I'm making brownies!

Sketches: $5 per character, $10 for color

$25 for a 3000*3000 canvas of doodles, I draw for an hour straight. Give me a vibe or playlist and a character(s) of your choice.

vaggie as a Human 🤭

CHAGGIEEE in my style like ponies 🌈❤️

Take a look at Iran right now. How many of their generals and presidents and ayatollahs and shieks and whatever have we blown the fuck up in the past two months? They're still shooting.

If Putin is assassinated, will the war in Ukraine necessarily stop? Or will it continue to be pushed by whichever oligarch takes his place?

Those tend to be the ones that are ENTIRELY based on subverting the inherent tropes. Because all those elements of stability preclude any concept that the war between humanity and the demons is a thing about the power conflicts between monsters and humanity and are instead a war between nations that can and do stand as equals.

If your Demon Lord is the Load Bearing Figure for his castle than you don't get a functional government after his death.

This was the old Medieval way of doing things: the 'hue and cry', the "wolf's head" system, outlawry. To basically pawn off the problem to someone else, which is what the role of the D&D party is. As you rightly said, they become the role of law enforcement in the setting.

But the fundamental question is "why does that happen?", and the answer is damn simple: because if it didn't, you wouldn't have a freaking game worth playing.

My 2 cents on the matter.

A lot of these problems come down to 'the people raising issues are incapable of viewing things within the context they are supposed to be viewing it, and the confusion is purely related to that lack of proper engagement'.

Like, just in context? The local suburb I live in? Has a larger population than all of Waterdeep. The city of Naperville IL is more populated than all of Baldur's Gate. The entire Chicagoland area is three times more populated than the WHOLE of the Sword Coast, and the city itself is TWICE as populated as Waterdeep.

But I feel I should make clear that D&D the game itself is not exactly at fault here: like, okay, it is sort of at fault in the sense that it is a game of fantasy killing people with swords and magic. And it is easier for people to accept the killing with people with swords and magic part when they can imagine that their characters are at least to a degree justified. That is sort of just built into the game (and the game has built into its lore varying levels of making the fantasy of killing certain types of guy justifiable).

But D&D is not at fault for making people go "okay so it's bad when you kill orcs simply because they're orcs. It's better when you kill people who are bandits, who are a class of evil criminals where killing them is actually wholesome and sensible." Like, yeah, most people probably don't think about it that deeply, but the reason people don't think about it that deeply is ultimately ideological.

In older editions of D&D, which were much clearer on the expected gameplay being "go into the dungeon and steal the stuff," there wasn't really this layer there. The rules for combat were generally quite harsh on player characters so combat was certainly something they didn't want to get into too casually, but ultimately the player characters were just going into the dang monsters' house and stealing their stuff. The monsters were arguably the ones acting in self-defense (but they're evil so who cares).

But in the WotC editions the self-defense justification is still fraught because modern D&D especially is an action game. It's a game where characters mostly have access to various methods of visiting violence upon their environs and where the gameplay itself rewards them for violence, because combat is the main source of experience as written in all WotC editions of the game and characters primarily grow in combat effectiveness.

The self-defense angle I feel is not supported by the game's rules itself, but is more of a narrative contrivance introduced by groups to make their characters feel more heroic.

My friend @tenleaguesbeneath once described it as, and I am paraphrasing, "characters hunting things for sport but the things attack them first so they can claim self-defense." Characters want to get into fights (because that's where the rewards are), characters primarily grow in terms of being able to get into cooler fights, but because getting into fights on purpose isn't heroic there's an angle of "those goblins started it" to make the characters feel more heroic.

The reason people don't think about it that deeply is ultimately ideological.

The classic D&D part being a big example, considering the scenario is 'Dangerous creatures/violent criminals have nested in the (ruins of a fallen town/keep)/(local forest)/(nearby cave system) and are posing a constant and ongoing threat to everyone in the area. And you, as a hero, can gain renown/save people/profit off of dealing with them.'

The concept that everything there is harmless and safe and nobody is doing anything bad until the adventurers show up is a complete fabrication and I can absolutely say this and base this on the over 100 copies of Dragon Magazine I have sitting in a bin amongst the other things I have collected since my mother bought me the original Red Box set when I was NINE.

The need to define a world entirely and utterly divorced from our own by the standards of political theory that even on THIS world are actually rather questionable? Has nothing to do with 'issues in the text' and everything to do with 'if everything does not reflect my politics, my politics have no weight'.

But at every level this kind of thinking intrinsically fails. I will, at least, start with what they are complaining ABOUT to some degree (the concept of 'vigilante heroism') but every single step of the way is entirely based in an inability to distance the real world from the fictional one, and the abject need to turn every fantastical element into a rehashing of history.

Except the CW shows because they did it in a bad way.