A Half-Elven, Half-Halfling Wizard Paladin

Good morning lesbians

This but Thjazi in the center with 12 people around and maybe Thimble flying near him?

but for now i see it kinda like this?

but I need a break cause woof

But also if you listen to the little bit of longing in his voice. It sounds like "I want nothing more in this life than to hold you. I've wanted to hold you for so long." It feels very akin to his "oh Orym my heart aches that I cannot be there to help you" where you can hear the yearning in his voice. You can hear how much he's wanted to have Orym in his arms. How much he wants Orym in his arms.

Encumbrance is a great example of this. 5e contains granular weights for all the items that you might have in your inventory, and rules for how much you can carry based on your strength score, and they've set these carry capacities high enough that you should never actually need to think about them. And that's deliberate, the designers have explicitly said that they've set carrying capacity high enough that it shouldn't come up in normal play. So for a starting DM, you see all these weights, you see all the rules for how much people can carry or drag, and you've played Fallout, you know how this works. And then if you try to actually enforce that, you find that it's insanely tedious, and it basically never actually matters, so you drop it.

Foraging is the example of this that bothers me most. There's a whole system for this! A table of foraging DCs, and math for how much food you can find, and how long you can go without food, etc. But the math is set up so that a person with no survival proficiency and a +0 to WIS, in a hostile environment, will still forage enough food to be fine, and the starvation rules are so generous that even a run of bad luck is unlikely to matter. So a DM who actually tries to use these rules will quickly find that they add nothing but bookkeeping. You're rolling a bunch of checks every day of travel for something that is purpose built not to matter. And that's before you add in all the ways to trivialize or circumvent this.

These rules don't exist to be used, that is not their purpose. These rules exist because the designers were scared of the backlash to 4e, and wanted to make sure that the game had all the rules that D&D "should" have. But they didn't actually want these mechanics. They didn't want the bookkeeping, they didn't care about that style of play, but they couldn't just say, "this game isn't about that" for fear of angering traditionalists. And unfortunately the way they handled this was by putting in rules that are bad, that actively fight anyone who wants to use that style of play and act as a trap to people who take the rules in good faith.

And this means that knowing what rules are not supposed to be used is an actual skill 5e DMs develop. Part of being a good 5e DM is being able to tell the real rules that will improve your game from the fake rules that are there to placate angry forum posters. And that's just an awful position to put DMs in (especially new DMs), but it's pretty unsurprising that it creates a certain contempt for knowing the rules as written.

Optional rules can be great, but notably, optional rules should be good if you use them. These rules have two modes: not benefiting from them (because you're not using them), and not benefiting from them (but with extra bookkeeping.) They are traps for DMs who want this type of gameplay, who will think they have rules for it and then find out that they don't.

I think people who have taken this post as a defense of 5e DMs are basically correct. 5e DMs have a bad, unhealthy relationship with the rules, but it's a relationship the rules have created. But for those who have taken it as a defense (or even as praise) for 5e as a system, it absolutely is not.

Obviously, in any TTRPG, the people playing the game can choose to ignore some of the rules. It's normal to need to remove some rules if you don't want to engage with a specific mode of gameplay. It's fucking weird to need to remove rules for a system so that you can engage with it.

I'm going to link the iconic r/hobbydrama post because I think it's genuinely excellently written and a thorough rundown, and please note that I also started with Campaign 2 so this is mostly secondhand for me. The tl;dr is that the actor for Tiberius immediately began hogging the spotlight inappropriately, avoiding things that might put Tiberius at risk thus screwing over everyone else, cheating on dice to make his character seem cooler, and ultimately in the course of one episode dominated the conversation and tried to bypass a core aspect of Percy's arc and said something sexually inappropriate in-character regarding Vex, Laura's character. He left not long after. If you watch the early C1 episodes it's very much stated as him needing to leave for personal reasons (he was also I believe legitimately dealing with some health issues), but it became clear later he'd been asked to leave.

It later came out that the actor had been hostile a few times while on the show towards fans in inappropriate ways, was frequently hostile and abusive towards many people afterwards, and stole and scammed from his own crowdfunding and employees regarding a spinoff of Tiberius's adventures.

For a bit of background, the vibe when I started Campaign 2, at least while avoiding most of social media, was pretty neutral even though Matt had definitely said some stuff that indicated this had gone badly, and TVTropes (look, I was trying to avoid spoilers and at the time it had episode-by-episode updates) honestly seemed to have been written by fans of Tiberius and was pretty sympathetic towards him. If you're not experienced with D&D or are listening by podcast it is hard to tell how bad things were until episode 27 (his final one and the one where the conflict is really apparent), especially if you have no other baseline for the cast. Tiberius's heroic death that comes out in 1x64 was, I believe, arranged by Matt to be fairly respectful, and coupled with the cast's requests to respect everyone's privacy I think it just wasn't much of a point of discussion during C1, though I could be wrong. The crowdfunding scam news came out right when C2 was in its early episodes, and I think that's when the fandom started to become more aware.