MikeRoxTheBoat
2019-10-24, 04:50 PM
While my Goblin Shadow Monk was dodging hate fueled lasers from our nemesis, a plane shifting bear we had accidentally doomed to Pandemonium, and dealing with the time and reality warping properties of the current plane of the abyss we were on that was causing our spells to generate random effects instead of the intended spell effects, our sorcerer made the offhand comment that this situation would be impossible to explain to anyone outside the game.
I came to the realization that this was true of almost all D&D game stories. I remember that for a long time I was hesitant to try D&D 'cause every story I heard had some weird, implausible, or absurd element that they seemed to take very seriously, but seemed silly to me. The problem is that people usually tell you the punchline, or the ending scenario, but it's hard to portray the steps that it took to get there. Every weird end game story always starts as a series of seemingly rational (sometimes) choices made at the time over the course of weeks and months of investment that snowball into something absurd that, from the player's perspective, makes absolute sense in the context of their game and experiences, but ends up being incredibly difficult to explain to an outsider due to all the twists and turns it took to get there.
Just a realization I had, that I'm sure many people have eventually come to after dedicating anytime to D&D. It's definitely something I'll keep in mind now when my roommate starts explaining that the reason their castle has indoor plumbing is because they had to build an elaborate pipe system to funnel water from a nearby river into the basement where they'd trapped three vampires that they couldn't kill otherwise.
Anyone else come to a similar realization?
I came to the realization that this was true of almost all D&D game stories. I remember that for a long time I was hesitant to try D&D 'cause every story I heard had some weird, implausible, or absurd element that they seemed to take very seriously, but seemed silly to me. The problem is that people usually tell you the punchline, or the ending scenario, but it's hard to portray the steps that it took to get there. Every weird end game story always starts as a series of seemingly rational (sometimes) choices made at the time over the course of weeks and months of investment that snowball into something absurd that, from the player's perspective, makes absolute sense in the context of their game and experiences, but ends up being incredibly difficult to explain to an outsider due to all the twists and turns it took to get there.
Just a realization I had, that I'm sure many people have eventually come to after dedicating anytime to D&D. It's definitely something I'll keep in mind now when my roommate starts explaining that the reason their castle has indoor plumbing is because they had to build an elaborate pipe system to funnel water from a nearby river into the basement where they'd trapped three vampires that they couldn't kill otherwise.
Anyone else come to a similar realization?