Cleric, to Rogue: Don’t bring a gun to a knife fight? Don’t bring a knife to a knife fight. Why do you keep going to knife fights? Stop going to knife fights!
Yeah… So my parents were the sort that, when I brought how Magic the Gathering cards or some roleplaying game books, they made a bonfire in the backyard and had me burn them to “purge the evil from our household.” They almost did the same with my younger brother’s Harry Potter books, and my youngest brother’s Pokemon card decks. The Satanic Panic was real, and continued through the mid-00s in some places.
rolling badly is something that can be so good for developing your character, actually
like I say this wholeheartedly, just absolutely fucking up and beefing it and having to roleplay with that is really good for forcing your character to grow from the image you had of them in your head to an actual living, breathing, fully realized creation that you can really inhabit.
I played a campaign once as a Druid character who I’d fleshed out as extremely connected to animals, especially predators. Except every single time we encountered a beast of ANY sort and I rolled to communicate or reason with them or tame them etc. etc., I rolled so low they immediately attacked me. But I PERSONALLY didn’t want to give up. I wanted my Druid to be One With Nature so badly that I tried every single time.
In the end it became the hallmark of my character that while I was good at everything else Druids should be good at, for some reason wildlife universally Hated me So So Much. I couldn’t so much as look at a raccoon without starting a fight. But I was also in denial, so my party would see me approaching an animal and get into position to rescue me immediately when it went south, which it always did.
A Druid in absolute denial over the fact that All Birds wanted her dead and the party who doesn’t know how to convince her of that ended up being way more fun than “talks to lions” or whatever I had in mind.
ifesbob 