My experience
I feel like this is related to the meme you just posted about turning an insect swarm spell into a cloud of falling elephants. That’s not “player shennanigans”, that’s theory-crafting a gotcha moment and failing because of how the spells actually work.
A pretty large proportion of “player shenanigans” stories amount to “we ignored the rules and allowed something ridiculous to happen”. This is fine if that’s what your group wants to do, but can’t really be expected to be relatable to the community at large.
It’s similar to the stories about level 5 groups who miraculously defeat an ancient red dragon or whatever. It invariably only happens because of some utterly absurd homebrew/ruling, or the GM just played the dragon as an idiot.
I mean, which is has more weight? RAW or RoC?
In the moment at the table, arguably RoC, but that’s still not necessarily going to convey well to anyone who wasn’t there.
Also, assuming OP’s previous submission is the “player shenanigans” which prompted this then it’s my opinion that it wasn’t cool at the table, either.
Rules as Implemented. which includes every codified house rule as well as every misunderstanding of the printed rules.
I think part of it is that meme discussions are just a great place to actually talk shop about D&D.
Back on reddit, the vast majority of D&D subs were flooded with fan art and very little discussion. There were DM subs, but those obviously left out players. I loved /r/rpg, but that place was also a refuge for people who don’t want to talk about D&D and only D&D all the dang time. (And even if I’m mostly over D&D, I still like D&D in theory, if not always in practice). So… that kind of left /r/dndmemes as, unexpectedly, one of the few places to get in-depth discussion about all kinds of RPGs and experiences from around the table.
Ten years ago /tg/ on 4chan used to be surprisingly good (if you could appreciate the elf bdsm content) but I haven’t been there since so who knows…
One of my proudest accomplishments was starting a thread there that people saw fit to archive. It was about pretending that there was a real White Wolf game called Bear: the Mauling in which the Foraging skill was so overpowered that no one actually mauled anything.
I’m not apologizing.
I think it’s like “you had to be there” tier jokes. Once you get far enough away from the shared framework and experience, things are less funny and relatable.
Like, if you post a funny story about your soccer game where the goalie shot the ball out of the air with their nerf cannon, that’s cool but like what? That’s not how soccer typically works.
Bahahaha!
Yeah, we argue about rules, like a lot.
But on the other hand, we also work to figure out how to make ridiculous things happen within the rules.
It’s the nature of the game.
