, by looking at the messages in pop culture. Imagine two societies. In one, all their pop culture and trashy airport novels are about murder and plunder. In the other, they’re about cooperation and building a better world together. Do you think that would mean anything? Do you think you could infer anything at all from that? It says something that we’re cool with “then I killed him and took his stuff! Rock on!”. We’ve all played that kind of game, but if you think about it that’s a horrible story.

Surely there are stories that would be on the far side of the line for you. “I killed the men and enslaved the women! Look at all these points the game gave me!” would probably make most people uncomfortable. Why is the line there, but murder is fine? Does the placement of that line mean anything?

And again, this doesn’t mean you can’t play a beer-and-pretzels half-brained game about tactics, strategy, and extermination. But to wave your hands in the air and say it doesn’t mean anything is absurd.

I dunno man, you’re the one that said the players can’t talk focus on gay rights now. there’s a demon invasion. Which, again, maps pretty cleanly to that kind of attitude. But I think you might be the kind of person who doesn’t understand subtext, or maybe text.

you choose to lead a gay rights movement while the world is being overrun by the demon king’s hordes.

This maps kind of easily onto “We can’t fight for gay rights right now. They just blew up the twin towers!” or similar “wait your turn for justice” arguments.

I get the impression that you don’t see that kind of thing, and furthermore don’t care. You run whatever kind of game you want, but I would be surprised if your settings weren’t full of unexamined biases and defaults.

Have you taken any literature or maybe other media classes at the 200 level?

Sometimes people say really weird things and I wonder if they just don’t know any better. Maybe they’re a teenager.

But like “fact from fiction” is irrelevant here. No one’s saying Dracula is non-fiction, but you can still read it and take meaning from the text. Furthermore, it’s not just a story about a guy who bites people. The read on how women are expected to behave is pretty obvious, for example.

You don’t have to care about the subtext of “kill all the goblins and take their stuff”, but saying there is no subtext or “no one cares” is absurd and self-centered.

Some CS rep said to me the other day when I was asking about a bogus charge on my account, “thank you for being part of our family”

I said “family doesn’t usually charge money, but go on”

I got a partial refund.

People do not all have the same working definition of “politics”. Many people seem to use it to mean “overt content about contemporary issues”, but that’s not really a good definition.

If your game has sentient creatures with agency and desires, it has politics.

For example, if your game has a king, there’s politics. Having the people accept monarchy is a political statement. It’s not as hot-button as, say, having slavery, but it’s still political.

You might not be surprised if your players react to a world with chattel slavery by trying to free the slaves and end that institution. The same mechanism may lead them to want to end absolute monarchy. They see something in the setting they perceive as unjust, and want to change it.

A lot of people are kind of… uncritical, about many things. They don’t see absolute monarchy as “political” because it’s a familiar story trope. They are happy to accept this uncritically so they can get to the fun part where you get a quest to slay the dragon. (Note that the target of killing the dragon rather than, say, negotiating or rehoming it is also political)

People then get frustrated because they feel stupid, and they’re being blocked from pursuing the content they want. They just want to, for example, do a tactical mini game about fighting a big monster that spits fire. They don’t want to talk about the merits of absolute monarchy or slaying sentient creatures.

It’s okay to not always want to engage in the political dimension. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. If someone responds to the king giving you a quest with “wait, this is an absolute monarchy where the first born son becomes king? That’s fucked up” they’re not “making it political”. It already was political.

If you present a man and a woman as monogamously married in your game, that’s political. That’s a statement. If you show a big queer polycule, that’s also a statement. The latter will ping the aforementioned uncritical players as “political”, because it’s more atypical, but both are “political”.

Some of this can be handled in session 0. But sometimes you learn that some people in the group have different tastes and probably shouldn’t play together.

I imagine if all you do is watch films, you get tired of common stuff. You’ve seen it before. But if you only watch films sometimes, some of that is still interesting to you.

Kind of like how some video game nerds will be only “only double soj 2x blan Blah is viable” but like other builds do fine for everything except some optional mega bosses

I was at a major concert the other day waiting in line for the bathroom. So many men just strolled out of there without even looking at the sink.

Well, thankfully I included examples other than magic.

However, I do think trying too hard on “martials should be like real life” easily leads to harsher limitations for them. It’s not always intentional. But when someone says “I want to leap 15 feet over the chasm” some people get all “you can’t do that! I can barely jump five feet and I’m athletic (they’re not)” and you have a whole digression where someone looks up human records and then argues about if 16 strength is really Olympic class and what about all your equipment and blah blah blah.

It’s much rarer for that kind of argument to come up with wizard types, in my experience.

Clearer rules up front help, though I feel like half of DND players have never read the rules.

I guess I’m lucky almost no one I know is trying to side hustle slop their way into money. I don’t think I would put up with that happily.

Oh. Well. I don’t think anger is an appropriate response, unless you’re some sort of evil light mode gremlin that switches people’s settings on them.

I did give some of my old coworkers shit whenever they shared screen with full light mode, because it was like a mini flashbang.

It’s uncomfortably bright, especially if the room isn’t already very bright. My apartment is lit by a single lamp and a little sunlight from the windows. Full screen light mode is like a flashlight in my face, and too big a change in brightness every time I look around my apartment and then back to the screen.

Do you have trouble seeing dark mode? That’s hard for me to imagine.

I wouldn’t mind ads on streaming media if they were limited to a few seconds at the start and end, and had some constraints (eg: no volume tricks to sound louder). Just a calm voice saying “This episode brought to you by WidgetCo. The best in Widgets. [logo] [url]” over a neutral color. That’d be fine. But the hunger for profit can never be sated, so it’s longer, more obvious ads more frequently forever. So they can all get fucked. I won’t watch at all.

“it seems silly that you can just go around the corner and suddenly you’re hidden. They know you’re there”

This was rebutted with “they know I’m somewhere over there, but not exactly where or when I’m going to pop out. I’m a 7th level rogue, I’m sure I have tricks you and I can’t even think of”.

Sometimes people get like selectively simulationist. They’ll ignore most of the game’s gamey bits (inventory management, hit points and recovery, magic) but some things throw them off. Usually things that are closer to lived reality. For example, someone having no problem with a wizard hypnotizing an entire room, but balking at a fighter climbing a tall fence.

There was also: “It seems like a lot of damage…”

“I’m pretty sure rogue is balanced around doing sneak attack almost every round. The fighter gets multiple attacks, but I don’t. Almost every other class gets a resource to burn like spell points or ki points or superiority dice. I have nothing. All I do is sneak attack. Without it, I’m a particularly accurate peasant that can run away real good. And I still miss about a quarter of the time, which means my whole turn accomplishes nothing”

I wonder if the DMG or something published expected damage per round or per encounter somewhere.

I had a dm once say he was thinking about saying no about my rogue’s “I shoot, move, bonus action hide around the corner” loop. But then he said he realized if he said no, my character would suck and it’d be no fun.

I think that was the right call.

This seems like an obvious improvement and I kind of want everyone who thought otherwise to be banned from working in decision making roles.

Cis male. Often yes, but there’s always room for improvement. I lean on metaphor a little hard sometimes.

I had a relationship where the other person was very Guess Culture (as opposed to Ask) and that didn’t work very well at all.

When making small talk I usually explicitly differentiate between “what do you do for money?” and “what do you do for fun?”

Sometimes people are surprised by the latter, but it’s usually a more fun topic.

Saw the comic and knew the thread would be a train wreck. So many dudes take this kind of thing deeply personally and throw up colored flags about themselves.

I (cis man) always fully close the toilet when it’s not in use. Never would occur to me to do otherwise.

Some of my women friends leave the seat down lid open, but then their cats drink out of the toilet.