My post from the another thread about whether it was a problem for a vegan to ask their friends to tone it down on the carnivore stuff in their D&D campaign led to a couple more posts and wandered off topic.
When I split the threads some posts about in game stuff are getting caught in the net because of multiple replies in a single post - feel free to cut out the part of your post that was on topic and repost it in the other thread
It could still be fun to talk about though. I mean, telling people about your RPG campaign will probably turn out to be telling people about your dreams, but letâs find out.
Post any cool stories from your role playing game campaigns here and letâs see!
In a D&D campaign I ran back in the late '70s (while still a callow teen) I had a player that was a Druid who refused to eat plants because they were sacred.
ETA: and in a Runequest campaign a character that fought and killed a bear only to discover that she had a cub, which he took under his wing and raised, only to be killed by it later when it grew up because itâs a wild fucking animal (I was always rolling behind the scenes to see if it was time for the turn)
Depending on how old the cub was when they adopted it and how well they treated it, I might have let them part ways peacefully. Evil Overlord List item 48 says âI will treat any beast which I control through magic or technology with respect and kindness. Thus if the control is ever broken, it will not immediately come after me for revenge.â
Now if they mistreated it and/or didnât try to train or bond with it, having it maul the character as a going-away present IMO sounds perfectly reasonable.
I was going more for a âthe chimp you brought home will eventually tear off your face and genitalsâ thing. You take an animal out of the wild, you donât know what you will get.
The rolls just came during times of stress and action (the bear accompanied the character everywhere and eventually fought along side the character).
I gave the character a secret (to the player) Tame Bear skill that I tracked throughout, starting it at 10% - if he had failed that initial roll the bear would not have gone along with any of it and run away.
The skill would grow over time (and never went down). The skill worked like any other RQ skill - successful rolls would allow the chance for a (single) skill increase at the end of an adventure, critical rolls would result in that and a better outcome for whatever the bear was up to, failure in a bad outcome, and a fumble? WellâŚ
If the character had been Runelord or Priest of the cult of Odayla the Storm Bear I would have let him do a Divine Intervention on the fumble, but sadly they were not.
The relationship between the character and the bear was roleplayed out within those mechanics. The rest of the party was nervous all the time because they knew I was doing something behind the scenes, if not the details
ETA: and of course I would cheat all the time in the playerâs favor based on what would be more fun for everyone. The final fumble came at a time when it was exciting and good story telling for everyone. The player of the character loved it and thought it was a good and fair send off. The bear exited, pursuing escaping enemies, and lives to this day, as far as I know
And THAT is what a good DM does- While our DM tries her best to kill our characters during the game sessions, thereâs never any malice behind it. (Well⌠maybe a little bit, especially when I toss out a terrible Dad joke or pun and get disadvantage âawardedâ to meâŚ)
Thatâs the thing that I never picked up on until much later- D&D and other TTRPGs in that vein are essentially a collaborative story told during the session, and the only time itâs âDM vs. the playersâ is during combat.
A friend of mine, who used to DM our D&D games in college, became a pretty successful author. In the intro to a Reddit AMA he did, he wrote:
My friends are great and all, but they could throw monkey wrenches with the best of them. When I tired of writing stories that I couldnât entirely control, I ventured forth into writing fiction.
The original encounter was a generic random encounter with âa bearâ, which the player had the opportunity to avoid. He didnât, so I decided to add the cub as a âHey! See what you did! Feel bad!â. It did work though - over the campaign the whole group thought a little bit more about the consequences of their actions, even though until near the end of the campaign that consequence was âAwesome bear companionâ
this bit of DM karma ever so much.