most tumblr jokes are utterly embarassing to say in public but today i said to someone “bold of you to assume i have dignity” and i won’t lie it was the most powerful I’ve felt in years
I was in the car with my family and my mom was talking about how much time she thinks “our generation wastes on the internet” or whatever. And I was explaining how I use the internet to read and curate more interests and hobbies and expand my social horizons etc. and she was just like “Well fine if that’s how you want to live. You can waste all your time on the internet if that’s what you want but I beg to differ” and without thinking I just said “then beg.” and the entire car went silent until we got home. it was the biggest power move i have ever made to date
Hey GMs/DMs I’ve seen a few posts now from players saying they’ve been banned from playing a certain class (bards). I’m at a loss as to why?
Have any of you banned a class/race/playstyle from your games? Why?
I can totally understand limiting character options to ensure a specific tone is met (I.e. we’re running a hardcore survival horror game with no magic so no spellcasters) for certain games.
But in general, why would you need a blanket ban?
This isn’t a dig, I’m genuinely curious.
I think a part of it has to do with a sort of a mistaken assumption that Bards are always “that player that always tries to have sex with the NPCs” as a class, and while that player type is bad and please okay we’ve all seen the pictures of that Bard who had sex with the monsters and we all laughed but you don’t have to do that all the time ANYWAY we shouldn’t let them tarnish the reputation of Bards
And I love Bards if I’m going to be banned from playing Bards I will face God and walk backwards into Hell
OK sure that makes sense if someone’s acting skeevy at the table and making people uncomfortable. Surely, though that’s just a questions of either:
Asking the player to tone down the sexual stuff since it’s making people feel bad.
Implementing a ‘fade to black’ rule. As in, sure you’ve seduced them and we now go to the other players and pick up after a few minutes with the assumption the the biznezz is done.
Introducing in game consequences such as: you had sex with a ghoul and now your nether regions are rotting away OR you had sex with a dragon, it’s obsessed with you and has kidnapped your character to its love cave OR you seduced the barmaid and now she’s pregnant and her 20 ruffian brothers are after you. Meanwhile the BBEG is running amok in the game world and your PCs are being hassled by increasingly stronger minions.
But the ‘seduce ALL the things’ playstyle could be accomplished with any high CHA character? Why bards specifically?
Like I’m not sure if this is the reason for Bard hate, but it brings me back to the early aughts when people were banning Paladins left and right, not because of anything wrong with the class, but because they had bad experiences with Paladin players. I think high Cha classes for some reason tend to attract a certain type of player who take a high Cha as an excuse to play an annoying and overbearing personality
Yeah could be. I still think it’s a problem of player behaviour, rather than game mechanics though so would be better off addressing player behaviour through house rules and discussion of comfort levels.
If a DM was dead set on addressing it in game, though, I feel that the best route is in game consequences. A high CHA roll doesn’t mean you can automatically seduce a princess by sending her the fantasy equivalent of a dick pic. It just means she won’t have you immediately executed on the spot.
Maybe.
Depends on the DC and the DM has controls of those.
Also to these:
Yeah. There’s loads of ways to go with bards that are rad and don’t rely on seduction. Off the top of my head:
Con artist who uses deception to swindle tyrants out of their ill gotten gains for a song
A mute musician who is completely socially inept but whose music can touch even the hardest of hearts
Wizened hag whose ghost tales terrify all who hear her
Viking warrior whose tales of old stir their companions to feats of bravery they didn’t know were possible
Tortured kenku survivor who sings in the voices of his lost loved ones to drive his enemies mad
There’s one example for how incredibly amazing a bard can be…
Also, the dm can make characters unseducible. The bard in my campaign has never successfully seduced someone because he keeps trying to seduce goddesses and dragons and lesbians.
occasionally the universe orders one of its many snipers to fire a warning shot at me. not to cause any (physical) harm, mind you. they’re just reminders that the universe hates me and could snuff out my puny little life anytime it wishes.
today that warning shot came in the form of my microwave burrito being completely empty. no filling. just tortilla.
how can you look at this and still believe the world is kind and just
I literally don’t get people who complain that other people are just projecting onto characters like “you’re just using that character to explore and actualise yourself” well done james that’s what stories have been for for centuries what the fuck is your point
Newsflash: people and good people are not synonymous.
If you portray a villain, that villain has thoughts, emotions, desires. Maybe even loved ones. They have things they want. They have reasons for what they do. And none of this excuses their villainous acts.
If you portray a good person, all of the same things apply. Thoughts, emotions, desires, loved ones, things they want, reasons, etc. And when you look at the acts they commit, you think to yourself, “That is a good person. I consider this person heroic, someone worth emulating.” Whereas when you see what the villain does, you think, “Man, that is fucked up.”
The entire difference between a good person and a bad person is not whether or not they are people, but whether the things they do and their reasons for doing them are good or bad. So you can portray a bad person, who abuses people, as having emotions, and desires, and thoughts, and they can still be a bad person.
So yeah. The OP says “bad people should be written as if they are people.” This is true. “Normalizing abuse” is what happens when you write bad people as if they are incomprehensible evil monsters with no common humanity with the rest of us, because this tells abuse victims, most of whom love their abusers, “You’re not really being abused because the person you love is not a bad person! Bad people are 100% evil monsters and the person who is hurting you obviously has feelings!” No. Bad people are people. When you write an abuser, write them as a person, with thoughts and feelings, because real abuse victims know that their abusers are people, and you don’t want to convince them that their abusers can’t be abusers because only monsters are abusers. You want them to understand that abusers are human too, because they already know the person abusing them is human. What they don’t know is whether or not they can consider what’s happening to them to be abuse.
^^^
Antis: “Only good people are actually fully human beings! This totally isn’t fascist or anything!”
“If you write well-rounded, deep, believable characters you’re a fucking abuse apologist!”
This is way too similar to that god damn “if you write characters being traumatized/in traumatizing situations then you are fetishizing abuse and you’re bad!” Like stories need conflict and sometimes being involved in conflict can be traumatizing, do you really want to consume only media that is entirely Good People Doing Good Things, Everyone Is Happy And Nothing Bad Ever Happens?? Because that’s sounds like a whole lot of boring to me
Given the alternative that we’ve had forever now, where characters go through intensely traumatic shit but have absolutely no trauma whatsoever - thus conveying the message that the problem is YOU, YOU’RE the only one who breaks like that - I’m gonna have to say I’ll take the realistic portrayals of trauma.
There is something, I think, to us as a whole, as humans, that is INSANELY disturbing and difficult about viewing irredeemable, evil people as PEOPLE. Like, we cannot accept that people who do things like commit genocide or murder people or abuse people are, in a lot of ways, just like us. That they have families and feelings and complex inner lives. And my gf just summed up why the portrayal of evil people as something apart from human is such a problem:
Because it keeps us from confronting evil when it DOES actually show up. It keeps us from confronting other people, who we know, who espouse hatred. Because how can this person, whom we know , who maybe we are even friends or family with, be an empty evil husk? It’s what keeps us from addressing things like racism, fascism, white supremacy- you name it.
When we dress up evil people as something apart from us, when we act like humans are inherently better than the evil people we see in media, it means that come being faced with a person who is doing abhorrent things, we are unable to process that. Because we feel like humanity and evil are incompatible.
You know it’s funny but we really need more bad people depicted as real people because it’s meant to be a warning to what you can become if you aren’t careful. Antis are good examples of that because they genuinely don’t realize how evil their behavior is because they think they are doing it for the greater good or with the best intentions justifies it. People are always the hero of their own story and if you can’t recognize that you are capable of being a monster then you will become a monster because you see everything that you do as good. It takes any complex thinking about morals out of the picture because you aren’t a laughing disney villain so why should you be concerned if your decisions hurt people if it wasn’t apart of the big picture or plan you have.
Think the Original The Lorax where the bad guy was viewed as complex and had good points even though he still was the bad guy. He was complicated and Kids could understand it through Seuss’s writing that he was just a person. Then look at say Ursula or Makeficent who had the complexity of a wet napkin and few kids could imagine themselves becoming. Obviously some kids can imagine themselves as them but which story really teaches you that good people do bad things or bad people don’t always realize they are bad.
It’s not some evil pro villain thing to make bad guys real. It’s a warning that you need to be careful because you could easily become the bad guy even if you have the best intentions.
I am Silver Tongue, I am an artist. I have many characters and you can check out my art in the art tag. I occasionally practice witchcraft though I don't do anything too complicated. I am girl 2 and don't know what else to put here.
