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I played D&D with my roommates all the time up in Indiana, and before that I was part of a campus D&D club at my college. My now-former roommate that DM'd for us has been grooming me to become a DM as well for the new campaign he's been working on.

One thing I absolutely love about D&D is the absolute silliness that can happen in an instant. There are so many stories I hear and can tell that just seal the deal for me on loving the game. I understand it's not everyone's cup of tea, but it's definitely worth a try for anyone who has a slight interest.

I'm actually on a guild right now where they play campaigns online. Do you think we could gather enough interest to start one here? Either one of us could DM, or we could design a campaign together and take turns playing NPCs and side characters.

I honestly don't think a game is a game unless it mirrors real life, and when you're in a dark environment with a lot more grit and cold truths, zapping the "ableist, racist, violent, cruel" stuff just ruins the point. It also kind of kills the gameplay, LOL, as what's a story without challenge and conflict? Boring as hell, that's what it is. wink

I love being an awful person in D&D, I'll have you know. That's how the best stories happen! If there's no battle, no push and pull, no conflict of interest, there's nothing to laugh about, nothing to blink and and say, "What the actual ********?" Guaranteed, my friends laugh a lot more about the time when my Lizardman offered the cooked fingers of a dead woman to her grieving husband and then killed him when he resisted my offer of a consoling hug, or when our half-elven mage tried to sexually lure the Aarakocra guards away from their posts by casting a spell to change her form so she could basically hump a bush naked yelling, "BA-c**k!!!", or the time when our entire band of five players spent two whole sessions trying to slaughter a couple of innocent goblin scouts hiding in the treetops when we were supposed to be doing something productive, than the time when our ranger's eagle landed the finishing blow on the big bad ogre. It's just not as riveting.

All of my characters are assholes. All of them are dicks. They're dicks for various reasons, of course, but they're still dicks. I'll be damned if I ever create a "nice" character or rewrite the rules of a game to make it more PC. To me, that's like playing Cards Against Humanity after X'ing out every d**k joke and replacing them with Care Bears and bible verses, or playing Flux after removing all the creepers from the deck. It's hardly even a game by that point -- certainly not the game you started with -- and there's no point in playing.

TL;DR: If the characters aren't horrible people and if the game isn't rigged against you, what fun is there in playing? The whole point of a DM is to make life hell for the players, if D&D has taught me anything, and if the game treats everyone equally, the DM is not doing one's job. Vice versus, if a player's character doesn't have any character flaws or handicaps that make the game a living hell for the DM, that player is not doing one's job.

So one time i was playing world of darkness with my group, and we were in the Underworld (yes the land of the dead in some societies). But most of our characters were alive. Naturally, the point was to escape the place because that is no place for the living to be. We had a wild group of characters too. I think it was a vampire and his lover, a werewolf and a werefox, two sineaters (people who deal with ghosts) and their accompanying geists, one mage, and a regular human. This was a rather large group. And yet, the point wasn't that they were fighting each other, but rather they had to work together in order to get out alive. Yes there were character conflicts along the way (the human wanted to keep his newly "adopted" children, one of the sineaters and their boyfriend the mage, alive while assuming the vampire was dangerous), but that was not the driving plot.

Also, part of that setting involved my character (the newly "adopted" sineater) stealing fruit from one of the Underworld trees. This actually was against the stated rules (that no one could read because they were written in koine greek) that "NONE SHALL STEAL." The punishment? Being marked by a hydra and forced to work in the garden until the mark healed. But this was still an UNDERWORLD garden, and my character had class the next day! They couldn't spend their time tending a dead garden in the land of the dead. So of course they had to escape.

Conflict can come in beautiful varieties that doesn't have to stem from one character ruining another's day. But hey, if that's the way you want to play, that's cool! Just make sure other people are okay with you doing that, since yeah a lot of the reason why i rp is so that i don't have to be reminded that the rest of the world often wants me dead for being who i am.

tldr: player versus environment has a lot less of a chance of someone hating you after a session