Last month I was doing some normal computer maintenance, and when I had gotten everything set up I found the computer wouldnt turn on. Took me a full week to diagnose the problem: it wasn’t plugged into the wall.

Perchance is free

I use the pride flag

It works. Well, it works about as well as your average LLM

AFAIK he was a Democrat at the time. No clue about now. Don’t really want to find out. I’m hoping he took the chill agnostic route but I’m not checking

Actually, no. My justification for my coffee intake was “I need it to focus”. So when covid hit, I was out of a job for 3 months, and there was nothing to focus on. I believe there was about 2 weeks of adjustment, but I was too busy binge-watching all of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure for me to notice the withdrawal symptoms. I didn’t even notice I had stopped drinking until I started running the online campaign from my previous horror story and thought “oh, I need to be able to focus, I should make some coffee”, but when I tried to drink what I had been able to just a few months previously it didn’t taste good anymore and made me feel like I was having a panic attack for 6 hours.

I switched to tea, but stopped that when I moved out of my parents basement. I sometimes drink coffee when I feel I need it, but I go weeks at a time without coffee.

Since Shkshkshk deleted their comment, this is what they said:

I wonder how many of the downvotes are from people who couldn’t make it to the last paragraph because they were too mad at how mean I was being to Pablo and his unregulated ADHD

Thank you! That was very validating to hear. That said, if I said the ADHD was 100% managed now that would be a fucking lie, but I do have actual coping mechanisms that work instead of drinking brain-damage amounts of coffee lol. Progress is progress 🤷‍♂️

Most of the stuff I highlighted about Phillip were one-off occurances that happened exactly once, but I think any one of the things I mentioned about him should have been my cue to run as far away from the group as possible. On a day-to-day basis, he clearly wanted to do what Jesus would do and be a giving, empathetic, nonjudgmental person who literally gave me the shirt off his back once and metaphorically did so five other times. Which is why I stuck around. 99% of the time he was one of the most stand-up guys I knew, and the remaining 1% of the time he drops a red flag the size of Texas.

I think it’s also important to note that he was surrounded by LGBTQ+ people, and he chose this friend group. We lived in a pretty red part of my state. There’s lots of people in his area who share his worldview, and he’s chosing to hang out with us sinners. Why he did so will forever be beyond me. I think he’s just not being honest with himself, like most people. People aren’t logical critters.

My understanding is that he values civility above everything else, more than authentic personal expression, more than actually being a decent person. I guess nazi + civility-centered worldview = enlightened centrist behavior

Important to note is that he’s holding these horrible beliefs while being surrounded by bisexuals, pansexuals, nonbinary people, underage drinkers and smokers, etc., and presumably he wants to keep those friends. Why, I do not know. People are almost never logical critters. I feel that his autism might be playing a part in this.

Quick explanation of the names:

• Phillip Barker, better known as Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman Barker, was a linguist who was a professor of Urdu and South Asian Studies from 1958 to 1990, and produced Tékumel (Empire of the Petal Throne) which was one of the first 3rd-party D&D settings ever produced. It was widely regarded as being very respectful to the indigenous cultures it drew from. That being said, his Wikipedia page looks like this:

• Dave Arneston co-authored the first edition of D&D. Consensus I’ve heard of him was that he was a passionate DM and a good person overall, but he was not great at following deadlines or making functional product. Gygax used B/X D&D to push him out of the company.

• Emmett Roe…well, just Google him

• Pablo Pineda was the first european with Down Syndrome to recieve a university degree (B.A. in Educational Psychology) and is also an award-winning actor.

• Henry Cavendish was the natural philosopher who discovered hydrogen. He is commonly believed to be super autistic. Wikipedia says “He could speak to only one person at a time, and only if the person were known to him and male . . . He communicated with his female servants only by notes. By one account, Cavendish had a back staircase added to his house to avoid encountering his housekeeper, because he was especially shy of women.”

• Amy Winehouse: I googled “celebrities that were disasters” and her name popped up. She died at 27 due to alcohol poisoning.

• Theresa Barkley was a 19th century English dominatrix. I went down a list of historical dominatrixes and filtered out the ones known for positive personality traits, and she was what was left. She was best known for Inventing the Berkley Horse, a BDSM apparatus used to position the sub in an appropriately floggable position.

Ooh, what is 13th age? Tbh, the main reason I still like 5e is all the crunchy rules, but for some reason I haven’t seen many crunchy dungeon-crawlers. I’ve also been pitched Mork Borg but the visual design was an immediate turn off for prioritizing COOLNESS over being actually readable.

No

I do agree that the main problem is with current published adventures and that most campaigns (even homebrew ones) don’t usually have places to grind loot. But it’s even more frustrating when we do have a dungeon-crawling campaign and there is maybe 3 spell scrolls in the entire campaign because thats what the loot tables rolled.

deleted by creator

I think the first 10 people who saw it read me as a grumpy DM griping about players not doing what I want.

Thanks for the non-adversarial read. And I do agree that class and roleplay are not closely coupled and should not be (although I do think breaking this design philosophy for Paladins would make me want to play one.) Tbh, the most fun I’ve had at the table was playing a Champion Fighter at adventurer’s league. I liked big stronk man, everyone else liked big stronk man, DM was mildly confused by big stronk man. We had fun. I think the difference was that I knew the DM was playing a module, so I didn’t ask for much other than some flavor stuff.

I feel like you read a different thing than I thought I wrote. Maybe I could have been clearer. This is about me not wanting to be a player in 5e because the game does not encourage the dm to do stuff. I could have dwelled more on moments where I asked a dm to do something that would help me play my class (spell scrolls in the loot, give me opportunities to interact with other druids in my circle, overland travel, let me make use of my knightly title) and then they just forgot to do that. As a DM, I get it, a lot of these requests were very small things that just get lost in the shuffle, and its not pleasant to tell a player “hey, we wont be doing overland travel, if travel is what makes ranger appeal to you maybe dont play a ranger this game”. It would be easier if they game empowered the players to be active in the world and make class-informed choices that the DM can react to.

Don’t remember. We did end up playing Traveller after this, but I know that wasn’t what we were talking about. This convo happened back in 2017