RPG rules are bad, this much we know. Whenever you're using the rules that's not roleplaying, that's what I like to call ruleplaying. Or rollplaying if you're nasty. The most important part of roleplaying games is that the rules are bad and the enemy. And that knowing that you have to ignore the rules is the most important part of being a GM. We have to keep buying the rule books though so we can not read them. Just so we know which rules to ignore. There can be no such a thing as a good rule because rules means that you're not roleplaying. Asking for game rules to be good instead of bad and to be ignored is like asking me to roleplay while I am rolling the dice (rollplaying). My favorite game is D&D 5e, a game famous for not having rules.
Ideally whatever you play should have a lot or most of its page count dedicated to rules for something you don't want to do so that you can ignore them harder
The person who tagged this as "Brennan Lee Mulligan:" has seen the light of the truth.
Ok ive seen y'all complain about Brennan for a while now and now I have to ask what did the guy do??? I just know him from being incredibly funny on dropout shows, I know he has a DND podcast but just,,, playing dnd can't possibly make him this much of an antagonist here so what did he do???
I mean he's not an antagonist or anything but he's just a very silly celebrity DM with a vested financial incentive in running D&D (D&D is, for better and for worse, the game that brings in the biggest audience for these podcasts) but the way he bends himself over backwards to justify using D&D for stories which not only don't benefit from D&D but where D&D is actually completely contradictory to his stated goals combined with his platform isn't really great. He's not exactly unique in this but he's one of many celebrity DMs who basically utilizes his reach to teach people "D&D can do anything because as a game it actually isn't about anything" when he should know better.
So he's basically the sort of guy being made fun of here.
Brennan is a perfect amalgamation of the Whose Line is it Anyway effect (a group of professional comedians and actors doing really common improv games and making them look fun and easy) and the Reality TV Paradox (a guy with a massive media budget and writing rooms full of people both writing a script and ensuring that any unforeseen random elements can be edited and recontextualized into the predetermined script) that is everything wrong with Big Actual Plays, on top of actively shilling for the worst toy making company to have ever existed. I absolutely believe Brennan is a swell person and probably fun to talk to. I do not think his shows are anything but a sham and a commercial for the worlds most overmarketed rpg.
He's also the perfect embodiment of what would and should otherwise be a straw man of D&D players - He's incredibly socially conscious. I've heard this guy talk about Other Shit before, and he's smart. He's observant. He's got class consciousness, and a lot of it.
And yet he acts like he HAS to give money and free promotion to a multi-million dollar company that has a practically infamous churn-and-burn cycle for minorities they hire on for expansions and adventure modules, has continued to stand by a man who doxxed a group of concerned women to their alleged rapist, even though they took said alleged rapist's name out of the credits, that called the Pinkertons on a customer because of a shop's mistake, that laid off nearly every employee who was contracted out to work on Baldur's Gate 3, which was possibly their biggest in-road to gamers who weren't already into TTRPGs, EXCEPT the guy who did the aforementioned doxxing, and is now angling to replace said employees with Generative AI.
Because what's the alternative? Learn a new game? Acknowledge there are things about your hobby you don't understand? Work on a project that won't have the same immediate mass appeal? Surely you're not asking him to do THAT, are you?
So instead he acts like playing the game wrong counts as socialism.
So instead he acts
like playing the game wrong counts
as socialism.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
