Things I May No Longer Do While Playing 14: The DM is not my therapist.

[Bohandas]

Jolly Green Giant is not a type of main sequence star

[Pauly]

* May not respond to an accusation of shooting an unarmed man by saying “How could I know he was unarmed - he had his back to me?”
** May not refer to the posse closing in on our party as a result of (*) as “good, they’re giving us a wide shot selection”

[KorvinStarmast]

* May no longer telepathically tell my hunting pet to pee on the bank managers leg, no matter how funny the Crew found that to be. (Timing is everything).

[Lord Torath]

*** Pre-recorded lute music of "It's A Small World" is not an acceptable substitute.

Dang it, Reltzik! Now I've got that song going through my brain! Maybe I can replace it with "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts"...

[Mandark]

DM: "Absolutely not."
Me: "Fine. What about pre-recorded music? I could probably find a lute rendition of It's A Small World..."

When the other players came back to the table, the DM called for everyone's attention and officially announced (without any context provided to the rest of the group) that I was now banned from even creating a bard character ever again and if they ever so much as SAW me holding a character sheet with the word "Bard" written in the class entry they were under orders to pelt me with dice.

Look up Through the Fire and Flames - Tavern Version
Just play it in the backround. See who notices.

[dspeyer]

**** The DM doesn't know how I can pre-loot recorder music, doesn't want to know, and doesn't need to know. It's forbidden regardless.

Pre-recorded lute music is perfectly sensible. Pre-looted recorder music suggests someone stocked recordings of that retched semi-flute in actual stores.

[TeChameleon]

* Failing to set a trap properly is nothing unusual. It's a bit weird when you manage to repeatedly fail to bait a trap when the procedure in its entirety is 'dump a barrel of blood on the ground'.

* Getting impatient because the rest of the party is waffling around for twenty-plus minutes about not much is... well, not great, but understandable. Responding by summarily murdering the one combat encounter we got this session in the second round is a bit less so.

* If the other players get into an argument about whether my characters are primarily sociopaths or psychopaths... and I almost exclusively play chaotic good characters, with the full intent of remaining (and doing) good... something has gone a bit odd. That or I've been following the Pyromaniac'smancer's credo a little too closely (namely "The only problem that cannot be solved by the application of enough fire is too much fire. Corollary; there is no such thing as too much fire.")

[Lord Raziere]

* May not half-remember the lyrics to a song I don't know as "MEGAHARDAN GIGAREAL RICARDO FORGET ABOUT IT"

[Bohandas]

The Harlequins of Cegorach are not Juggalos

[Bohandas]

*Morgan le Fey is not related to Tina Fey

[danielxcutter]

That's what they want you to think~

[Lord Raziere]

* May not have the villain have a defense against power of friendship attacks
** May not proclaim "Foolish, did you think I wasn't prepared against such an obvious force?" then kill all the heroes easily after they survive
*** The rest of the campaign may not be spent looking for an actual power greater than the villain to defeat them with when the power of friendship fails

* May not remark to the kidnapped king "if you thought that was bad, imagine if we were actually trying to overthrow you"

[TeChameleon]

* May not declare the Power of Family to surpass that of Friendship.

** Especially not if 'the Power of Family' is just a euphemism for Dominic Toretto spontaneously appearing and running your enemy over in some absurd muscle car.

* Likewise, the greater power is not 'The Power of Friendship... and this gun I found'.

** Most likely because the gun will jam, as any gun you found just laying around isn't going to have been properly maintained.

[KorvinStarmast]

I may no longer forget to 'push to talk' three turns in a row when playing an on-line game.

[Anonymouswizard]

* May not have the villain have a defense against power of friendship attacks
** May not proclaim "Foolish, did you think I wasn't prepared against such an obvious force?" then kill all the heroes easily after they survive
*** The rest of the campaign may not be spent looking for an actual power greater than the villain to defeat them with when the power of friendship fails

I hope they've not also protected themselves against the power of love, the power of hate, and the power of rock. Because at that point you're pretty much just left with the power of bacon, and that's really hard to transport.

[animorte]

Because at that point you're pretty much just left with the power of bacon, and that's really hard to transport.

Is any other power really even needed at that point?

[Bohandas]

*The magic mirror is not Siri
**or Alexa
***"Mirror mirror on the wall...was Chelsea Handler in The Happytime Murders?"

[Anonymouswizard]

*The magic mirror is not Siri
**or Alexa
***"Mirror mirror on the wall...was Chelsea Handler in The Happytime Murders?"

Or on the houses I tend to frequent:

'Mirror mirror on the wall, set basting timer for thirty minutes.'

[Rockphed]

The mirror also isn't facebook or google.

* I cannot use scrying artefacts to stalk my crush.

[Bohandas]

* May not have the villain have a defense against power of friendship attacks
** May not proclaim "Foolish, did you think I wasn't prepared against such an obvious force?" then kill all the heroes easily after they survive
*** The rest of the campaign may not be spent looking for an actual power greater than the villain to defeat them with when the power of friendship fails

****The defense against the power of friendship is not multi-target attacks

*****The Power of Friendship is not a euphemism for forming an angry mob

EDIT:
*May not replace all of the problematic Vistani characters from Ravenloft with a conspicuously white fortune-teller named "Madame Karen" who roams the mists in a camper van filled with mayonaise jars, yoga mats, and small dogs

*The name of the skill is "Knowledge (Nobility and Royalty)" not "Knowledge (Celebrity Trivia)"

[Rater202]

*I cannot play a misotheistic "cleric" who gets their spells from the concept of their hatred of the gods.
**Even though under standard D&D cosmology all the gods are kind of bastards and they and the Outer Planes themselves are dependant on rendering down sapient beings to first batterie and then raw materials to be recycled or devoured, a character with the goal of "kill all the gods and destroy the Puter Planes" cannot be chaotic good.

[Eldan]

*I cannot play a misotheistic "cleric" who gets their spells from the concept of their hatred of the gods.
**Even though under standard D&D cosmology all the gods are kind of bastards and they and the Outer Planes themselves are dependant on rendering down sapient beings to first batterie and then raw materials to be recycled or devoured, a character with the goal of "kill all the gods and destroy the Puter Planes" cannot be chaotic good.

Let me introduce you to the Athar! They are very, very canon and follow exactly that philosophy. Quite successfully sometimes.

[danielxcutter]

I was going to say "Ur-Priests" but that works too.

[Bohandas]

*May not depict the author of the Necronomicon as a naive idealist who is placidly unaware of or unimpressed by the horrific implications of the dark truths he has just shown, and therefore disappointed by the book's reception

**May not misattribute quotes from Richard Dawkins to Abdul Alhazred

***"a foreign publisher of my first book confessed that he could not sleep for three nights after reading it, so troubled was he by what he saw as its cold, bleak message. Others have asked me how I can bear to get up in the mornings. A teacher from a distant country wrote to me reproachfully that a pupil had come to him in tears after reading the same book, because it had persuaded her that life was empty and purposeless. He advised her not to show the book to any of her friends for fear of contaminating them with the same nihilistic pessimism
If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking can undo it. That is the first thing to say but the second is almost as important. As I went on to write:
Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos but do any of us really tie our hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don't, not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and preceptions. To accuse science of robbing life of the warmth that makes it worth living is so preposterous, so diametrically opposite to my own feelings and those of most working scientists, I am almost driven to the despair of which I am wrongly accused"
-The Necronomicon The Selfish Gene, 30th Anniversary Preface

[TeChameleon]

* Even if you are double their height and something like eight times their mass, "You are puny and your attacks seem ineffective." is a bad greeting. Especially when you are being rescued from an airship crash caused by an enormous Ice Worm partially eating, then choking on your airship.

** Even so, Miss Manners probably won't back the response of finding an even bigger Ice Worm and beating it to death with one's bare hands... while inside its mouth... smashing its teeth to get out, and then staring the huge, insulting rescuee firmly in the crotch while demanding "Puny and ineffective?"

[Rockphed]

* Even if you are double their height and something like eight times their mass, "You are puny and your attacks seem ineffective." is a bad greeting. Especially when you are being rescued from an airship crash caused by an enormous Ice Worm partially eating, then choking on your airship.

** Even so, Miss Manners probably won't back the response of finding an even bigger Ice Worm and beating it to death with one's bare hands... while inside its mouth... smashing its teeth to get out, and then staring the huge, insulting rescuee firmly in the crotch while demanding "Puny and ineffective?"

I think I was banned from playing a hoRde of Nac Mac Feegle after I revealed that I was planning to do this to every enemy.

[KorvinStarmast]

* May no longer use up all of the party's beverages - mead, ale, brandy, whisky, rot gut - to get a couple of ogres drunk.

Spoiler: Why I can't do that anymore

Show

The monk had the DTs the next day thanks to no booze

** May not do an impromptu stand-up routine in Giantish to go for the big laugh.

[Telok]

As GM I may no longer give the dire squirrels a "collect nuts" ability and and "gelding blow" special attack. It's "or", not "and".

[tomandtish]

*May not depict the author of the Necronomicon as a naive idealist who is placidly unaware of or unimpressed by the horrific implications of the dark truths he has just shown, and therefore disappointed by the book's reception

**May not misattribute quotes from Richard Dawkins to Abdul Alhazred

***"a foreign publisher of my first book confessed that he could not sleep for three nights after reading it, so troubled was he by what he saw as its cold, bleak message. Others have asked me how I can bear to get up in the mornings. A teacher from a distant country wrote to me reproachfully that a pupil had come to him in tears after reading the same book, because it had persuaded her that life was empty and purposeless. He advised her not to show the book to any of her friends for fear of contaminating them with the same nihilistic pessimism
If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking can undo it. That is the first thing to say but the second is almost as important. As I went on to write:
Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos but do any of us really tie our hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don't, not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and preceptions. To accuse science of robbing life of the warmth that makes it worth living is so preposterous, so diametrically opposite to my own feelings and those of most working scientists, I am almost driven to the despair of which I am wrongly accused"
-The Necronomicon The Selfish Gene, 30th Anniversary Preface

After recent events....

I may not hide the Necronomicon in a children's library.

[Rockphed]

I cannot make my villains thinly veiled references to current politicians.
* I cannot make my villains a mashup of current politicians.
** My villain's plan cannot be to merge all the politicians into a single person.
*** "We won't accumulate their ages" does not make it better.
**** Going "metal wolf chaos up in this joint" is right out.