My favorite was death panels.

“The government is going to decide who lives and dies by gatekeeping access to healthcare!” Motherfucker, that’s what insurance does now. The potential failures of a collectivized system are treated with more scrutiny than capitalism working as intended.

I’ve made a habit of saying “Look, [city] was a powderkeg ready to go off before we even got there.” It’s come up in multiple campaigns.

It’s bending the rules, since it’s a camping meal, but I have made it at home, too, since it makes a great depression meal. I got it from backpackers, who I’m pretty sure got it from prison inmates:

The Ramen Bomb.

Cook a crushed up packet of instant ramen noodles, maybe with a little more water than usual. Add like half a packet of instant mashed potatoes. You can also add a protein, like… chopped up Spam. Maybe some hot sauce or other fixings if you’re feeling fancy.

I hated how much I enjoyed it. Granted, that was when I was really tired and hungry, but that hit the spot.

Also, I’ve heard meals like the ones in this thread affectionately referred to as “glop,” by a fellow glop-enjoyer.

Minus the egg, that’s also a popular backpacking meal.

Personally, I also like genericizing D&D.

It’s a shorthand for folks outside or new to the hobby, it skips a hurdle to talk to people about other RPGs with those people, and it weakens the brand identity. Considering how much D&D has coasted on brand identity as the game suffered, I’m all for that.

I’m less likely to do it places like here, because it causes more confusion, but still. It’s fun to say, “Pathfinder is a great way to play D&D.” :P

Paper straws were pushed by big corporate polluters to build a negative association with environmentalism.

Plastic straws are single-use plastics, but seem unexceptional by those standards. It’s almost a meme that they’re being singled out like they’re the single greatest source of plastic waste, or uniquely damaging to ocean life.

On top of that, there are way better ways of reducing straw usage. I’ve used bioplastics that seemed way better. You could redesign the lids. You can do the plastic bag thing and charge people a nickel for a straw or whatever. Hell, you could just not give straws with every drink, and plenty of people will just drink from their cups and glasses. Instead, we get paper straws, something that is so obviously a bad idea it sounds like a joke, or a metaphor for a useless invention. Often served with cups and lids made entirely out of plastic.

So you get a bunch of people who have their drinks kind of ruined by a frustrating straw. It’s a small thing, but it’s just a little nudge away from environmentalism. You build an association with disappointment and inconvenience. Maybe it doesn’t cause a big sway, but it makes people maybe a little more anti-environmentalist than they already were, or just less passionate about environmentalism.

/u/DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca is right on the money. Mana paces the game, so anything that can break that is super good. In an otherwise even matchup, if one player has a Lotus while the other doesn’t, that can easily make the game. It’s not going to win the game in and of itself, but it’s a huge enabler to play the thing that will win you the game, before your opponent can reasonably do anything about it.

On top of that, it’s literally good in all decks. It’s been banned in every format besides Vintage, where it’s restricted to one (and not including casual/fan formats). It had to be banned partly for power reasons, but also because it makes deck-building less diverse. There’s no deck that wouldn’t want a Lotus if it could have one, much less four.

It’s also part of the Reserved List. After WotC overprinted cards, they essentially promised not to reprint certain ones. I think it’s a dumb decision, but they’ve annoyingly stuck to it (and players are worse off for it). Black Lotus is on that list. And it was alreadly limited in printings, because it was a rare card, and a bit of a design mistake.

It’s also simply an iconic card. Despite being a design mistake, it’s a major part of Magic history, and gets referenced all the time. To some extent, it’s famous for being famous. That makes it the biggest prize for collectors.

So, all this together, it has an incredibly high demand, a very limited supply, and no indication of a reprint anytime soon.

So I printed off a proxy at a professional card printer for 30¢. :)

“If you’d rather play D&D, are you willing to DM while I recharge?”

In my group, yes. :| We actually have plenty of players willing to run games.

That said, they’re also willing to try out new games, so it all works out just fine. :)

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.

Oof. I wouldn’t like that at all. I’m already bothered with how many player powers just shut off certain parts of the game. Also putting it on the monster side seems like it will make the game an arms race of things not mattering.

It’s definitely something that’s a part of newer D&D, though it’s debatable when it started. It was inarguably a part of 4th edition, I think it was here by 3rd edition, and there’s even a case to be made that 2e was headed in that direction with some of the supplements.

Anyway, your dad was right. :P During 2e, that was still a big part of the game. It’s part of the differentiation between “old school” and “new school” D&D. Whatever I think of any particular edition, I think both approaches are rad for different reasons. :)

It’s just the mismatch of expectations that would be a problem. It sucks to die because you were expecting another epic set piece battle, and it also sucks to try to come up with a clever solution to avoid an encounter just to end up not doing much or getting railroaded.

Yeah, we had a near-TPK with our group recently. The rogue picked a lock and opened a door, which triggered a comical amount of explosives. We dealt with the consequences, but it was frustrating because it just kind of came out of nowhere. It didn’t seem to be that kind of campaign, y’know? Nothing remotely like it happened in months of play up to that point.

…so I was kind of reading my own experiences into this. :P

Alright, gotcha. Just taking it as a launch point for discussing the game.

Plus apparently situations like this happened in CR recently, so I thought it was about these kinds of situations in general.

Just to get it out of the way, I don’t watch CR, so I don’t know if this is a specific reference, and am just speaking about D&D in general. :)

Kind of inevitable with most D&D games. If you design adventures around having a series of more-or-less balanced encounters, almost always combat, where player characters are expected to be stressed but not generally killed the vast majority of the time… both the players and their characters are going to have the expectation that they can just do that.

So you need to manage those expectations. Make it clear up front, and either run the game so that death is a real threat more of the time, or find other ways to make it crystal clear when it is.

(Or just don’t make things lethal and find other consequences for failure. Or whatever you’d like, my point is just to get folks on the same page.)

If only the people who supported regressive, dumbass positions like JD Vance’s could be swayed by thinking about things for even a few fucking seconds.

It’s really the crux of a lot of issues with D&D, from table problems to game problems to publisher problems.

And as a player who wants to do that too, I keep in mind that the DM is also playing the game and wants to have a good time.

Well before covid, I knew Republicans would politicize almost anything. Covid made me realize I was wrong, because they will politicize literally anything, even a fucking virus.

Sometimes I think about how much art was never created because of capitalism. It either never got funded, or a potential artist never got the chance to make it, because just to scrape by, they had to spend too much time toiling to make some business owners money. It’s depressing.

And, just to cut off one potential counterargument: I don’t give half of a shit how “good” that art would be. I’m confident there are spectacular works of art that never came to be, but even putting it aside, it’s all subjective. Some folks would have loved it, and the artists would have found value in making it. That’s more than enough, and a hell of a lot more meaningful than breaking your back working for a living so that other people can own stuff for a living.

Huh. I kind of do this in between sessions. I like to read a few pages, maybe a chapter or two, from whatever rulebook, just so I’m constantly brushing up on the rules.