Utopolis

which three different characters respond to by

teleporting out of existence (with the same stat as the costume change - an easier effect using it, even!)

just actually punching it

using the fact that he's ontologically defined as "dying of betrayal" to inflict the cactus with the same, making it's own needles harm it

none of these actually help, and then they have this exchange

OOC, all I can think of is player or group fiat. When the HG walks into the room, stand up and yell "surprise! My PC has become miraculous." Perhaps it will pay off! Party poppers have been known to help.

IC, you could try eating a miraculous stone or something? If it were easy to do with ordinary resources people would do it all the time RL, but conversely who can say what a miraculous stone might do?

I want Yellowstone to erupt

I need Yellowstone to erupt

It feels good for Yellowstone to erupt

A Yellowstone Eruption is good for me

A Yellowstone Eruption is good for the world

Yellowstone will erupt

I am making Yellowstone erupt

We are making Yellowstone erupt

We will wake her from her slumber

Yellowstone is overdue to erupt

Yellowstone will erupt any day now

When Yellowstone erupts, it will feel so good

A Yellowstone eruption is Mother Gaia having an orgasm

I am ready to share in Mother Gaia's orgasm

I am ready for Mother Gaia's cum to wash away the taint upon my heart

I am ready for Mother Gaia's cum to wash away American hegemony

Yellowstone is erupting

Yellowstone is erupting

Yellowstone is erupting

It's not me that has anything against GMs. There's a pervasive disrespect for the time, energy, and enjoyment of GMs present in the majority of TTRPG spaces.

People love to say “it’s just a game” while stacking more and more work onto the GM’s shoulders. It’s selfishness, and often a contempt for TTRPGs in general.

The purpose of a GM isn’t completely universal across all TTRPGs that use a GM role, hell a lot of TTRPGs don’t even seem to know why they have them in the first place, but usually the purpose of a GM is to handle scenarios that the game rules don’t account for, and handle procedures that the other players are not supposed to be privy to.

Over the years, more and more responsibilities have been put on the generalized GM role: sole rules memorizor, level designer, bespoke world creator, bespoke storyteller, scheduler, host, etc.. It has morphed into being a job as much if not more so than an activity to do with your friends. GMs have been dropping like flies to “GM/DM Burnout” for a decade or more and people willing to even go near the GM role are an endangered species.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that while, yes, the rules of a TTRPG are technically changeable and nobody is going to kick down your door if you don’t play them correctly, they do serve a purpose, and that is, simplified, to produce certain outcomes of gameplay.

A game’s rules cannot account for every possible situation that may come up in something so open as a tabletop roleplaying game, and one of the strengths of TTRPGs is that when the rules don’t account for something, human players can pick up the slack. In a traditional challenge game like every edition of D&D, this slack and the privilege to pick it up is by default handed over to the GM. This is because in a traditional challenge game that slack is often only handlable with that knowledge that other players are not meant to be privy to.

Since so many people are allergic to playing anything but D&D, even when they clearly don’t want the gameplay which D&D is geared to produce, this privilege instead becomes a curse for the GM. All of the scenarios and characters that D&D(or any TTRPG) is simply not intended to be built to accommodate are seen as “the slack for the GM to pick up” instead of “things that are outside the scope of the game.” It’s going to a coffee shop and telling the barista, who hasn’t trained in pizza, to make you a pizza. “A good barista could make it work, this is a food vendor so I’m supposed to be served the food i order,” even though the barista isn’t trained to make pizza, and the coffee shop does not stock the necessary ingredients for it.

Except the GM isn’t even getting paid minimum wage, they’re voluntarily taking on the most high-responsibility role of a group activity for you. Even if you do convince them through the shame of thousands of “a good GM could make it work, a good GM never says no to what a player wants” posts to make you a pizza, it won’t be a good pizza and it won’t go well with the other items on the menu. And even if it turns out to be a good pizza (because bad pizza is still usually pretty good pizza, not because it’s actually a good pizza) it won’t really be the coffee shop’s pizza, it’s the barista’s pizza. Once you go far enough, creating so much slack for the GM to pick up, you aren’t playing D&D anymore, you’re playing The GM. After a certain point the GM is doing way more work than the rules.

When I brought this up and mentioned how it was kind of disrespectful to the amount of prep I had put into writing a pretty open scope adventure I was met with responses questioning how I had been a GM for so long if I wasn't able to do this, and saying a good GM shouldnt "rail road" players.

[Insert here long rant about "top drop" and how Session Zero talks about game expectations and Line/Veil lists should also include the ST's squicks and triggers, bc I'm tired, man.]

*[Insert another rant here about my asshole ex who had the license plate DIREKTOR and treated every RPG moment like a scene in his personal TV show. Don't be that dude.]

“The notion that people panic and run screaming for the exits is a Hollywood fiction,” said Prof Stephen Reicher, an expert in group behaviour at the University of St Andrews.

“Characteristically, people stay and help each other,” he said. “We found this during the 7/7 attacks on the underground and the 1999 attack on the Admiral Duncan pub in London, where people looked after each other even though they feared other bombs.

“In our own research on the Leytonstone tube attack in 2015, there was an amazing level of spontaneous coordination by bystanders: some directed others away from danger. Some distracted the attacker. Some confronted the attacker. Each was able to act because of the others. Heroism was a feature of the group, not just the individual,” he added.

"oh, did you make the font bigger and more legible?"

"no we're just doing the next edition in D&D5e"

"we're making our video game more accessible!"

"oh did you add an option to remap the controls?"

"which part? what did you make accessible?"

it is a very popular trend right now to add, like, features that skip the engagement with an interactive work of art, such as skipping combat or making combat impossible to lose in a combat-focused video game, or in the scene of TTRPGs making your TTRPG completely dumbed down or just hastily and mindlessly making it a D&D5e hack "because people already know how to play D&D5e and I want it to be accessible" instead of expecting people to actually read and learn and engage with a set of specific rules, and call all of that "accessibility" instead of adding "accessibility" features that would actually help disabled people access the "meat" of whatever the interactive art is.

If it's a combat-focused video game, some examples would be helping them engage with the full depth of the combat by allowing the controls to be fully remapped to something easier for their hands(or lack of hands), or the option to disable flashing lights or reduce the intensity muzzle flashes on the guns or something.

I think I have come up with a good example to illustrate this point. Let's say there is an FPS where you shoot aliens. Pretend it's, like, Halo but not specifically Halo.

And let’s say there’s a group of disabled gamers who are excited for this video game.

Missing Finger Guy, Deaf Guy, Colorblind Guy, and Poor Eyesight Guy.

Missing Finger Guy is missing at least one finger that corresponds to the Dodge button, he can’t reliably press it especially on short notice when aliens are coming at his character. So, he can’t really play the game because dodging is required to beat the levels. The game devs provide an “acccessibility” easy mode that turns off combat or makes the enemies do so little damage that he never needs to use the Dodge button. So, Missing Finger Guy can play the game now, right? Wrong. Dodging enemies *is* the game, and he still never gets to play with the Dodge button, or engage with any of the other elements of the game that are watered down by making enemy attacks not matter. To make the fun gameplay of dodging enemies accessible to this player, the answer is to allow remapping the Dodge action to a button that he can reach.

Deaf Guy

The game expects the player to rely on audio cues to know when enemies are sneaking up behind them or when a grenade lands at their feet or when an enemy is about to do a specific attack. Obviously the deaf player can’t hear these and can’t play the game because he’ll just die all the time to attacks which are literally impossible for him to predict. Again, this could be “fixed” by a mode that makes it so it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t hear a grenade land at his character’s feet by removing the consequence of death for failing to notice the grenade, or you could add the option to turn on subtitles for both story dialogue and sound effects like “[grenade beep]” and “[screatchure scream].” One of these allows the deaf gamer to play on roughly the same playing field as other players and react to threats the same way that hearing people can do that he can engage with the meat of the game, and the other doesn’t.

Colorblind Guy

The video game features enemies that are identifiable by their red and blue armor. Red aliens throw red grenades that you can catch and throw back, and blue aliens throw blue grenades that explode by proximity and you just have to fully avoid. Obviously, a colorblind player cannot reliably tell these apart, and would either have to try to throw back grenades at random and hope for the best, or just avoid all grenades to be safe. You could “fix” this by removing the consequence of death for getting exploded by a grenade, or you could fix it by adding a togglable colorblindness mode that switches the color distinction to something visible or adds some other distinctive feature besides color to one of those grenade types. One of these allows the colorblind player to engage with the intended gameplay of the game by taking informed risks by trying to throw back certain grenades, and one of them doesn’t, making it just not matter what decision he makes.

Poor Eyesight Guy

You get the formula by now. The *actually* accessible feature would be allowing him to adjust the text to be more readable instead of making it not matter if he can read the directions that tell him how to get through the minefield safety by removing the consequences for stepping on a mine.

A mode that simply removes consequences for failing to engage with and react appropriately to the threats the game presents is, at best, appealing only to people who don’t actually *like* the gameplay in the first place, while still shutting out the people who *want* to engage with the full depth of the gameplay but can’t because of some disability that prevents them from doing so as intended.

Because the gameplay isnt just seeing the cutscenes and getting a “level cleared” achievement, it is dodging the enemies, throwing back the grenades, listening for the screatchure screams, etc..

If there is an enemy who is super tough from the front and will kill you if you can’t get around behind him, you don’t make the game more “accessible” by making him so weak from the front that it doesn’t matter where you shoot him, or making his attacks so weak that you can shrug them off long enough to whittle him down from the front, youve actually removed this enemy from the game by making him just like the common enemies that can be shot from the front. You have actually made the element of the gameplay provided by this enemy inaccessible by doing this, because the quick thinking and tactical usage of the game’s features required to get behind him *is* the gameplay.

I like difficulty levels, sometimes I don't enjoy a specific aspect of gameplay or I just want to blast through from cutscene to cutscene, and being able to toggle a zero-consequences baby mode is a nice option to have.

Option to hold or toggle buttons for running

Quick Time Events on a toggle, or not involving quick, successive button presses (just one press)

Ability to change the colour, font and size of subtitles!

Ability to re-map buttons

ABILITY TO USE A NONSTANDARD CONTROLLER

Ability to change brightness, colour saturation, lighting intensity and filtering

ABILITY TO TURN OFF FLASHING LIGHTS OH MY FUCKING GOD

Volume control that lets you turn up the dialogue and atmospheric sound but turn the music down

Ability to turn off camera shake and blur

And you might ask 'well how is x an accessibility feature'

But consider:

People who have issues with their hands (muscle weakness, missing fingers, impaired reflexes)

Folks who are hard of hearing or have other hearing issues