#and how poorly strung together it is - making it difficult for me to even comprehend

[creative-cauldron]

Inter-party Conflict, the Horrors of Bleed, and DM-Style

I know I promised more on Cardinal but I got a few specifics to figure out and something happened that I wanted to talk about. So, I’ve been participating in some one-shots recently and what happened occurred at the one I played in this past weekend. It was D&D 5e with the DM running a mystery-horror setting, basic set-up being a random spooky mansion in the middle of the woods filled with death traps and strange magic. Fun right. It gets better because it turns out the place is a home to a lich who is trying to bring back his long dead family through various necromantic experiments. We were a party of three; me a halfling arcane trickster, the elven trickery cleric, and a human fighter (forget the subclass). All character were pre-made by the DM at level 7.

Me and the fighter had good banter going with both of us playing our characters as sort of goofy characters who are constantly making jokes. I think we both just subconsciously decided that we were going to play that type of character that makes light of any situation. The cleric though was being played by a player who had only played in few one-shots and didn’t keep up with our character’s humor. Whether it was a a character choice or not I’m not sure, but I don’t think it was. Not a big deal though me and him formed what seemed at first to be some fun friendly rivalry, when I told him to go first walk across a trapped puzzle floor citing age before beauty. The fighter also joined in on this but kept repeating the more targeted jokes and started only referring to the cleric as age. Why didn’t I disable it as the rogue you asked, well because it turns out that my rogue didn’t have thieves’ tools, something the DM made sure of when making the character. 

This was the first flag, and issue that I had with the DM. They designed the characters with the goal of making them unsuited for the one-shot. Another example being that there was Deep Speech everywhere and they said they made sure that none of the character options knew Deep Speech and no one had access to Comprehend Languages. Now there might have been some item or something in the mansion that would allow us to read Deep Speech but I kinda doubt it. Our characters were almost designed to fail, something I felt especially when I realized that all of my spells didn’t work against Undead or Constructs which were all that we were fighting. The exception was Invisibility which when I cast it on myself was useless because the creature I was running away from didn’t rely on sight. I was frustrated but it was a one-shot. Our cleric was not so accepting go. It didn’t help that this was his first time playing a full caster and he blew most of his spells on a homebrewed golem with magic resistance. 

Things got worse for him when we encountered the Lich. I had maintained my invisibility and was scouting but it didn’t matter because I forgot that Liches get truesight. So I was captured and, using my brains, suggested he question me about why we were in his house while being magically prevented from lying. The reason why was because well we had technically done anything that wrong, we were a little railroaded with the way our characters were designed and surprisingly, our characters were invited into the house by a mysterious voice, we didn’t just barge in. After that the rooms were basically just one after another each with really only one door, and no details were given about the room until we asked to perceive the room. We didn’t even know there was a door, just that this was a dining room, a parlor, or whatever have you. Anyway during the questioning I accidentally lied because when he asked had I touched this NPC boy he had kidnapped I said no because I forgot that one round of combat when another player “put him on my back” before taking him back the next turn. 

So I was in the hands of a deranged Lich who I just accidentally pissed off as he marched after the aforementioned child. The fighter was in another room with the child who we find out was getting the soul of the Lich’s son put into him and the two souls were fighting but the Lich’s son had just one. The fighter had been really good about building a relationship with this boy before the “personality change” and then went on to build a great relationship with the new child in the few second before the Lich arrived, somehow (mostly dice rolls, but also a little of the DM’s showing a slight bit of favor). Due to his relationship with the boy and the fact that he had actively worked to keep the child unharmed, the Lich was okay with him, and you guess it, the fighter starts to betray the party. The cleric meanwhile, was in a little girl’s room and soon discovered the zombified daughter of the Lich, then starts playing dolls with her, then realizes that the dolls were former intruders into the mansion who are still kinda sentient but tortured. Then when the Lich entered, with me in his grasp and the fighter following behind, the daughter decides she wants the Cleric as a new doll.

This is were things really go downhill especially for our. The Cleric is put in a cell, the Fighter got the Lich to let me and him leave, but I don’t want to leave the Cleric behind. So the Fighter is talking with the Lich and the Zombie while I try to get the Cleric out of the cage (I eventually found Thieves’ Tool in the mansion). However, as the Fighter is talking he officially accepts a job as the the kids nanny, which means he’s gonna do whatever it takes to make the kids happy. If you haven’t put it together yet that means stopping me from getting the Cleric out of there. So now I and the Cleric are fighting our Fighter while the Cleric is still trapped in a cage which the Fighter is keeping held shut. I’m happy at first because I can start using my spells since they work on the Fighter, but get annoyed when they don’t really work. The sleep was my fault for using it too early, but the charm person was him trying to find a loophole which I’m a little upset the DM allowed. Basically I told him to stop holding the cage door closed and let the Cleric out. He stop actively holding the cage closed and instead just leaned up against it. 

Meanwhile, the Cleric was having horrible rolls to attack the fighter and was getting frustrated. Luckily the Lich wasn’t paying attention to us because it got distracted by his ghost wife who had been helping us. So our boss battle was us trying to kill the Fighter while he tried to keep us distracted long enough for the Lich to turn the Cleric into a necromantic doll. What was annoying was the whole time Fighter kept making jokes about how he was trying to help the Cleric achieve immortality. When the lich finally got back to us he decided he was done playing around with us. I got my soul put in a gargoyle which was apparently always sitting on fireplace mantle which was always in the dining room we walked through before. The DM was running theatre of the mind, which is fine, but my problem with them is that they never truly painted a well enough picture of the scene to do that. I eventually managed to escape back to my body and get out though. Meanwhile, the Cleric was sent to a room we have never been in before and strung up awaiting to be turned into a doll. He does manage to escape and after asking to perceive the room notes that there is a closet and hides in it. The fighter eventually comes in following the daughter and immediately goes for the closet. 

This is when the player playing the Cleric gets real mad and start telling the Fighter to stop meta-gaming, claiming he had been doing it all night. Had he been, a little, nothing major. It made sense for Fighter to check the closet when he found the room empty, but he did have the luxury of not having to ask if the closet was there in the first place. He was getting the benefit of slight favoritism from the DM because he was a source of constant weird and interesting ideas. The problem ultimately was poorly managed bleed. If you don’t know bleed is when emotions, skills, and thoughts carry over from player to player character or vice a versa. The Cleric was feeling betrayed and so the Cleric’s player was feeling betrayed. I picked up on the favoritism the DM showed to the Fighter’s player and it annoyed me as a player and I’m sure the Cleric’s player picked up on it. That frustration mixed with the in character frustrations, the frustration at the poor rolls he’d been having, and he boiled over. The DM did defend the Fighter’s player, which I wish wasn’t the first thing out of their mouth, but ultimately they helped the Cleric deal with their frustrations in character by coming up with creative solutions to their situation. Luckily the session ended soon after and we talked a little about the tension before packing up. 

Ultimately, emotions are weird and difficult. People have enough trouble with emotions when they only have their own to control. I don’t hate the DM, they had a style that worked with players who are used to them but if you aren’t it is a little clunky to work with. Narrative heavy which is great but super fluid, they didn’t even use initiative for turn order so that it doesn’t break the narrative flow of the scene and everything was time sensitive so if you want to stop in think, you can’t. It was cool to play with I just wish they toned their style to the table and were a little better at reading and addressing the problems that were forming. All-in-all though not sure I would have done better but I know I would have done it differently and maybe our Cleric needed different, maybe not. 

[adhdvane]

i started over on my pkmn black 2 cartridge yesterday bc boy i’m putting the rest under the cut bc this is my personal blog and these are personal things and the last thing i want to do is accidentally trigger/or contribute further other peoples mental health break downs, so instead i’m just going to leave this part above the cut saying espeon’s backsprite in bw2 is so fucking cute, it looks so frickin short compared to other sprites which just make it’s ears look even larger and tbh i just want to pick it up and hold it an cry

look at this tiny cute fuck 

and please know if you’re not in a good place mentally and struggling to deal, don’t let other people shame you for it (and don’t let yourself shame yourself... for it), bc if you literally cannot care for yourself, you can’t expect yourself to be able to focus your energy on helping other people without being a detriment to yourself and the people you’re trying to help.

do i need to really distract my brain from more full on melt downs and ever with “”parts of the country opening back up”” my work wont even be able to remotely open back up until the rest of country opens up since my work is production that’s customers are other companies, who are buying for their employees. ((and like a large portion of our orders are related to real estate)). and tbh i never thought the fact i haven’t been able to work for so long bc of the shut down would be contributing so severely to my anxiety/panic disorder, even more so than when the concept to entering the working world was deeply affecting my mental health before i got assistance. plus the constant stream of news in the background further increases the deterioration rate of my mental state. my mental health has not been this serious in year like, i am ashamed to admit i have been teetering on the edge of self-harm again especially with how often i’m just going into full hysteric sobbing/panic attacks nearly every other day. the sheer amount of backpedaling my mental health has done the past month after having gotten so fucking far on my recovery around the end of 2019 and like the first two months of 2020 makes me so fucking upset and angry and upset, and i know at the same time dwelling on this is literally doing the opposite of what i need to be doing for my own health; it’s just becoming so fucking impossible and makes me feel fucking selfish. like my own fucking instability of my deteriorating mental health, most of which i have very literally control over (bc god if i could just like flip a fucking switch that makes me neurotypical and not have a brain incapable of producing a functioning combination of chemical medical without assistance that would be really fucking nice), is something i feel so fucking selfish for having. and that’s just the mental health side of it. god forbid i feel bad about my physical health problems that have only been made worse due to quarantine making getting access to my medication and self-care more difficult. but HEY, at least i feel slightly less guilty about being upset about those problems bc of my own internalized ableism i hold for myself thinking my mental health problems aren’t “legitimate” problems, bc unlearning years and years of stigmatism towards mental health at a young age, even when you’re a fucking victim of it is still fucking hard.