Message #RPGaDAY2025

 

A terrible message

I don't think we're enemies, but the owner of a board game store has been posting messages on various social media platforms attacking the group of friends I usually get together to play D&D with.

Many of us got to know each other in her store and we might not have met otherwise, that's true. But the attitude she took towards the role she played in our personal plans to get together and play ended up being unhealthy and so cringe.

She took credit for being the only place where role-playing games should and could happen, while at the same time maintaining that there was no problem with everyone playing on their own, but insisting that we couldn't play with the people she had brought together in her business in the first place.

The logic he brought up was unknowable. We came to play and, without realizing it, we already had a number carved into our backsides. The situation was absurd.

And yet we laughed and wanted to put everything that had happened behind us. We played along with the situation, and although the owner never took the teasing well, she remained silent.

The situation happened a couple more times. So we slowly drifted apart.

And yet, despite the excesses, a part of me wanted to keep talking. The owner was funny, and I liked her despite how absurd she was. But her constant aggression became exhausting, so we left her business and got together on our own to play at one of our friends' houses.

The same old D&D reunion with friends, that's the good way.

You get together with your friends in the basement, eat pizza, and laugh nonstop until dawn. That's how it should be, it's that simple.

And I know very well that everyone reading this post knows perfectly well that the experience of getting together and building a story through the laughter of several basement nerds is a moment that cannot be possessed by anyone.

The role-playing is a non-place.

The ideas are bulletproof, literally.

That is the message I would like the business owner to understand clearly, but I realized long ago that the message will never be understood. She may be able to read the words, but it is clear that she will not truly understand them in a way that will lead to significant changes. That will not happen.

That is the reality. 

 Few messages hit home.