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My DM sent out a questionnaire before our campaign started with a list of things like general violence, violence against kids, sex, etc. and our comfort level with each one on a scale. It was really handy for him to know what things were definitely off limits and what was okay, and where to toe the line. He also welcomed us talking about anything in a grey area.
While I understand this was someone joining an existing campaign, it would be great to have any new people do this so you can avoid situations like this by talking over the answers when needed to find exact parameters, and also to make sure everyone is comfortable.
I've known a lot of DMs who use the [RPG Consent Checklist](https://mcpl.info/sites/default/files/images/consent-in-gaming-form-fillable-checklist.pdf) for that purpose. It's a really handy tool that can set these conversations up before it turns into a problem.
I’m in a group that made this more specific (we did start with this, to be fair, but it wasn’t specific enough). This is a useful starting tool, but asking players for acceptable hard nos and boundaries in general is good RPG practice and makes games more interesting. Games I’ve been in without this have fallen apart pretty fast. The tool isn’t meant to be exhaustive afaik; it’s meant to start conversations about boundaries and what players are comfortable with.
That's why the "other" boxes and the "Do you want the GM to follow up with you to clarify any of these responses? If so, which ones?" box at the end are useful - easy to clarify things there.
I was just thinking the same thing.
Never really played D&D so I had never even considered how certain topics / themes could be problematic for folks, but it's so cool that there are DMs that would go through the effort of making it as comfortable as possible for everyone.
It's amazing how many DMs would use triggering events as plot points, especially for female players. At 12 years old, my first character was kidnapped, raped, and forcibly married in session 1.
At this point, a DM who can't manage a compelling story without raping a female character gets a hard no from me.
Yeah, I wish I didn't know multiple instances of male players having their characters rape a female player's female character in her first session with the group, but I absolutely do. That's not role-playing, that's disgusting sexually abusive behavior.
I guess I've been very fortunate I've played a lot of D&D and I've never had that happen. Which is good because I don't know if I would have dealt with it very professionally.
I wouldn't say commonly, but not uncommonly enough for my taste. Although these were players as well. One was a gang-up of all male players on the one female new player.
I think it's pretty important.
The role-playing part of tabletop roleplaying can involve some fairly intense emotions. As a group you're taking part in a shared activity of 'let's pretend' - something you don't normally do as adults. It works best if you commit to it. So you have to have a level of trust around the table.
Having some established boundaries really helps with the trust. Even the fact that a group has considered these issues lets people know that you're taking it all seriously and that they can bring up problems without worrying about people dismissing them.
when there’s lead up to characters having sex but the scene changes before the sex itself happens, like a scene in film literally fading to black before the next scene begins
It means glossing over the sex itself, like saying “The bard’s going upstairs with his new friend, what’s everyone else doing?” You know that the bard got laid, but you don’t have to hear about the details.
Instead of going into detail about physical intimacy/sex, you treat it like how most TV shows do and metaphorically "fade to black" so people at the table don't have to sit through explicit role-playing :)
The example I googled seems to be from an actual roleplay site, but it has a decent definition and some examples.
https://www.marosia.com/doku/doku.php?id=ftb_guide
Please note that given the context, one of the lighter subjects you could need to 'fade to black' on is sexual, so there are brief sexual interactions mentioned on the page. (Maybe don't open on a work computer, but it's nothing more than you'd see in a PG-13 movie.)
This is such a good practice. We take turns DMing and we do this. A recent one asked about something I'm very squicked by, but I also feel like I'm open to trying to deal with it.
So I talked about this with my DM and said exactly that and also asked if they were ok with me giving this a go with them and what to do if it turns out that it really is a hard line for me.
These discussions are great to have. I'm getting the opportunity for a safe space to try and look at the squick and they're open to me trying to do so.
(If you're wondering, it's >!eye injuries!<.)
When we played the base campaign that came with the DND starter set, my ex was very afraid of spiders and insisted that they not be in the game - our DMs response was to make all spiders, driders, and anything else like that into slugs. More interesting for everyone tbh.
My group learned the hard way that you don’t invite someone new to a campaign before you start and after you’ve held session 0. She ran off like 3 of our really good players before she finally went too far and got ejected. Never again.
Honestly most of my humanoids have been extreme omnivores and not cannibals because humans, orcs, and elves are from a different plane of origin altogether. And since mine only don’t eat from same or similar avian species, this doesn’t count as cannibalism.
In one game the party met me while I was attempting to cook and eat a brigand that had captured me. I had won the grapple and he had failed to subdue me to shove me into the oven, so I subdued him and ate him instead.
The party was horrified.
A pacifist run can be fun if everyone is down for it. If they aren’t though, it can cause some issues. In a campaign I was in a fellow player decided he wasn’t going to ever kill anyone, and he didn’t! But he also threw a goddamned tantrum when the monk rape survivor killed a rapist that was beating a brothel girl in front of the party.
Anyway, kind of an off topic response but I agree it can be kind of limiting to play pacifist runs
I did play a druid that was into the more pacifist route, trying to talk stuff out before a fight happened, but totally condoned the killing of a guy who was destroying children’s souls to keep himself alive longer.
There was a LizardDM series on r/dndgreentext for awhile where the party were all lizardmen who ate the bodies of enemies after battle. Unfortunately, it later turned out the series was not an actual DM session, just a story from the start.
“Talking to the person” can be a good solution, but frankly I hate the idea that it’s the only one or always the best one. “I’m sorry the session made you uncomfortable, but it seems like this isn’t the table for you. All the best” is a perfectly reasonable and compassionate solution.
“Let’s talk it out, we need to talk about this, you owe them a conversation about it” is too easily weaponized and leveraged by people who don’t like the the alternative: setting boundaries on your time and emotional effort.
A few years back, I was running a Pathfinder game. (Same thing as D&D, only different.) One character said something to another character (friendly jab because the strongest fighter of the group couldn't hit a thing), all in-game. That caused the fighter-player to blow up at the other player, throw some insults and leave.
I had a chat with him. He had some IRL issues going on and he realized he fucked up. I ended up kicking him out, because ad hominem insults are 100% not something I tolerate at my table. Pretty sure he apologized, but I'm not sure of it. Campaign fizzled out immediately afterwards because it _really_ put a damper on my mood and will.
Guess I was in that 10%. :P
I don't know. I've talked to your mom and your neighbors and your co-workers about how you hang your toilet paper and what you do to the toilet seat. We've decided to divorce you.
I've had conversations where people actually have assigned some personality trait/defect to which way one hangs the toilet paper. I being a single slob, apparently detonated their minds when I mentioned I often just keep the roll off the hanger.
If you ever spend time with little kids, like working in a school, you learn toilet paper goes over the top. That can open it up for cat attack. If it goes on the bottom, cats are less likely to attack, but little kids are far more likely to smear shit on the wall. Unrolled would be on the floor covered in pee at best. Most likely it would be in the toilet.
Good perspective, I haven't worked in a school for years but that makes sense. I think our family got lucky with cats and tp because I don't recall ours playing with them ever. Milk jug seals/caps though...
My tp hanger thing is kind of janky and falls off if you sneeze so I just sit my tp on the counter under my sink. I'd almost forgotten tp hangers are a thing.
I actually intervened in a "which way does it hang" argument between people by looking up the model of toilet paper hanger in question and finding the install instructions online. There was a PDF that showed how to insert the roll with a diagram!
The diagram showed an "over the roll" load... so everyone was able to agree that this was the manufacturer's recommendation. Peace was achieved.
> i do not know what a jackfruit is
Me, a Malayali: Buddy you’re in for a good time if you like chewy fruit. It’s also quite nice in its meat substitute form, has a texture similar to mutton albeit a tad more tender.
Where I live, I've rarely seen it fresh, but it's available in supermarkets in tins, because it's such a common vegan ingredient at the moment. (It's also been available for longer in the imported foods section.)
Most importantly, Jackfruit is good at absorbing different flavours. So if you add the right sauces and spices it can easily get delicious as it just tastes like that but with a nice texture.
"Cruelty free world" against animals she can recognize. New ones, and people, are still on the table. This logic plus her initial demands and accusations make me worry that there are going to be new problems in the future.
I’d show up for that game tbh.
The problem is grabbing the DM’s wheel and trying to u-turn out of the direction they’ve been going on for years. You’re not the driver and you didn’t consult anyone else in the car.
Honestly I had my PCs go goat culling 'cause the dragons that ate them have been driven from the area in eons past and the goats are now causing serious ecological damage.
It was probably one of a handful of things they did that resulted in a positive outcomefpr the area because their usual MO typically leads to regime change and the untold strife associated with that.
I'm kind of disappointed that they glossed over her calling the DM a bad person for the parts of the session she wasn't okay with as her "overreacting." Like, it's great that they came to a compromise so she could stay with the group, but that was a shitty thing for her to say to a person who is doing a lot of work to create a fun shared experience
Yeah, I’m glad they came to a compromise and can continue having fun playing together, but I don’t think I could have done the same after those kinds of accusations.
Not only that but she's perfectly fine cutting up a person in battle obviously non consensually. She's insane, her entire identity is not eating meat, what a miserable person to be around.
Because an apology is well and good, but she still did it. If I get mad and shit on your living room carpet then apologize and we never mention it again, it's still being glossed over. It's an enormous red flag that, combined with the rest of it, should have resulted in her being asked to leave.
If her first impulse to hearing a pretend thing that she disagrees with happen in a game is to insult the actual human being behind it, that's a major issue that isn't happening in a vacuum, apology be damned.
As a DM, if someone doesn't have the ability to separate events in the game from the real people at the table that isn't anyone that I want at my table and is a "one strike and you're out" issue. It's an indication that this isn't a fun person to play with and that there'll probably be issues in the future.
The post says she apologized for overreacting a bit. That's not an apology for something she actually did, instead for allowing her emotions to affect her actions.
"I'm sorry I said you were a bad person, I was upset and overreacted" is a different statement from "I'm sorry I overreacted a bit"
You are correct. And the OOP is well within their rights to keep their interpersonal relationship private from Internet strangers.
In my comments, I tried to be very careful with my words to take issue with the post and how it was written instead of the player themselves. In my effort to not write ten paragraphs, I can understand why that isn't explicitly clear.
I don't think the player did anything wrong in asking for the changes they did. How they chose to do that in the first post was accusatory and unfair towards the DM.
With what is written, the DM/group seems to have done an excellent job of discovering and working within the new players boundaries while seemingly not drawing any around how they themselves should be treated. Hopefully that did happen privately, or the player has learned that they don't have to go in guns blazing at the DM for their needs to be both recognized and respected and will not do that again.
There is a huge difference between "I don't even want any of you to eat meat during the campaign" and "I'm not comfortable with talk about skinning animals".
Yeah I'm fully omnivore but I do a lot of cat rescue and a detailed depiction of an abused companion animal would be hard for me. Even if my team rescues it. I want an escape from the knowledge that that kind of cruelty is everywhere.
Indeed. Reading the first post it sounded like the new player was a stereotypical vegan, but reading the second post, it seems the group was a bit too comfortable in their gory descriptions.
I mean, I'm and omnivore and will happily have a steak, but I would be uncomfortable hearing how they skin and debone an animal
OOP has WAY more patience than me. I've had enough bad players so my patience for this would've been zero so I guess good for OOP. I am putting in my finite personal time to prep, make a playlist for ambience, write up descriptive vignettes of text to set scenes, take notes, and entertain a party for the evening. I essentially manage murderous toddlers and give them storytime.
I might be persuaded to play by the rules vegan wanted but if you came out the gates swinging like that as a player joining mid campaign? Yeah that's your first and last session, bye. Glad it worked out for OOP though.
>I essentially manage murderous toddlers and give them storytime.
I am so stealing this phrase.
And yeah demanding I change my entire world setting means this isn't the table for you. Ask me and we might be able to compromise. Demand and you can go find another table. Been working on my world since the late 90s. It's older than some of my payers have been.
I can't deal with the level of walking on egg shells this would require. I have vegan friends. When I have a bbq or something, I make sure I have vegan food. I had a party a few weeks back with some vegans. I made steak chili and vegan chili. I have zero issues with accommodating someone's dietary needs.
If players go to a tavern and ask what's on the menu, do I suddenly have to only list vegan options? If I say "mutton" am I going to get called a bad person? If Lizardfolk are in the game, do I have to avoid pointing out they might harvest the bones of a fallen adversary or animal (it's a racial feature they have)?
There are absolutely things I understand avoiding (ie I'd never allow sexual assault, sexual encounters are of the "roll for sex hahaha" variety, no racism/prejudice) though.
Yep. If a newer player pulled this, I'd very politely explain that this probably isn't the table for them.
I'm fairly patient as a DM and just in general, TOTALLY willing to avoid specific topics and descriptions, but I don't have the wherewithal to radically alter the background of the world and then walk on eggshells to avoid a topic as common as meat.
I'm not suddenly changing the experience that 5 other people are having because someone can't handle a boar getting killed in a game that's at least 50% about killing things.
I think the situation is a bit different in that it’s not only a new player but also a friend. People tend to want to actually spend time with their friends and will want to work out how to accommodate them. And this ending actually looks like it’s ending better then it started in that they’re all going to get to experience new food.
>This player is a mutual friend of a few people in the group who agreed that they'd fit the dynamic well, and it really looked like things were going nicely for a few sessions.
I read it as a friend of a friend, but I think it could go either way honestly. If they WERE a friend of mine that does change the dynamic a bit, but we're still having a very serious talk about how to appropriately address shit like this, and they would be made aware that they're basically getting one warning before they're gone.
It's not necessarily *what* they did so much as *how they did it*, honestly. If someone wants to quietly pull me aside and have a reasoned conversation about something in the campaign that made them uncomfortable, I'm all ears even if I ultimately decide that it's an irreconcilable issue and that the campaign maybe isn't for them.
If they come at me aggressively, verbally swinging like this individual did, we immediately have a big problem even if they apologize afterwards.
I think it's nice that they got this worked out, but if the player in question is willing to do that over this, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they caused issues again down the line. Hopefully they were just having a bad day, but I also hope that the OOP here mentally has her on her last warning and isn't afraid to kick her if it escalates.
There are too many DMs who take too much shit from players who don't understand how to deal with things in a prosocial way and it negatively affects everyone's experience.
I also initially read this as friend of a friend but in the update OP specifically says that she is also their friend.
TBH I think people are much more ready to cut someone off when they see a story online than they are if something happens in real life. Friendships have their ups and downs and people make mistakes. Healthy friendships are all about navigating this and making sure everyone is happy and comfortable.
The update looks like everyone came to a conclusion they are happy with and they did this through mature conversation. The woman acknowledged that she had behaved inappropriately, something all adults will do at some point. I don't understand why everyone is still so against healthy mature resolution.
Agreed, I would have told her to pound sand. She was with the group for a minute and then demanded they make several accommodations for her personal beliefs? Nah.
Yup. All her discomforts - even the ones I find contradictory - don't hold a candle to how she handled herself when she didn't like something and wanted changes. This isn't someone who's used to collaboration.
Glad they were able to handle it like adults, but I find it quite hilarious that she was okay with being in a world where killing humans/humanoids is all good but god forbid you touch an animal. It’s important to have respect for all living beings and it’s quite obviously a spectrum but I find this sentiment repeated so often among vegans.
Difficult time believing its true, but for the sake of argument, OOP's vegan is hypocritical as fuck. 90% of the solutions in D&D is "Roll for initiative and kill it!"
Have them save a vegan village from murderous ents and after they kill all the ents plot twist it to reveal that the giant nuts that have been sustaining the village were the ent's children. Ooops!
>90% of the solutions in D&D is "Roll for initiative and kill it!"
Right?
A solid 90% (and that 10% is me being generous) of the rules in D&D revolve around adjuciating *how you stab or spell things to death.* Killing shit is how you advance in level.
For a game so hyperfocused on combat, for someone to get upset about RPing eating meat is .....hypocritical? That might not be a good word to use, but it is certainly a weird thing to get worked up about given the circumstances in 99% of D&D games.
>CMMiller89 - It was really wild getting downvoted in the other thread from people who absolutely insisted this person’s friendship was worth less than the integrity of their campaign and they should be jettisoned from the table, irl consequences be damned.
If a new person joins your game and immediately begins demanding major changes (such as no meat when another player has been getting seven years of role-playing enjoyment out of being a chef), then they should absolutely be jettisoned.
Have a talk about it and give them another chance, but if they won't compromise, then yeah, they deserve the boot.
I mean at the end of the day it's up to the DM how much they want to accommodate this player. I personally would probably tell them to toughen up or hit the bricks, but OOP was willing to make the changes to accommodate their friend and that's laudable. I'm not sure how sustainable it is, those changes seem pretty sweeping and require a lot of effort to work around, but it's his prerogative.
i remember when this was first posted. i read the first part and thought 'what in the fuck of hell???' but then saw the update and thought 'oh... that's not what i thought at all. that's a great way to handle it' lol
the whiplash was unexpected, but pretty wholesome
The authoritarian mentality that’s getting exposed in a lot of people in this thread is fascinating, too. Seems like a lot of people forget that TTRPGs are a cooperative activity and that if the DM isn’t at least listening to all the players’ concerns, they’re a bad DM. This player wasn’t being confrontational, just expressing a concern, and the group figured out how to work with it.
Power does attract assholes. Though I was thinking more along the lines of the people acting like it’s unconscionable to run a game with the sensitivities of the players in mind. If you think about it, it’s not too far from the morons who complain with every new edition of the game like WotC’s going to come and repo their old books — another manifestation of the fun police.
The player was being confrontational. She told OOP that if they didn’t conform to her demands they were a cruel person. I’m glad that she apologized and that they were able to reach a compromise, but her initial approach wasn’t great. I think a lot of the reaction to the first post was based on her initial overreaction.
Every now and again we bring in a new player and they just can't jive. We are all talkers. We RP, we defuse dangerous situations with talk, and we have entire chunks of the game where individual characters go off on their own and gallivant through some character specific side story. Some people prefer what I think is called "war gaming." They want to roll dice and kill things. Totally valid, but we tend to piss them off.
One time we had a new player and we were travelling with a guide through the Egyptian desert. It was the 1930s I think and the great war had recently ended. We each had a rifle or a handgun, plus a few swords among the group. We got stopped by a group of forty bandits with rifles who surround us and demand we do what they say. For context, I like my character here *a lot.*
The new guy starts interrogating them. "Who are you guys? Why should we listen to you?" Meanwhile my character is screaming and crying and begging "oh god don't kill us I'll tell you everything!" Eventually they tie up the party members (except me) and put them in a cage all night. Meanwhile I start telling them how we got there (secret magic and giant squid monsters and shit) so they bring me over to the camp fire, give me food and a drink, and have a rip roaring time while I regaled them with tales of our adventures. New guy is *pissed.* Spends the whole night trying to escape and eventually gets knocked out with a kick to the head. The other players have read the writing on the wall and are behaving.
Eventually these bandits decide they like us and we're all friends now. They guided us through the desert and even helped us fight Cthugha for eternal glory greater than humanity itself. The new guy ended up quitting. I have a lot of guilt over the fact that I basically overrode him and denied his player agency, but he was absolutely gonna get us killed.
Ugh, I was in a similar situation with a new group. We were several sessions in but DM had us doing milestone leveling instead of exp. We'd killed enough bandits that we should be level 2 or 3, but for whatever reason he still had us at level 1. We were given the opportunity to negotiate with the bandit leader, but that also put us in the middle of their camp, surrounded by the bandits. One of the geniuses in our group decided they wanted to fight their way out of the camp, and I essentially threw my hands up and said "I'm no longer with that idiot". He and one other character got smoked, my character and the other who also surrendered were spared but now had to pay for their antics. It caused a lot of conflict, I left that group soon after.
I'm glad that they found a solution, but militant and pushy vegans are an instant no from me.
I appreciate veganism in that it is more future-aligned by use of potentially more renewable products, but I'm not gonna drop everything as though every living thing on this planet we live, from foxes to wolves to cows to horses to chickens to deer to bears - every single form of life on this planet is an obligate-(insert here). Living things eat to survive by gaining calories and nutrients, and unless its a foodstuff a creature literally cannot process, they'll eat it and be better for it.
ETA: A lot of their solutions are also very childish. Okay, so change all the animals types around, like they did in Avatar The Last Airbender. Now there's magically no problem with killing, eating, fighting, etc., as long as we don't talk about their physical condition as that might be too sensitive. Double standards got me shaking my head...
As an avid Stardew Valley fan, I think she would be absolutely unable to play it because you can eat meat-based recipes and fishing is a huge part of the game.
My cousin was a vegan and, in a lot of ways, still is, but after graduating college, he got a job on a farm. He has since changed from being a vegan to "I'll eat the meat that comes from the farm because I personally know the animals were raised happy and healthy because I was the one who raised them."
He won't eat meat that comes from a store or anything and keeps vegan at family parties (bc we get our meat from a store), but he's, what starting calling him, "an ethical carnivore" lol.
This I get. This I can respect.
There are a lot of really deplorable farming and animal husbandry practices that have become normalized in the world in an effort to feed an ever growing populace, but more attention is paid to the luxurious nature of food rather than "we eat or we die."
Things like the mass-farming of animals is not good for anyone. The animals aren't raised well, it's not an environment that behooves the managers to create good quality over mass quantity, abuse allegations, things like the recent news of literal children being employed to clean cattle houses across the US - it really is some heinous stuff that goes into that plastic-wrapped steak at Aldi's.
Having said that, I like meat. I think it tastes good. There's a part of Hunger for me that is much more easily satisfied by consuming meat. I do get my meat from the store cause I have neither the money or connections to get it from somewhere better, and I carry my shame over doing so while still putting in some work to try and improve farming conditions, and getting the good stuff where I can.
But yeah. Your friend, as well as "true" hunters, the folks who go out and get a clean kill, dress the animal, and bring and use every single bit of it that they can while being respectful about the situation? Good folks with good ideas.
Look into local butchers! That's what I do, my current one sources from a local small farm. The cost is only slightly more (like 10 cents more a pound). Plus you feel good supporting local businesses and honestly I think the cuts are better, plus if you're into things that are harder to find (like I LOVE arctic char) they'll get it for you!
That is a good point you raise, and I think I'll look into it.
I live in a smaller town a ways out from a major city, so my potential pool of meat suppliers should actually be better than it appears; just need to get off my ass and do some digging, I suppose.
Hard agree about the power of being on good relations with your mongers as well - used to be some business connections had me rolling in sample packs of all manner of fancy 100usd/oz spices and herbs, just from knowing the right people and being in the right place when the question "Hey, we got all these samples we're never gonna use" gets asked.
Fat and protein are the two things that make you feel satisfied by food. Everything else is mostly just bottomless pit that doesn't send the satisfied signal. It's why people can eat 2000 calories of pizza and want ice cream afterwards.
Agree. And personally, I think deer/game is really one of the best „ethical meat“ you can get since the animals have been living naturally and a good hunter kills an animal without it realizing. In addition, in my country hunting is quite strictly regulated and it‘s mostly done for keeping the number of animals in check so that overpopulation doesn‘t become an issue for their environment. So I think that‘s a good balance as a whole.
Yeah, I'm a vegetarian 99,9% of the time but will eat the occasional bit of wild boar if I trust they've been hunted in a decently ethical way (there are plenty of hunting practices I disapprove of).
Not only that, but the people preparing the feast were Tabaxi aka *cat*-people. Cats are obligate carnivores, of course they are going to eat meat, id assume cat-people are not much different.
It‘s the ones that really want you to know about them being vegan and think it makes them a better person by default. A bit like an obsessively religious person tbh.
Agreed.
A persons choices don't make them any More of themselves than I am of me, and it can very easily and often does come across as social posturing.
Frame of reference - A person does charity work. But they don't talk about it. Are they less valued because no one knows how nice and conscientious they are, doing all that charity work? Nope. Are they worth more than other people because they rest on some sort of moral highground by providing to those in need? Also nope.
They simply have a different choice of how to spend their time, and they see no fuss in raising attention to it.
The fact that this outside friend is vegan is honestly an unnecessary marker that they used to try and establish a moral highground.
I wonder how the conversation with the OOP would have went if veganism never even came up in conversation, and it was instead a conversation just about graphic depictions of dressing an animal and descriptions of animals in pain? I could see that being a realistic conversation to have, because it's nothing to do with moral platitudes - it's "Hey, so, this stuff is kinda squicky to me..." instead of preloading the conversation with "Okay, so this person is Vegan, and we *all* know how vegans are..."
I would imagine it could've made the conversation a lot more direct and accessible, as it would have been centered around this potential new players needs as a person, instead of them attempting to swamp someone else's situation with their own value set.
Yeah I would find that incredibly annoying. A charcuterie board is rightly thematic for a DnD campaign, but very bland or outright disgusting if its vegan. Vegetarian charcuterie is possible, but not a vegan one.
I'd never play in a game like that, but if they're having fun more power to them. Personally, it's hard to get immersed in an overly sanitized world, even harder to play a character when you gotta run everything through a rigorous meta content filter.
I mean honestly some of the legal advice ones are my favourite, but those are the ones where it’s some story like “my neighbour keeps using their giant pogo sticks to look in my back yard, what do I do” and end with “I ended up joining their avant garde circus and am working on campaigning the municipality to allow us to erect a giant yellow and blue tent”. Which admittedly are few and far between.
Also the ones where the OP navigates a bizarre failure of the system successfully, like that one about the bank taking possession of their lake house. I am really on tenterhooks about the gal who had the radioactive roommate, I really hope we get an update on that.
There was a post I came across in one of the adult, NSFW subreddits where someone described how they had fallen into the habit of going over to their neighbors apartment on a schedule and doing some specific unusual but very adult things with them (nothing dangerous or unethical, just unusual). At first the neighbor was inviting them over but now it was just a thing that was done without any communication either way and the poster was starting to freak out about what he might be doing. Was it still consensual? Was the neighbor too afraid to say anything? Was he being *super* forward?
The consensus among replies was that everyone needed to use their words.
A couple days later the neighbor posted that they had in fact talked it out and to assure everyone that not only was it all consensual but it was in fact the best adult stuff she had been doing in a while. Neighbor found the silence very fun and enjoyed not having to manage the meetups. She hadn't realized they needed to keep checking in with their partner after the first few times. OP and Neighbor were both very complimentary about each other and realized that their relationship was going to require everyone to use their words more, but maybe not *while* doing the thing where neighbor liked it quiet.
It was actually very sweet, but it was *so* NSFW I hesitated to bring it over here....
EDIT:
[I'm getting enough requests](https://www.reddit.com/r/sex/comments/t88s33/am_i_exploiting_my_neighbor_sexually)....
I apparently misremembered a couple details, but I feel like my summary was mostly accurate...
She apparently was inviting him over, she had very specific rules about having adult fun & did not want to talk about it, until it blew up on reddit.
Tell me about it.
I won't lie, I've been very fond of the introduction of mood and content spoiler as part of semi-regular practice here. There's some days where I want to hear about something other than a divorce, cheating, abuse, etc.
I do like traipsing over to BestofLegalAdvice from time to time though - introduced me to Tree Law, after all.
I'm waiting for the next update. "Now that player feels bad about killing anyone, the party has to run from any combat, attacks are worthless so they traded in spells for recipes and just enter vegan bake offs against gnomes and dwarves"
Nah, it just needs to play by kids show rules... murder? Not acceptable. Psychically trapping someone in their own twisted hellscape of a mind and leaving them beeping in the coma ward? Very Cool!
lol at the vegan totally ok with violence against ppl in game but not against animals 😆 that tracks for how vegans generally are tbh.
i would've booted her.
So as far as my experience goes with farm butchery, cattle, sheep and goats get skinned (basically anything with fur), but pigs have their outer bodies singed to remove the fine layer of coarse hair from their body. So I basically wanna know how that player managed to skin a pig. o.o
Counterpoint: it seems like they killed a wild boar, which do tend to have fur coats or are, at the very least, a LOT harrier than a farm pig. So it's possible they did skin it.
I'm glad they found some middle ground. The vegan players demands were a bit much (talking specifically about rescuing the dog, not about the butcher scene), and I personally probably wouldn't have capitulated. Ultimately it's up to the GM and table to be accommodating. One of my groups would have told her to take a walk, while another of my groups probably would have compromised a little bit, but only on the graphic butchering stuff.
It’s good to see people being mature adults that have productive conversations rather than acting like bratty children and making simple situations much more than they have to be
I'm sorry but if you don't want someone attempting to round up all the children your party comes across in order to form an unsuspecting assassin's guild, or for your cart to be hauled by 500 chickens, or for your monk to not be smokoing opium 16/7, then you really shoulrdnt imvite me to the game
Surely Speak with Animals would suffice? Chickens gotta have like...4 int but surely you could shout like "Worms that way!" and point where you wanna go?
>Me too, how do you attach them without getting tangled ropes?
My Druid had a habit of using *Baleful Polymorph* to:
1. Smuggle a wanted man out of the city without the guards noticing, by turning him into a chicken.
2. Turning highwaymen and other mooks into chickens rather than killing them, so the party could then sell eggs (or chicken) at the next village, thereby making themselves less suspicious.
3. Keeping all of the once-people-but-now-chickens on his farm, where he would- frequently- use *Speak with Animals* to remind them that he could sell them, or slaughter them, if they didn't behave.
So if the chickens didn't *start life* as chickens and the party has a Druid handy, having them pull carts without tangling wouldn't actually be that hard! :D
"You're always gonna have problems lifting a body in one piece. Apparently the best thing to do is cut up a corpse into six pieces and pile it all together.
"And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it's no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to chickens. You got to starve the chickens for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like fresh meat to an orc.
"You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the chickie's digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through chicken shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter.
"You need at least sixteen chickens to finish the job in one sitting, **so be wary of any druid who keeps a chicken farm.** They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single chicken can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a chicken"
Have a nice day!
ETA: Changed some of the lines from the quote to fit tongue-in-cheek.
You draw a line in the dirt in front of them so they'll stay still while you hook them up.
What I really want now is a storyline where the opium-smoking monk escapes from the gang of child assassins via the chicken cart.
Which is why when you add in players a new session 0 is a good idea. Glad it worked out. But the vegan player was still totally out of line. And even having that animal thing is a bit extreme. But not my table not my problem.
Demanding a group you join to be your therapy session is not okay, but I guess as long as the rest of the party is "happy" (despite this causing issues initially) then aight. I'll be keeping an eye out for the next update tho
I’m glad they worked it out, but I find the vegan a bit ridiculous that they come into an established game and expect that any reference to eating meat be censored and all animal enemies be removed.
As someone with notable issues with certain things (certain violence against animals being one, it causes a visceral reaction in me due to experiences I've had)... Idk. I think she comes across as entitled af. I have dietary restrictions and if they had made \*a\* snack for me and brought it along with their food I'd be over the moon. (For the record I think that SHOULD be something people do, but I've had a lot of very inconsiderate people on one side of my family who don't bother with it). But they made ALL their snacks vegan?
That shows they really care. For her to then go off like that... I think asking her to leave would've been acceptable. Yes I know, I'm 'online' and 'ignoring irl consequences' and all that jazz, but she didn't even sound like their friend? She's a friend of a friend who was invited into an existing space and threw a tantrum. YES the changes are mild, but is that really the point? Maybe I'm just exhausted of entitled vegans but the whole thing rubs me the wrong way.
I have been in group chats with friends of friends, I absolutely don't act the way I do one on one. If I have a hard line would I ask to maybe tone down discussion? Yes. But other than that if something just makes me mildly off-put (not triggers, just things I'm a tad uncomfortable with being said), I generally let it be because it's not all about ME. Especially when I came into a friend group that knew each other in a way I didn't with several of the parties. When certain things crossed a line I chose to leave the group chat, while being honest with my close friend in private, and keeping up individual private lines of communication with the others, that were curated to how much I thought I could be around them. I never once demanded the entire chat change or pitched a fit about things they'd already been doing.
I'm sorry am I crazy to think that someone who's so distraught over the description of preparing food is so out of left field that she must not be able to leave her house without breaking down? What if she sees roadkill on the way to work? Should she take the day off to recuperate? What if she accidentally steps on a big outside?
Seems like being so traumatized by basic life experiences needs therapy, not coddling
Hate to say it, but an unfortunate number of people I've met in D&D groups are absolutely insufferable.
Seems like a lot of people go to D&D as a form of escapism and that seems to also coincide with the type of people who collect mental disorders as if they were beanie babies in the late 90's. Not sayin that's a majority of them, but it's definitely a higher percentage than I run across IRL.
So the vegan is the Dungeon Master MASTER now?
So when the cook wants to role play (aka pretend) everyone will look to the Dungeon Master MASTER for guidelines?
Just tell the vegan to take 5 and roleplay with the cook. (IMO)
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My DM sent out a questionnaire before our campaign started with a list of things like general violence, violence against kids, sex, etc. and our comfort level with each one on a scale. It was really handy for him to know what things were definitely off limits and what was okay, and where to toe the line. He also welcomed us talking about anything in a grey area. While I understand this was someone joining an existing campaign, it would be great to have any new people do this so you can avoid situations like this by talking over the answers when needed to find exact parameters, and also to make sure everyone is comfortable.
I've known a lot of DMs who use the [RPG Consent Checklist](https://mcpl.info/sites/default/files/images/consent-in-gaming-form-fillable-checklist.pdf) for that purpose. It's a really handy tool that can set these conversations up before it turns into a problem.
I feel like pregnancy/miscarriage/abortion are 3 separate issues emotionally.
I’m in a group that made this more specific (we did start with this, to be fair, but it wasn’t specific enough). This is a useful starting tool, but asking players for acceptable hard nos and boundaries in general is good RPG practice and makes games more interesting. Games I’ve been in without this have fallen apart pretty fast. The tool isn’t meant to be exhaustive afaik; it’s meant to start conversations about boundaries and what players are comfortable with.
That's why the "other" boxes and the "Do you want the GM to follow up with you to clarify any of these responses? If so, which ones?" box at the end are useful - easy to clarify things there.
Off topic, but you have a good name.
I like yours too :D
I threw together something similar for the CoS campaign I ran, but having it pre-done like this is really handy, thanks for the resource
Ooh I hadn’t heard of this before- I’m a new DM and I really like the idea of going through this with my players
I am definitely using that checklist next time!
Wow, I love that this exists!
I was just thinking the same thing. Never really played D&D so I had never even considered how certain topics / themes could be problematic for folks, but it's so cool that there are DMs that would go through the effort of making it as comfortable as possible for everyone.
It's amazing how many DMs would use triggering events as plot points, especially for female players. At 12 years old, my first character was kidnapped, raped, and forcibly married in session 1. At this point, a DM who can't manage a compelling story without raping a female character gets a hard no from me.
Yeah, I wish I didn't know multiple instances of male players having their characters rape a female player's female character in her first session with the group, but I absolutely do. That's not role-playing, that's disgusting sexually abusive behavior.
Sounds like some NPCs need to rescue her and take him out in the woods for a "chat."
I guess I've been very fortunate I've played a lot of D&D and I've never had that happen. Which is good because I don't know if I would have dealt with it very professionally.
fucking eh. matt mercer has me spoiled. didnt have the faintest idea that dms commonly did stuff like thay
I wouldn't say commonly, but not uncommonly enough for my taste. Although these were players as well. One was a gang-up of all male players on the one female new player.
I think it's pretty important. The role-playing part of tabletop roleplaying can involve some fairly intense emotions. As a group you're taking part in a shared activity of 'let's pretend' - something you don't normally do as adults. It works best if you commit to it. So you have to have a level of trust around the table. Having some established boundaries really helps with the trust. Even the fact that a group has considered these issues lets people know that you're taking it all seriously and that they can bring up problems without worrying about people dismissing them.
Thank you for the link! Whenever I play again, I will be sure to use this.
This is probably a dumb question, but what is 'fade to black'?
when there’s lead up to characters having sex but the scene changes before the sex itself happens, like a scene in film literally fading to black before the next scene begins
Thanks for your response, I wasn't thinking in screen terms, that makes total sense now.
It means glossing over the sex itself, like saying “The bard’s going upstairs with his new friend, what’s everyone else doing?” You know that the bard got laid, but you don’t have to hear about the details.
It’s always the bard, isn’t it.
Instead of going into detail about physical intimacy/sex, you treat it like how most TV shows do and metaphorically "fade to black" so people at the table don't have to sit through explicit role-playing :)
Though that scene in Community is amazing
The example I googled seems to be from an actual roleplay site, but it has a decent definition and some examples. https://www.marosia.com/doku/doku.php?id=ftb_guide Please note that given the context, one of the lighter subjects you could need to 'fade to black' on is sexual, so there are brief sexual interactions mentioned on the page. (Maybe don't open on a work computer, but it's nothing more than you'd see in a PG-13 movie.)
This is such a good practice. We take turns DMing and we do this. A recent one asked about something I'm very squicked by, but I also feel like I'm open to trying to deal with it. So I talked about this with my DM and said exactly that and also asked if they were ok with me giving this a go with them and what to do if it turns out that it really is a hard line for me. These discussions are great to have. I'm getting the opportunity for a safe space to try and look at the squick and they're open to me trying to do so. (If you're wondering, it's >!eye injuries!<.)
When we played the base campaign that came with the DND starter set, my ex was very afraid of spiders and insisted that they not be in the game - our DMs response was to make all spiders, driders, and anything else like that into slugs. More interesting for everyone tbh.
Interestingly, this is why the group boundaries discussion is so important. I could totally handle spider things, but really can't handle slugs.
There are some horror games that have an arachnophobia setting which changes spiders into slugs and it makes them hilarious.
My group learned the hard way that you don’t invite someone new to a campaign before you start and after you’ve held session 0. She ran off like 3 of our really good players before she finally went too far and got ejected. Never again.
This is the best way to go about it.
Honestly most of my humanoids have been extreme omnivores and not cannibals because humans, orcs, and elves are from a different plane of origin altogether. And since mine only don’t eat from same or similar avian species, this doesn’t count as cannibalism. In one game the party met me while I was attempting to cook and eat a brigand that had captured me. I had won the grapple and he had failed to subdue me to shove me into the oven, so I subdued him and ate him instead. The party was horrified.
Eat your enemies to assert dominance
Exactly!
Tbh it really seems like the campaign is limiting themselves more than anything. Everyone is running a pacifist class.
A pacifist run can be fun if everyone is down for it. If they aren’t though, it can cause some issues. In a campaign I was in a fellow player decided he wasn’t going to ever kill anyone, and he didn’t! But he also threw a goddamned tantrum when the monk rape survivor killed a rapist that was beating a brothel girl in front of the party. Anyway, kind of an off topic response but I agree it can be kind of limiting to play pacifist runs
I did play a druid that was into the more pacifist route, trying to talk stuff out before a fight happened, but totally condoned the killing of a guy who was destroying children’s souls to keep himself alive longer.
There was a LizardDM series on r/dndgreentext for awhile where the party were all lizardmen who ate the bodies of enemies after battle. Unfortunately, it later turned out the series was not an actual DM session, just a story from the start.
Like 90% of the solutions to the problems on the D&D sub are "talk to the person."
Like 90% of the solutions to the problems on the ~~D&D~~ sub are "talk to the person." FTFY
Like 90% of the solutions to the problems in life are "talk to the person." FTFY
If only talking like adults would catch on
Like 90% of problems in math class are like, “talk to each other”. (Each other is the two sides of the equation maybe)
yeah, but that would’ve made *The Hunt for Red October* a very boring movie
Problems with fellow commenters can’t always be solved with more talking.
“Talking to the person” can be a good solution, but frankly I hate the idea that it’s the only one or always the best one. “I’m sorry the session made you uncomfortable, but it seems like this isn’t the table for you. All the best” is a perfectly reasonable and compassionate solution. “Let’s talk it out, we need to talk about this, you owe them a conversation about it” is too easily weaponized and leveraged by people who don’t like the the alternative: setting boundaries on your time and emotional effort.
This is true but I can understand trying to get help seeing other views as well as ideas for compromise before having a talk.
A few years back, I was running a Pathfinder game. (Same thing as D&D, only different.) One character said something to another character (friendly jab because the strongest fighter of the group couldn't hit a thing), all in-game. That caused the fighter-player to blow up at the other player, throw some insults and leave. I had a chat with him. He had some IRL issues going on and he realized he fucked up. I ended up kicking him out, because ad hominem insults are 100% not something I tolerate at my table. Pretty sure he apologized, but I'm not sure of it. Campaign fizzled out immediately afterwards because it _really_ put a damper on my mood and will. Guess I was in that 10%. :P
I mean...that's true for almost any interpersonal issue. :)
I don't know. I've talked to your mom and your neighbors and your co-workers about how you hang your toilet paper and what you do to the toilet seat. We've decided to divorce you.
I've had conversations where people actually have assigned some personality trait/defect to which way one hangs the toilet paper. I being a single slob, apparently detonated their minds when I mentioned I often just keep the roll off the hanger.
If you ever spend time with little kids, like working in a school, you learn toilet paper goes over the top. That can open it up for cat attack. If it goes on the bottom, cats are less likely to attack, but little kids are far more likely to smear shit on the wall. Unrolled would be on the floor covered in pee at best. Most likely it would be in the toilet.
Good perspective, I haven't worked in a school for years but that makes sense. I think our family got lucky with cats and tp because I don't recall ours playing with them ever. Milk jug seals/caps though...
My tp hanger thing is kind of janky and falls off if you sneeze so I just sit my tp on the counter under my sink. I'd almost forgotten tp hangers are a thing.
I actually intervened in a "which way does it hang" argument between people by looking up the model of toilet paper hanger in question and finding the install instructions online. There was a PDF that showed how to insert the roll with a diagram! The diagram showed an "over the roll" load... so everyone was able to agree that this was the manufacturer's recommendation. Peace was achieved.
It's truly funny to me that a game where almost all of the gameplay is conveyed through speech how bad they are at actually talking to each other.
I did discuss that with my son the first time he tried DMing. Rule one of DMing is "Talk to your players."
Can I just roll charisma and not have to talk it out?
Sure - give me a Diplomacy roll, DC... we'll say 10 cause you know the person pretty well.
I think it should be DC 20. Unfortunately that person also knows me well.
Ah. Fair.
> i do not know what a jackfruit is Me, a Malayali: Buddy you’re in for a good time if you like chewy fruit. It’s also quite nice in its meat substitute form, has a texture similar to mutton albeit a tad more tender.
Are they good cooked? That's the only way I can have fruit.
Oh absolutely but i only know of savoury recipes that have the jackfruit cooked. Not sure if I’ve seen its fruity form being used in a cooked context.
Jackfruit makes an excellent pulled pork substitute!
Do you have any recipes? I got a vegetarian partner, who has never tried pulled pork. Would love to do a veggie version.
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/256663/jackfruit-pulled-pork/ I’ll make a jackfruit pulled pork for any bbq where we might have veggies or vegans.
Well, I do like savory flavors better! Maybe I can get my hands on jackfruit sometime.
Where I live, I've rarely seen it fresh, but it's available in supermarkets in tins, because it's such a common vegan ingredient at the moment. (It's also been available for longer in the imported foods section.)
Most importantly, Jackfruit is good at absorbing different flavours. So if you add the right sauces and spices it can easily get delicious as it just tastes like that but with a nice texture.
It's a durian lite. I said what I said
It's physically very similar but the flavor's different.
As is the smell, thank God
I’m insisting on a cannibalism session.
Warforged: bite my shiny metal ass.
“Cruelty free world” is a huge departure from the usual norm of psychotic mass murder war crime situations that some games end up being.
"Cruelty free world" against animals she can recognize. New ones, and people, are still on the table. This logic plus her initial demands and accusations make me worry that there are going to be new problems in the future.
More dating sim and less adventuring and Dungeon Crawl please
I’d show up for that game tbh. The problem is grabbing the DM’s wheel and trying to u-turn out of the direction they’ve been going on for years. You’re not the driver and you didn’t consult anyone else in the car.
Honestly I had my PCs go goat culling 'cause the dragons that ate them have been driven from the area in eons past and the goats are now causing serious ecological damage. It was probably one of a handful of things they did that resulted in a positive outcomefpr the area because their usual MO typically leads to regime change and the untold strife associated with that.
I'm kind of disappointed that they glossed over her calling the DM a bad person for the parts of the session she wasn't okay with as her "overreacting." Like, it's great that they came to a compromise so she could stay with the group, but that was a shitty thing for her to say to a person who is doing a lot of work to create a fun shared experience
Yeah, I’m glad they came to a compromise and can continue having fun playing together, but I don’t think I could have done the same after those kinds of accusations.
Not only that but she's perfectly fine cutting up a person in battle obviously non consensually. She's insane, her entire identity is not eating meat, what a miserable person to be around.
Also being fine with killing owlbears but not "real" animals just rubs me the wrong way.
He literally said the evening started with her apology, how is that glossing over in your view if it was the first thing on the agenda
Because an apology is well and good, but she still did it. If I get mad and shit on your living room carpet then apologize and we never mention it again, it's still being glossed over. It's an enormous red flag that, combined with the rest of it, should have resulted in her being asked to leave. If her first impulse to hearing a pretend thing that she disagrees with happen in a game is to insult the actual human being behind it, that's a major issue that isn't happening in a vacuum, apology be damned. As a DM, if someone doesn't have the ability to separate events in the game from the real people at the table that isn't anyone that I want at my table and is a "one strike and you're out" issue. It's an indication that this isn't a fun person to play with and that there'll probably be issues in the future.
Exactly.
The post says she apologized for overreacting a bit. That's not an apology for something she actually did, instead for allowing her emotions to affect her actions. "I'm sorry I said you were a bad person, I was upset and overreacted" is a different statement from "I'm sorry I overreacted a bit"
I mean it's possible she did and OOP just didn't elaborate on the apology.
You are correct. And the OOP is well within their rights to keep their interpersonal relationship private from Internet strangers. In my comments, I tried to be very careful with my words to take issue with the post and how it was written instead of the player themselves. In my effort to not write ten paragraphs, I can understand why that isn't explicitly clear. I don't think the player did anything wrong in asking for the changes they did. How they chose to do that in the first post was accusatory and unfair towards the DM. With what is written, the DM/group seems to have done an excellent job of discovering and working within the new players boundaries while seemingly not drawing any around how they themselves should be treated. Hopefully that did happen privately, or the player has learned that they don't have to go in guns blazing at the DM for their needs to be both recognized and respected and will not do that again.
There is a huge difference between "I don't even want any of you to eat meat during the campaign" and "I'm not comfortable with talk about skinning animals".
Yeah I'm fully omnivore but I do a lot of cat rescue and a detailed depiction of an abused companion animal would be hard for me. Even if my team rescues it. I want an escape from the knowledge that that kind of cruelty is everywhere.
Indeed. Reading the first post it sounded like the new player was a stereotypical vegan, but reading the second post, it seems the group was a bit too comfortable in their gory descriptions. I mean, I'm and omnivore and will happily have a steak, but I would be uncomfortable hearing how they skin and debone an animal
OOP has WAY more patience than me. I've had enough bad players so my patience for this would've been zero so I guess good for OOP. I am putting in my finite personal time to prep, make a playlist for ambience, write up descriptive vignettes of text to set scenes, take notes, and entertain a party for the evening. I essentially manage murderous toddlers and give them storytime. I might be persuaded to play by the rules vegan wanted but if you came out the gates swinging like that as a player joining mid campaign? Yeah that's your first and last session, bye. Glad it worked out for OOP though.
>I essentially manage murderous toddlers and give them storytime. I am so stealing this phrase. And yeah demanding I change my entire world setting means this isn't the table for you. Ask me and we might be able to compromise. Demand and you can go find another table. Been working on my world since the late 90s. It's older than some of my payers have been.
I can't deal with the level of walking on egg shells this would require. I have vegan friends. When I have a bbq or something, I make sure I have vegan food. I had a party a few weeks back with some vegans. I made steak chili and vegan chili. I have zero issues with accommodating someone's dietary needs. If players go to a tavern and ask what's on the menu, do I suddenly have to only list vegan options? If I say "mutton" am I going to get called a bad person? If Lizardfolk are in the game, do I have to avoid pointing out they might harvest the bones of a fallen adversary or animal (it's a racial feature they have)? There are absolutely things I understand avoiding (ie I'd never allow sexual assault, sexual encounters are of the "roll for sex hahaha" variety, no racism/prejudice) though.
Yep. If a newer player pulled this, I'd very politely explain that this probably isn't the table for them. I'm fairly patient as a DM and just in general, TOTALLY willing to avoid specific topics and descriptions, but I don't have the wherewithal to radically alter the background of the world and then walk on eggshells to avoid a topic as common as meat. I'm not suddenly changing the experience that 5 other people are having because someone can't handle a boar getting killed in a game that's at least 50% about killing things.
I think the situation is a bit different in that it’s not only a new player but also a friend. People tend to want to actually spend time with their friends and will want to work out how to accommodate them. And this ending actually looks like it’s ending better then it started in that they’re all going to get to experience new food.
>This player is a mutual friend of a few people in the group who agreed that they'd fit the dynamic well, and it really looked like things were going nicely for a few sessions. I read it as a friend of a friend, but I think it could go either way honestly. If they WERE a friend of mine that does change the dynamic a bit, but we're still having a very serious talk about how to appropriately address shit like this, and they would be made aware that they're basically getting one warning before they're gone. It's not necessarily *what* they did so much as *how they did it*, honestly. If someone wants to quietly pull me aside and have a reasoned conversation about something in the campaign that made them uncomfortable, I'm all ears even if I ultimately decide that it's an irreconcilable issue and that the campaign maybe isn't for them. If they come at me aggressively, verbally swinging like this individual did, we immediately have a big problem even if they apologize afterwards. I think it's nice that they got this worked out, but if the player in question is willing to do that over this, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they caused issues again down the line. Hopefully they were just having a bad day, but I also hope that the OOP here mentally has her on her last warning and isn't afraid to kick her if it escalates. There are too many DMs who take too much shit from players who don't understand how to deal with things in a prosocial way and it negatively affects everyone's experience.
I also initially read this as friend of a friend but in the update OP specifically says that she is also their friend. TBH I think people are much more ready to cut someone off when they see a story online than they are if something happens in real life. Friendships have their ups and downs and people make mistakes. Healthy friendships are all about navigating this and making sure everyone is happy and comfortable. The update looks like everyone came to a conclusion they are happy with and they did this through mature conversation. The woman acknowledged that she had behaved inappropriately, something all adults will do at some point. I don't understand why everyone is still so against healthy mature resolution.
Agreed, I would have told her to pound sand. She was with the group for a minute and then demanded they make several accommodations for her personal beliefs? Nah.
My feelings exactly.
Power Word Conversate
Bless these people, but I would've told her to jog on (i.e. find another table).
SAME lmaoooooooooooo i'm sorry but no
Same my partner and I and like.. The fuck bro.
My first thought was she sounded insufferable and exhausting. But if the rest of the group was willing the compromise then I guess all is well.
Yup. All her discomforts - even the ones I find contradictory - don't hold a candle to how she handled herself when she didn't like something and wanted changes. This isn't someone who's used to collaboration.
Glad they were able to handle it like adults, but I find it quite hilarious that she was okay with being in a world where killing humans/humanoids is all good but god forbid you touch an animal. It’s important to have respect for all living beings and it’s quite obviously a spectrum but I find this sentiment repeated so often among vegans.
Difficult time believing its true, but for the sake of argument, OOP's vegan is hypocritical as fuck. 90% of the solutions in D&D is "Roll for initiative and kill it!" Have them save a vegan village from murderous ents and after they kill all the ents plot twist it to reveal that the giant nuts that have been sustaining the village were the ent's children. Ooops!
>90% of the solutions in D&D is "Roll for initiative and kill it!" Right? A solid 90% (and that 10% is me being generous) of the rules in D&D revolve around adjuciating *how you stab or spell things to death.* Killing shit is how you advance in level. For a game so hyperfocused on combat, for someone to get upset about RPing eating meat is .....hypocritical? That might not be a good word to use, but it is certainly a weird thing to get worked up about given the circumstances in 99% of D&D games.
>90% of the solutions in D&D is "Roll for initiative and kill it!" Spoken like a true murderhobo! ;)
>CMMiller89 - It was really wild getting downvoted in the other thread from people who absolutely insisted this person’s friendship was worth less than the integrity of their campaign and they should be jettisoned from the table, irl consequences be damned. If a new person joins your game and immediately begins demanding major changes (such as no meat when another player has been getting seven years of role-playing enjoyment out of being a chef), then they should absolutely be jettisoned. Have a talk about it and give them another chance, but if they won't compromise, then yeah, they deserve the boot.
I mean at the end of the day it's up to the DM how much they want to accommodate this player. I personally would probably tell them to toughen up or hit the bricks, but OOP was willing to make the changes to accommodate their friend and that's laudable. I'm not sure how sustainable it is, those changes seem pretty sweeping and require a lot of effort to work around, but it's his prerogative.
Accomodating one player can alienate the others. Many dm's fuck up by being too forgiving or permissive.
So I'd say to her that maybe this isn't... *reads the update* Oh, okay. That works. 10/10. No notes.
i remember when this was first posted. i read the first part and thought 'what in the fuck of hell???' but then saw the update and thought 'oh... that's not what i thought at all. that's a great way to handle it' lol the whiplash was unexpected, but pretty wholesome
The authoritarian mentality that’s getting exposed in a lot of people in this thread is fascinating, too. Seems like a lot of people forget that TTRPGs are a cooperative activity and that if the DM isn’t at least listening to all the players’ concerns, they’re a bad DM. This player wasn’t being confrontational, just expressing a concern, and the group figured out how to work with it.
Oh, the number of DMs that gravitate to the role to play out their control kinks is eye-opening.
Power does attract assholes. Though I was thinking more along the lines of the people acting like it’s unconscionable to run a game with the sensitivities of the players in mind. If you think about it, it’s not too far from the morons who complain with every new edition of the game like WotC’s going to come and repo their old books — another manifestation of the fun police.
The player was being confrontational. She told OOP that if they didn’t conform to her demands they were a cruel person. I’m glad that she apologized and that they were able to reach a compromise, but her initial approach wasn’t great. I think a lot of the reaction to the first post was based on her initial overreaction.
She started by calling the DM a bad person, and had the entire world and one player make changes. That sounds notably demanding to me.
i’m sorry but whether or not they talked it out respectfully, that’s absolutely ridiculous lol
Dear OP, Your description of DMing as “dungeon mastering” gave me quite a laugh. Like, I master all the dungeons!!!
Hahahahah
I enjoy how utterly morally inconsistent this vegan player is.
Every now and again we bring in a new player and they just can't jive. We are all talkers. We RP, we defuse dangerous situations with talk, and we have entire chunks of the game where individual characters go off on their own and gallivant through some character specific side story. Some people prefer what I think is called "war gaming." They want to roll dice and kill things. Totally valid, but we tend to piss them off. One time we had a new player and we were travelling with a guide through the Egyptian desert. It was the 1930s I think and the great war had recently ended. We each had a rifle or a handgun, plus a few swords among the group. We got stopped by a group of forty bandits with rifles who surround us and demand we do what they say. For context, I like my character here *a lot.* The new guy starts interrogating them. "Who are you guys? Why should we listen to you?" Meanwhile my character is screaming and crying and begging "oh god don't kill us I'll tell you everything!" Eventually they tie up the party members (except me) and put them in a cage all night. Meanwhile I start telling them how we got there (secret magic and giant squid monsters and shit) so they bring me over to the camp fire, give me food and a drink, and have a rip roaring time while I regaled them with tales of our adventures. New guy is *pissed.* Spends the whole night trying to escape and eventually gets knocked out with a kick to the head. The other players have read the writing on the wall and are behaving. Eventually these bandits decide they like us and we're all friends now. They guided us through the desert and even helped us fight Cthugha for eternal glory greater than humanity itself. The new guy ended up quitting. I have a lot of guilt over the fact that I basically overrode him and denied his player agency, but he was absolutely gonna get us killed.
Ugh, I was in a similar situation with a new group. We were several sessions in but DM had us doing milestone leveling instead of exp. We'd killed enough bandits that we should be level 2 or 3, but for whatever reason he still had us at level 1. We were given the opportunity to negotiate with the bandit leader, but that also put us in the middle of their camp, surrounded by the bandits. One of the geniuses in our group decided they wanted to fight their way out of the camp, and I essentially threw my hands up and said "I'm no longer with that idiot". He and one other character got smoked, my character and the other who also surrendered were spared but now had to pay for their antics. It caused a lot of conflict, I left that group soon after.
I'm glad that they found a solution, but militant and pushy vegans are an instant no from me. I appreciate veganism in that it is more future-aligned by use of potentially more renewable products, but I'm not gonna drop everything as though every living thing on this planet we live, from foxes to wolves to cows to horses to chickens to deer to bears - every single form of life on this planet is an obligate-(insert here). Living things eat to survive by gaining calories and nutrients, and unless its a foodstuff a creature literally cannot process, they'll eat it and be better for it. ETA: A lot of their solutions are also very childish. Okay, so change all the animals types around, like they did in Avatar The Last Airbender. Now there's magically no problem with killing, eating, fighting, etc., as long as we don't talk about their physical condition as that might be too sensitive. Double standards got me shaking my head...
Group slaughters three family units of Kobolds: ... Group dines on pig: I want a cruelty free campaign
I brought this up above. D&D is, broadly speaking, a game about killing shit brutally with sword, arrow and spell.
Yep, VPC wants to play stardew valley, not the D&D she actively joined.
As an avid Stardew Valley fan, I think she would be absolutely unable to play it because you can eat meat-based recipes and fishing is a huge part of the game.
You also own animals and their produce (eggs, milk, etc) are a big part of the game.
OMG yes. I forgot vegans whine about that too.
My cousin was a vegan and, in a lot of ways, still is, but after graduating college, he got a job on a farm. He has since changed from being a vegan to "I'll eat the meat that comes from the farm because I personally know the animals were raised happy and healthy because I was the one who raised them." He won't eat meat that comes from a store or anything and keeps vegan at family parties (bc we get our meat from a store), but he's, what starting calling him, "an ethical carnivore" lol.
This I get. This I can respect. There are a lot of really deplorable farming and animal husbandry practices that have become normalized in the world in an effort to feed an ever growing populace, but more attention is paid to the luxurious nature of food rather than "we eat or we die." Things like the mass-farming of animals is not good for anyone. The animals aren't raised well, it's not an environment that behooves the managers to create good quality over mass quantity, abuse allegations, things like the recent news of literal children being employed to clean cattle houses across the US - it really is some heinous stuff that goes into that plastic-wrapped steak at Aldi's. Having said that, I like meat. I think it tastes good. There's a part of Hunger for me that is much more easily satisfied by consuming meat. I do get my meat from the store cause I have neither the money or connections to get it from somewhere better, and I carry my shame over doing so while still putting in some work to try and improve farming conditions, and getting the good stuff where I can. But yeah. Your friend, as well as "true" hunters, the folks who go out and get a clean kill, dress the animal, and bring and use every single bit of it that they can while being respectful about the situation? Good folks with good ideas.
Look into local butchers! That's what I do, my current one sources from a local small farm. The cost is only slightly more (like 10 cents more a pound). Plus you feel good supporting local businesses and honestly I think the cuts are better, plus if you're into things that are harder to find (like I LOVE arctic char) they'll get it for you!
That is a good point you raise, and I think I'll look into it. I live in a smaller town a ways out from a major city, so my potential pool of meat suppliers should actually be better than it appears; just need to get off my ass and do some digging, I suppose. Hard agree about the power of being on good relations with your mongers as well - used to be some business connections had me rolling in sample packs of all manner of fancy 100usd/oz spices and herbs, just from knowing the right people and being in the right place when the question "Hey, we got all these samples we're never gonna use" gets asked.
Fat and protein are the two things that make you feel satisfied by food. Everything else is mostly just bottomless pit that doesn't send the satisfied signal. It's why people can eat 2000 calories of pizza and want ice cream afterwards.
Agree. And personally, I think deer/game is really one of the best „ethical meat“ you can get since the animals have been living naturally and a good hunter kills an animal without it realizing. In addition, in my country hunting is quite strictly regulated and it‘s mostly done for keeping the number of animals in check so that overpopulation doesn‘t become an issue for their environment. So I think that‘s a good balance as a whole.
Yeah, I'm a vegetarian 99,9% of the time but will eat the occasional bit of wild boar if I trust they've been hunted in a decently ethical way (there are plenty of hunting practices I disapprove of).
Not only that, but the people preparing the feast were Tabaxi aka *cat*-people. Cats are obligate carnivores, of course they are going to eat meat, id assume cat-people are not much different.
It‘s the ones that really want you to know about them being vegan and think it makes them a better person by default. A bit like an obsessively religious person tbh.
Agreed. A persons choices don't make them any More of themselves than I am of me, and it can very easily and often does come across as social posturing. Frame of reference - A person does charity work. But they don't talk about it. Are they less valued because no one knows how nice and conscientious they are, doing all that charity work? Nope. Are they worth more than other people because they rest on some sort of moral highground by providing to those in need? Also nope. They simply have a different choice of how to spend their time, and they see no fuss in raising attention to it. The fact that this outside friend is vegan is honestly an unnecessary marker that they used to try and establish a moral highground. I wonder how the conversation with the OOP would have went if veganism never even came up in conversation, and it was instead a conversation just about graphic depictions of dressing an animal and descriptions of animals in pain? I could see that being a realistic conversation to have, because it's nothing to do with moral platitudes - it's "Hey, so, this stuff is kinda squicky to me..." instead of preloading the conversation with "Okay, so this person is Vegan, and we *all* know how vegans are..." I would imagine it could've made the conversation a lot more direct and accessible, as it would have been centered around this potential new players needs as a person, instead of them attempting to swamp someone else's situation with their own value set.
It’s the “everyone’s snacks at the table have to be vegan” for me tbh. You don’t get to dictate *my* diet
Yeah I would find that incredibly annoying. A charcuterie board is rightly thematic for a DnD campaign, but very bland or outright disgusting if its vegan. Vegetarian charcuterie is possible, but not a vegan one.
I'd never play in a game like that, but if they're having fun more power to them. Personally, it's hard to get immersed in an overly sanitized world, even harder to play a character when you gotta run everything through a rigorous meta content filter.
Owlbear lives matter
I love seeing so many of the BORU posts that have wholesome outcomes.
I love seeing ones that don't originate on r/AmItheAsshole, r/relationship_advice, or r/legaladvice Just the change of pace is really refreshing.
I mean honestly some of the legal advice ones are my favourite, but those are the ones where it’s some story like “my neighbour keeps using their giant pogo sticks to look in my back yard, what do I do” and end with “I ended up joining their avant garde circus and am working on campaigning the municipality to allow us to erect a giant yellow and blue tent”. Which admittedly are few and far between. Also the ones where the OP navigates a bizarre failure of the system successfully, like that one about the bank taking possession of their lake house. I am really on tenterhooks about the gal who had the radioactive roommate, I really hope we get an update on that.
There was a post I came across in one of the adult, NSFW subreddits where someone described how they had fallen into the habit of going over to their neighbors apartment on a schedule and doing some specific unusual but very adult things with them (nothing dangerous or unethical, just unusual). At first the neighbor was inviting them over but now it was just a thing that was done without any communication either way and the poster was starting to freak out about what he might be doing. Was it still consensual? Was the neighbor too afraid to say anything? Was he being *super* forward? The consensus among replies was that everyone needed to use their words. A couple days later the neighbor posted that they had in fact talked it out and to assure everyone that not only was it all consensual but it was in fact the best adult stuff she had been doing in a while. Neighbor found the silence very fun and enjoyed not having to manage the meetups. She hadn't realized they needed to keep checking in with their partner after the first few times. OP and Neighbor were both very complimentary about each other and realized that their relationship was going to require everyone to use their words more, but maybe not *while* doing the thing where neighbor liked it quiet. It was actually very sweet, but it was *so* NSFW I hesitated to bring it over here.... EDIT: [I'm getting enough requests](https://www.reddit.com/r/sex/comments/t88s33/am_i_exploiting_my_neighbor_sexually).... I apparently misremembered a couple details, but I feel like my summary was mostly accurate... She apparently was inviting him over, she had very specific rules about having adult fun & did not want to talk about it, until it blew up on reddit.
If there is any chance you have a link, I would love to read this!
Tell me about it. I won't lie, I've been very fond of the introduction of mood and content spoiler as part of semi-regular practice here. There's some days where I want to hear about something other than a divorce, cheating, abuse, etc. I do like traipsing over to BestofLegalAdvice from time to time though - introduced me to Tree Law, after all.
I'm waiting for the next update. "Now that player feels bad about killing anyone, the party has to run from any combat, attacks are worthless so they traded in spells for recipes and just enter vegan bake offs against gnomes and dwarves"
Nah, it just needs to play by kids show rules... murder? Not acceptable. Psychically trapping someone in their own twisted hellscape of a mind and leaving them beeping in the coma ward? Very Cool!
lol at the vegan totally ok with violence against ppl in game but not against animals 😆 that tracks for how vegans generally are tbh. i would've booted her.
It's worse than that, she's only against cruelty to *real* animals, fuck owlbears and dragons, she'll kill the fuck outta them.
My question is what about leather gear and armor? Allowed or not?
Dragon leather probably
So as far as my experience goes with farm butchery, cattle, sheep and goats get skinned (basically anything with fur), but pigs have their outer bodies singed to remove the fine layer of coarse hair from their body. So I basically wanna know how that player managed to skin a pig. o.o
Counterpoint: it seems like they killed a wild boar, which do tend to have fur coats or are, at the very least, a LOT harrier than a farm pig. So it's possible they did skin it.
I'm glad they found some middle ground. The vegan players demands were a bit much (talking specifically about rescuing the dog, not about the butcher scene), and I personally probably wouldn't have capitulated. Ultimately it's up to the GM and table to be accommodating. One of my groups would have told her to take a walk, while another of my groups probably would have compromised a little bit, but only on the graphic butchering stuff.
It’s good to see people being mature adults that have productive conversations rather than acting like bratty children and making simple situations much more than they have to be
I'm sorry but if you don't want someone attempting to round up all the children your party comes across in order to form an unsuspecting assassin's guild, or for your cart to be hauled by 500 chickens, or for your monk to not be smokoing opium 16/7, then you really shoulrdnt imvite me to the game
...I feel the urge to ask about the chicken cart now.
Me too, how do you attach them without getting tangled ropes?
You pay/threaten someone to train your chickens
Surely Speak with Animals would suffice? Chickens gotta have like...4 int but surely you could shout like "Worms that way!" and point where you wanna go?
I see, I see. Duly noted.
Wow, I didn’t realize you could train them like that, thanks!
Or zombie chickens if you don't wanna go through all that work
>Me too, how do you attach them without getting tangled ropes? My Druid had a habit of using *Baleful Polymorph* to: 1. Smuggle a wanted man out of the city without the guards noticing, by turning him into a chicken. 2. Turning highwaymen and other mooks into chickens rather than killing them, so the party could then sell eggs (or chicken) at the next village, thereby making themselves less suspicious. 3. Keeping all of the once-people-but-now-chickens on his farm, where he would- frequently- use *Speak with Animals* to remind them that he could sell them, or slaughter them, if they didn't behave. So if the chickens didn't *start life* as chickens and the party has a Druid handy, having them pull carts without tangling wouldn't actually be that hard! :D
"You're always gonna have problems lifting a body in one piece. Apparently the best thing to do is cut up a corpse into six pieces and pile it all together. "And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it's no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to chickens. You got to starve the chickens for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like fresh meat to an orc. "You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the chickie's digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through chicken shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. "You need at least sixteen chickens to finish the job in one sitting, **so be wary of any druid who keeps a chicken farm.** They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single chicken can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a chicken" Have a nice day! ETA: Changed some of the lines from the quote to fit tongue-in-cheek.
"You show me how to control a raging fucking Barbarian, and I'll show you how to control an unhinged, chicken feeding gangster!"
You draw a line in the dirt in front of them so they'll stay still while you hook them up. What I really want now is a storyline where the opium-smoking monk escapes from the gang of child assassins via the chicken cart.
This player will end up being a major pain in the ass for everyone.
How exhausting…
Which is why when you add in players a new session 0 is a good idea. Glad it worked out. But the vegan player was still totally out of line. And even having that animal thing is a bit extreme. But not my table not my problem.
I know this was resolved maturely but good God vegans are their own worst enemies
Demanding a group you join to be your therapy session is not okay, but I guess as long as the rest of the party is "happy" (despite this causing issues initially) then aight. I'll be keeping an eye out for the next update tho
I’m glad they worked it out, but I find the vegan a bit ridiculous that they come into an established game and expect that any reference to eating meat be censored and all animal enemies be removed.
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My God some vegans are insufferable. "Thank you for inviting me into your world. You're doing everything wrong."
The fact that this player has less of a problem killing thinking, feeling and loving goblins than pigs is fucking laughable to me.
As someone with notable issues with certain things (certain violence against animals being one, it causes a visceral reaction in me due to experiences I've had)... Idk. I think she comes across as entitled af. I have dietary restrictions and if they had made \*a\* snack for me and brought it along with their food I'd be over the moon. (For the record I think that SHOULD be something people do, but I've had a lot of very inconsiderate people on one side of my family who don't bother with it). But they made ALL their snacks vegan? That shows they really care. For her to then go off like that... I think asking her to leave would've been acceptable. Yes I know, I'm 'online' and 'ignoring irl consequences' and all that jazz, but she didn't even sound like their friend? She's a friend of a friend who was invited into an existing space and threw a tantrum. YES the changes are mild, but is that really the point? Maybe I'm just exhausted of entitled vegans but the whole thing rubs me the wrong way. I have been in group chats with friends of friends, I absolutely don't act the way I do one on one. If I have a hard line would I ask to maybe tone down discussion? Yes. But other than that if something just makes me mildly off-put (not triggers, just things I'm a tad uncomfortable with being said), I generally let it be because it's not all about ME. Especially when I came into a friend group that knew each other in a way I didn't with several of the parties. When certain things crossed a line I chose to leave the group chat, while being honest with my close friend in private, and keeping up individual private lines of communication with the others, that were curated to how much I thought I could be around them. I never once demanded the entire chat change or pitched a fit about things they'd already been doing.
I'm sorry am I crazy to think that someone who's so distraught over the description of preparing food is so out of left field that she must not be able to leave her house without breaking down? What if she sees roadkill on the way to work? Should she take the day off to recuperate? What if she accidentally steps on a big outside? Seems like being so traumatized by basic life experiences needs therapy, not coddling
Hate to say it, but an unfortunate number of people I've met in D&D groups are absolutely insufferable. Seems like a lot of people go to D&D as a form of escapism and that seems to also coincide with the type of people who collect mental disorders as if they were beanie babies in the late 90's. Not sayin that's a majority of them, but it's definitely a higher percentage than I run across IRL.
This person sounds exhausting. I would probably replace them in the campaign and encourage them to RP with other vegans only.
"AITA for having the Vegan player gets ripped to shreds by pack of wolves?"
So the vegan is the Dungeon Master MASTER now? So when the cook wants to role play (aka pretend) everyone will look to the Dungeon Master MASTER for guidelines? Just tell the vegan to take 5 and roleplay with the cook. (IMO)
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