"But Taliesin metagames!" "But Taliesin gets angry when things don't go his way!"
Gently grabs your face. Listen. Listen to me. First and foremost, this is little more than a Taliesin Jaffe fan account. Secondly, so does almost everyone at the table. It's fine. It's okay. It's a game. I do not care how loud he is. I do not care that he plays primarily morally ambivalent characters. I do not care that he gets angry sometimes. He's having fun with his friends playing a game. It's genuinely so fine.
Also, speaking as someone with Chronic Pain, Functional Neurological Disorder, and other disabilities, it's pretty understandable to want to build a character that can defeat the circumstances they constantly finds themselves in. D&D is escapism and sometimes the thing we're trying to escape from is helplessness, loss of control, pain, and that feeling of being trapped by circumstance. You got to remember that these guys aren't performing a scripted fiction; they're TTRPG Lets Players. We're watching a group of nerdy-ass voice-actors PLAY Dungeons & Dragons. Play. It's a game. Some people play to explore a theme. Some people play to win. Some play to be as useful and cool as possible. Whatever the playstyle, it's a game and it's how they choose to play. If it was a problem, there's a table full of friends to say so.
Don't apologize, I'll add onto this. I've seen so many people complain about Molly, that Molly wasn't useful in fights, that he didn't do enough, and I have to combat that with the knowledge of how absolutely useless the bloodhunter class was when Taliesin was playtesting it in real time. He couldn't use half of his cool abilities because he had to hurt himself to do so, and at early levels, that kind of health wasn't available. Sure, the bloodhunter is revamped to be more useful early on, but it took Molly killing himself with an ability to do so. Even so, at the time Molly died, he had something like 27 of the How Do You Want to Do This?, which was the most of anyone up to that point. Not so "useless", then. And then people complain that Taliesin takes too long to figure out what he's going to do when he's playing Caduceus. Well, so does Laura, so maybe that's a cleric thing, but people miss the point of Caduceus. By the time he gets to make his big plays half the time, the battlefield has changed so much that whatever his initial plan was is out the window and he's figuring it out as he goes. And Taliesin plays Caduceus to be what the party needs. Healer. Buffer. Debuffer. Inflicting pain where necessary. Guardian. Savior. Exactly what he needs to be so the party doesn't lose someone like they lost Molly. Of course he takes a while to figure it out. If, at the top of the round, nobody is hurt, Taliesin might think, "Oh, Spirit Guardians is a good choice, or Bane, something offensive." And then Caleb and Yasha and Fjord take 50 points of force damage from one attack and suddenly Spirit Guardians and Bane don't suit the needs of the battle. So maybe it's a Healing Word or a Cure Wounds. But which of those is more useful in this moment? Or would it be better not to heal until someone goes down, when he can give them the full effect of the spell without having to roll for points? But what if three people go down at once and he can't get to them all to cast a spell before death saving throws happen? What if what happens to Molly happens to them and they take two immediately failed death saves because an enemy attacks in melee while they're unconscious? Taliesin is so open about his nerves and anxiety and how he can have trouble articulating his plans, so things come out different than what he meant them to be, but anyone saying that he's not a good player, that he gets too angry, that he takes too long is really feeding into the ableism, because there's reasons for all of it.
