"Because [D&D] is a gradual series of revelations / That occur over a period of time / It's not some carefully crafted story / It's a mess, and we're all gonna die. . "
So if you've followed my posts for any time or read my campaign story hours you know it is a hobby horse of mine to push against the idea of D&D as a story game with notions of closure or emulating narrative or cinematic conventions as a goal of the game or even any particular scene or encounter.
This is the place where if I were
@Snarf Zagyg, I'd have a subtitle that said something like "
Every time I hear someone say 'Everything happens for a reason' I want to punch them in the face just to prove them right."
I was listening to NPR's F
resh Air the other day and the guest host (Terry Gross was on vacay, which is why I bothered listening) was interviewing Rachel Bloom. I have never watched
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend but they played a clip of one of the songs from it and I fell in love with the song (embedded below + lyrics). Not only because I agree with its view of life
. . . but because that is my ideal view of D&D. If you listen to it with D&D in mind, it really kinda works. It makes me think of how in my longest and most successful D&D campaign, while the PCs resolved what became the central concern of the game, there were still about a dozen loose threads and the game ended
satisfactorily after 5+ years (real-time) with the party dissolving to pursue whichever of those mattered most to them, some of which would put the PCs - now fast friends - into conflict. The End. Everyone loved it.
Also the lyric about "People aren't characters. They're complicated / And their choices don't always make sense" makes me think of all the times I've witnessed players argue about the in-game choices of another "not making sense" (something I would put the kibosh on these days). The people who play D&D characters are not characters themselves.
Anyway, I was gonna start a thread about this, but then I decided, what's the point? I'll share it in that wackadoo thread instead.