Syncrossus

This is the most nitpicky thing I've ever read. TTRPGs are (or at least can be) a form of collaborative story telling and Travis Miller has Hasperger's.

Good meme! Dylan B Hollis is a really witty baking content creator on YouTube (and TikTok) for anyone wondering who that is.

Have you asked Grandpa to install Windows? Good fucking luck. It's hard to get a windows install working in less than a day, even without reading the 800 pages of legalese which state that your personal information, body, mind, and first born are property of Microsoft.

Hahaha a fitting end to a beautiful and funny story! Thanks so much Ahdok, this was really fun.

Reading your comics has accidentally become part of my daily routine, and one of my most favorite at that. Konsi is so cute, and her and Razira are especially cute and wholesome together. Thanks for brightening up my days like this.

Well said. I think storytelling is an amazing medium precisely because it allows you to explore troubling topics in a safe way, with the linguistic layer of abstraction as a safety net. I check in with my players at session 0 and on occasion to know what is totally OK, what I can describe but not show art for, and what is off limits. We've agreed that sexual assault is off limits, sexual themes can be vaguely alluded to buy should remain mostly implied, spiders can be described but not shown, and everything else is currently on the table. This system should work fine for any table composed of reasonable humans.

I see where you're coming from, and more power to you if that works at your table. In my mind, Charisma accounts for how you present your arguments and how receptive people are going to be, not the contents of your arguments. It's totally valid to say your character could make better arguments than you, but that would depend on intelligence or wisdom (depending on whether they're logical or emotional arguments). So we would typically break character to figure out what the arguments are going to be.

When characters have higher intelligence than their players, I typically collaborate with them in a form of pseudo-metagaming, acting as a supplementary brain for the character. I readily give them / remind them of relevant facts and suggest things that I think might work. For high wisdom characters, I would let them roll an insight check to get a better idea of what emotional arguments might help.

With this, the player can form their arguments before I decide whether we proceed or roll. I realize this might sound tedious, but I think it works well as a way for my players to RP high INT/WIS/CHA characters. And we wouldn't do this for every conversation, only major ones. Sometimes we just want to move things along and I do just assume the character would likely come up with a decent argument, and ask for a Charisma (persuasion) roll

or even Intelligence (persuasion) or Wisdom (persuasion) if it seems appropriate.

I'm not saying our way is the correct way, it's just the way we do things and it works for us. My players don't find it to be unfair.

The way I see it, there's nothing wrong with voicing your opinion, especially between games. Saying "hey, I feel like the fantasy of my character isn't coming to life, is there any way I could get you to take the Charisma score of my character in greater consideration during social interactions going forward?" after a game is a great way to deal with that. That said, there's only so much that Charisma can account for. No matter how charismatic you are, you won't persuade a king to give up his kingdom. Your DM likely thinks your arguments are just too weak for you to persuade someone, regardless of your Charisma. Maybe their expectations regarding your wit and roleplay are too high, or maybe you need to re-evaluate your expectations of what is possible in your game.

Sentences like "Can I roll for persuasion?" or worse "I perception the room" are one of my biggest pet peeves coming from players. Tell me what you want to accomplish, I will tell you whether and what you need to roll. I've mostly managed to train that behavior out of my players, thankfully. As a newbie DM I used to use die rolls as a crutch -- "this is a dice rolling game, so the more dice we roll the more fun we're having, right?" I thought. I also hated saying no to my players, so stupidly high DCs were a way to shift the blame onto the dice for my players' failures. As I've gained experience, I run a much less dice-heavy game. I very often just let my PCs succeed with no roll required.

The one case where I don't mind the players asking to roll is when they ask to "INSIGHT CHECK" à la critical role; it's always fun to see the players so passionately engaging with NPCs.

If Brayden says his character tries to lift a heavy rock and he proceeds to deadlift 150kg to demonstrate, heck, I'll give him inspiration.

The potion mimic is going in all my games now

Definitely a curse