 Hey everyone, thanks. Thanks for stopping by. Thanks for coming to visit me here Here in Pokemon purgatory where I now canonically reside Awaiting a glorious rebirth of destruction That may never come I don't have I don't have much going on. I don't have much going on here in my little egg here being a little egg boy But it's given me time it's given me time to reflect to reflect on life and the universe and everything and Everything that ever was or is or ever shall be and I got to say I've become I've become pretty fucking wise in the intervening time. I've become I've become pretty much the wisest Thing that ever existed. I know you can't see it through my little eggshell, but I'm but I'm smiling wisely Constantly in here because my wisdom is just so fucking powerful and radiant that when this shell cracks The the light of my wisdom It will be like will be like will be like the Sun will be like the Sun appears on earth and everything will be destroyed in a glorious A glorious plasma flame of smartness and a genius think thinkery um anyway to the reason the reason I'm the reason I'm talking to you right now is that um my my my dear dear friend and literal human shitpost Tommy Oliver Recently filagrantly attacked me with slanderous lies claiming that Dungeons and Dragons is fun and And um Until and until my return to destroy all that lay before me My words my words are my weapon And I'm going to wield them. I'm going to wield them with such precise accuracy and acumen and and poisons That he will be a slain and lay lay in asunder. All right, that's enough fucking preamble Let's let's talk about Dungeons and Dragons. First of all, I I want to say That I like I get I get where Tommy and where all you fucking joy boys in in the comments saying oh, you're so right I get where you're all coming from because I was there. I was there as a wee baby teen boy And and into my young adulthood Think in Dungeons and Dragons was it was the cool was a cool and nice and good way to spend my time But you know what? I was fucking wrong and I'll tell you why all right, so but I get I get the arguments that oh You're not limited. You're not limited by like a computer system. Yes In Dungeons and Dragons, you can do anything you want and yeah That is that is a strength of the medium and it's pretty much the only strength It's pretty much the whole selling point of D&D. It's oh, you're limited only by your imagination. Well Kinda not really though because okay There's I know like there's different games have different rules But if we're talking about Dungeons and Dragons specifically the rules of Dungeons and Dragons are Really only designed for specific things like you know combat and spell casting and diplomacy, you know the skills and you know They're designed for some things Tommy Tommy talks about how Dungeons and Dragons let you do anything you want and be creative Well within the rules of the game you kind of can but if you go outside of what the game explicitly prescribes like about what the rules that exist in the game are designed to handle then You've gone completely off the rails and you're really not playing Dungeons and Dragons anymore What you're doing is just what you're doing is just like free-form role-playing which is fine Like I don't have a problem with free-form role-playing. I think That's something I mean I still wouldn't free-form role-play for other reasons that I'll get into it I would still think like why bother But I think that I think that Dungeons and Dragons or Another or another like game system designed for live-action role-playing like that is pretty much just inherently Inferior to some like a more free-form thing like that like Because like yeah this benefit of being able to do whatever you want all of the anything all of the anything that happens in A game like that is stuff that happens outside of the of the actual rules of the game And so when you're when you're doing that stuff like why even bother playing Dungeons and Dragons or or or mutants and masterminds or call of Cthulhu or Some white wolf shit or White wolf is at the vampire whatever Why even bother? I hate rules rules bog everything down. That's another thing rules bog everything down Dungeons and Dragons has too many rules Try to fucking play Dungeons and Dragons. I fucking dare you you can't it's literally impossible Because you'll get your friends together. You'll be like, oh, let's make characters and play Dungeons and Dragons Nope, you're gonna spend six fucking hours Well, everyone comes together and like tries to decide what they want their character to be and someone's gonna be new And they're not gonna know how to do it and everyone whose experience might get their character made You know, maybe in a couple hours, but then after that's all done the new people who are just like, oh, what do I do? Walk me through it. It takes for fucking ever You will never ever play Dungeons and Dragons when you set out to you You will always waste the entire night making your characters and it's not even interesting making a character like a low-level character Is not even interesting and yet it takes for fucking ever Because you always end up explaining. Okay That's another thing Actually playing Dungeons and Dragons you get fucking bogged down in the rules I understand that there are probably groups out there who are just so fucking so fucking into it and that know it all so Intuitively that like the game proceeds without a hitch and like, you know The turns flow smoothly one into the other and nobody's sitting around nobody's waiting But I have never ever encountered such a thing always Combat takes fucking hours like one combat will take like hours and hours It'll take the whole fucking night sometimes because there's all this fucking shit happening and everyone wants to like ever it gets their turn You're supposed to fucking think about your turn before you get there and be ready to do what you plan to do And then the DM responds, but it never fucking happens You get to the next person and then there's like oh well There's all this hemming and hauling and like reconsidering and they didn't think about it because they were busy on their phone or some shit I know you're not supposed to do that, but it happens. It fucking happens I defy you if you say that it doesn't oh my group's so good that everyone's fucking bullshit bullshit There's no such group. There's no such fucking group that doesn't make Dungeons and Dragons an absolute chore to play It doesn't exist. I do not have enough faith in the human animal to believe that any such collection of people could ever Convene under any circumstances. No. No, you're lying if you say I'm wrong and then All right, so yeah, everyone fucks around it takes forever Okay, and then as the turns go by everyone gets invested in their turn Like when it's their turns like ooh It's time for me to do my thing time for me to show off my skills and for me to make creative decisions Everyone else tunes the fuck out because everyone wants their turn everyone is excited about their turn and like Someone else is going okay Well, maybe I'll pay a little attention like to be polite Maybe like what they're doing might involve me and ooh, maybe then I'll get invested But no for the most part. It's someone else's turn everyone else is kind of just sitting around just waiting Just waiting for their turn if you're playing with four people that means that in a in a combat scenario 75% of the time spent in that scenario is time that you don't care about because it doesn't have it because you don't need to Do anything you're just waiting for everyone else to do their thing DMing okay, so so these are all reasons why you shouldn't play D&D Tom talks about you know how you need a good DM. I agree a good like if you have a bad DM Of course, there's there's no reason to even fucking bother, but What's in it for the DM right like okay the DM the DM needs to be All right You need to be like a good writer and like creator and like you need to like flesh out a good campaign and like write all This shit ahead of time and be really prepared. That's a lot of work. You have to sink like hours and hours Of your time into preparing for a session of D&D. I mean, maybe not always but a lot of the time It's a lot of fucking work and then you've prepared all your shit and it never fucking goes according to plan like It just doesn't and I'm not saying that's bad like yeah If everything happened according to plan it would be boring but a DM goes in there with all his shit prepared and The players will always derail even if they're not trying to Generally speaking unless the DM is like super railroading like telling the players what to do They'll always do something else and the DM's hard work goes to fucking waste and then the other half of being a DM is you know improvising and working with what the players give you and yeah a good DM needs to be able to do that and You know, there's fun to be had in that but like again coming back to Like if the DM needs to be improving like that, which is where the fun of it lies, right? The fun of D&D lies in the weird edge cases and the oh, I don't know what's happening This has never happened before. How do we handle it? The DM has to come up with something on the fly that is outside the rules of D&D You're not fucking if you're if you're if the DM is being that creative and that improvisational You're not even fucking playing D&D anymore I mean, yeah, you're doing this role-playing within the context of a D&D game But that kind of creativity is not actually Prescribed by the rules of D&D. It's something that it's something that you could do without them So it's it's done and And Like I've had great moments like I've played games of D&D that were fun and memorable and and really memorable things happen I've had like really I've had characters that I really liked and that had like a great Story that I remember and like, you know interesting things happen to them But like I don't know should I debating whether I should get into a specific example, okay Um The last D&D campaign I played it was it was a pretty interesting setting. It was this like Aztec themed world It was like just a tower like everything outside the tower was wilderness We were just inside this this stone tower We we basically had to ascend to the top and my character was a paladin. He was a paladin of friendship He believed in friendship above all else like the divine power that he believed in was friendship It was gay as hell and I fucking loved it But like but he also was like he was like a good guy He was you know, it believed in like the tenets of a civilization because he wanted to be to be friends with everyone But like as it eventually went on that like it turned out that the gods of the civilization were kind of were kind of bad Like these gods were not like the the benevolent gods that they believe that in and he ended up having you know to choose Between like like, you know, do I do I you know could be friends with my do it Do I continue to pursue friendship in like the immediate and like, you know work with my teammates and be You know friends with them or do I uphold like the tenets of my society? You know that I you know friendship on like a mass scale and he had like this real dark tyranny and he kind of Descended into madness and he and he it was really great, but like all right That story that was pretty fun for me to play took place over months. It took place over like maybe a dozen sessions that were each like maybe four or five hours a piece and Maybe in like half of them something interesting happened that progressed the character and then I found to be fun Maybe maybe in half maybe maybe let's even say most like maybe in three quarters of those sessions Did something happen like a story thing that was interesting or like a combat moment that was really unexpected and that like was like Really improvisational and we were like, ooh, I've never seen that before yeah They happen they can be really fun and they could be moments of beauty But they're fucking embedded in this horrible nightmare Scenario of bullshit paperwork and red tape that you all have to sit through and wait in order to get them and Yeah, as much as I enjoyed those bits of the story in that game Looking back I gotta say no it wasn't worth it It was not worth that much energy like to get to them there could have but there could be better ways to to you know to to Experience or to create a story like that and the last thing I want to say is that Tom tells the story with the alligators where you know He tried to diplomacy is the alligators and he rolled and it was a natural 20 and wow He successfully diplomacy is the alligators incredible right wrong because that There you have it he rolled a die and he got a 20 right like whenever you roll a natural 20 The DMs got a thing you know something weird's gotta happen like oh something even something impossible is supposed to be made to happen in some way so that So that can like create an interesting story right like oh somehow he was able to communicate with these alligators well the thing about that is that 19 out of 20 times that doesn't happen and the satisfying conclusion to that story doesn't happen so like 19 times out of 20 The story is just not interesting 19 times out of 20 that would have been like Oh, I tried to talk to the alligators and they just attacked me and I died or I had to fight them or something So what I'm saying is that yeah like an interesting story there would involve like oh Against all odds he was able to communicate with the alligators and sometimes that happens But 19 out of 20 times the story is prevented from taking the more interesting turn 19 out of 20 times You'll be hoping that something interesting will happen and then it won't because the dice will say no the fun and cool thing Don't happen. Sorry, buddy And I know that like the fact that they're rare and chance-based kind of makes them special But still I think that the fact that like the the goodness of the story and like the the The course of the story is randomly decided. Yeah, it makes it unpredictable and it can make unexpected things happen But it also fucking curbs the momentum and can kill a good story that might otherwise have happened Which is why I hate rules-based systems. I hate D&D. I hate you Tom and I hate you the listener This is fucking Ben Saint from Pokemon purgatory. Get fucked. See you next time buckos