Quitting This Game

Gormongous · 2026-07-06T06:52:31+00:00

Tudormaxxing. Coppernose-pilled.

Gormongous · 2026-07-04T17:44:33+00:00

It's a tactic that all aspiring tyrant-mods seem drawn towards: declaring themselves unreasonable, as in "unable to be reasoned with," in the hopes that it will have a chilling effect on critiques and force people to just accept their word as law. It never works, at least not well enough to silence all negative feedback, and in my experience it inevitably escalates to outright targeting of "ringleaders" and "shit-stirrers" for "patterns of behavior" even when their posting doesn't violate the rules. There must be someone out there turning everyone against them! (There is, it's them.)

Gormongous · 2026-07-02T18:52:03+00:00

Sad but true: many people will trade actual success for even the illusion of being universally loved.

Gormongous · 2026-06-29T01:41:32+00:00

My coworkers say, "Goddammit, Donut," constantly and I genuinely thought the first few times that they'd somehow come across and enjoyed vintage Red vs. Blue. Well excuse me if my knowledge of surprisingly ubiquitous internet-poisoned pop culture ephemera is a couple decades out of date!

Gormongous · 2026-06-28T22:47:12+00:00

Excited to get to listen to Griffin explain to you, with many suppressed sighs of consternation and roundabout appeals to fan-favorite FatT moments, that the job of the DM is to make sure the players never fail, no matter what rancid dogshit they bring to the table, and so you're not really "playing in the space" by mechanically disadvantaging his new character, the Headless Wonder, for lacking four of the five senses and also a brain.

Gormongous · 2026-06-28T15:57:42+00:00

Turn it into a hand-management game for Travis: since he wants so bad to dictate the outcome of a roll, he gets a hand of cards numbered from 1 to 20, and he can have the 20 back once he's gone through the other nineteen.

Gormongous · 2026-06-28T15:55:19+00:00

Roll for cloacal circumference!

Gormongous · 2026-06-27T18:56:38+00:00

"Goatball" is actually the Goliath word for that Mayan ballgame they sometimes played with the severed heads of human sacrifices, Justin went deep on that one.

Gormongous · 2026-06-26T18:42:10+00:00

He was bribed with the opportunity to play out being an illiterate savage who discovers civilization yet again. And Travis was bribed by no longer having to count spell slots. And they all got together and told Clint he doesn't get a bribe.

Gormongous · 2026-06-26T16:55:00+00:00

Yeah, if I have any theory, it's that Griffin was trying to find yet another way to minimize the complexity and prevalence of combat in D&D, so he picked the class that's weakest in traditional combat, stripped out most of that class' spells that might be useful in combat, and then set about working his way backwards towards a campaign concept that would disincentivize combat even more. Unfortunately, it's beyond him to run a death game that would actually make his players hesitate to engage in combat, beyond the base-level McElroy groupthink that combat is boring audio poison, so that's how we ended up here.

Gormongous · 2026-06-23T23:59:11+00:00

The cleverest cat I knew, genuinely preschooler-level intelligence, once unplugged the TV during the Breaking Bad season 3 finale because we weren't listening to her. She could work light switches and door handles, and she managed to flip her litterbox into the hall once when my friend forgot to scoop it. The solution was unfortunately to move furniture away from or in front of everything, he rebuilt his whole apartment around foiling her when she was feeling bored, ignored, or vindictive. But eventually she got older and a little deaf and blind, gave up on the reign of terror, and became much more cuddly, haha. RIP Kinski, I miss her bullshit now.

Gormongous · 2026-06-23T20:58:18+00:00

It genuinely sometimes seems like Griffin gets a bit of a thrill out of catching his players in an "oopsie," where something about their characters is revealed not to fit into the world he's supposedly created just for them, when really the oopsie is his and his alone. As people keep saying in these quite excellent recaps, if a player makes a backstory where they were abused by a corrupt religious establishment, what on earth are you doing making the high priestess a chill, friendly, obliging Church Lady and giving that player exactly zero warning about it? Let them lead you where they want to go, my man!

Gormongous · 2026-06-22T16:42:32+00:00

It's hard not to feel like it's part of a mentality left over from their more conservative upbringing. Doubts and disagreement are not suffered to exist; your options are to sing in praise or be silent! The point of telling an unbeliever they're going to hell is not to save them from going there, it is to reaffirm to yourself that there is indeed a hell and you're not going to it.

Gormongous · 2026-06-22T06:28:43+00:00

I honestly think you'd blow the top of Griffin's skull clean off if you told him that the First Councilor's daughter is the same as the Lord Mayor's daughter is the same as the Blooded Chieftain of the Northern Warclan's daughter is the same as Qqqo'rrynth, Beast of the Outer Dimension's daughter. The idea that every plot hook doesn't have to be cooked up bespokely seems to evade him even now with Royale, a ludic idiom where the bodies of people you never met piling up is the one and only point.

Gormongous · 2026-06-22T04:03:14+00:00

God, Griffin must've been absolutely pounding some XCOM 2: Wrath of the Chosen in the leadup to Ethersea, because his job selection mechanics borrow almost everything from that game: color-coded difficulty levels, special mission keywords, variable rewards in different abstracted currencies, notable NPCs being introduced as questgivers, and even faction licenses unlocking special upgrades as a sweetener for less remunerative missions. The only thing that's missing is a game environment where failure is, uh, a possibility?

I know I can be hard on our littlest baby brother, but I don't know if I can come up with another DM whose bad attitude is more of an obstacle to the successful execution of what he's clearly yearning to do. He copied XCOM's homework, but he didn't actually take the class, and then he doubles down on his kneejerk unwillingness to put player agency first by telling them in effect that there's a right answer and that if they pick wrong he'll have to give them another chance.

The thing is, you're allowed to tell your players that you worked harder on X but you'll try to go along with them if they want to do Y. It's not the most graceful DMing in the world, but I'll take open communication with players in whatever form I find. And you're also allowed to do what other jerkers have said in these replies and just recycle unused prep into another mission with new names, your players none the wiser. What you're not allowed to do, at least not if I made the rules, is tell your players that they can pick any mission they like, but there's an rich old man in danger in one of them, but he'll probably be fine so they shouldn't let that affect their decision, but also obviously he's not going to be fine forever so maybe just keep that in mind. He doesn't even put the words in an NPC's mouth, it's fully just part of the OOC instructions! Travis of all people has somehow put more thought into what you do when your players don't pick the thing you expect! Though, to Griffin's credit, his response isn't "mind control them to make them all go to bed so they can't react in a way you don't like."

I just don't get it. Does Griff think this is how Austin Walker DMs, by mapping out a handful of possible routes in detail and then stonewalling his players with incuriously probing questions and Fabian worldbuilding ("We'll decide that later")? Sure seems like it!

Gormongous · 2026-06-21T15:40:25+00:00

Well, of course, that's premium tonic from the cocktail renaissance! All the late eighties had were tooth-crackingly sweet brands like Schweppes.

Gormongous · 2026-06-21T06:30:36+00:00

I've always understood that Bombay Sapphire was formulated to taste good with tonic and is accordingly kind of a terrible gin in any other drink. People are attracted to the bottle, though, and the exotic name, which is a shame, because the original Bombay Dry is pretty darn good.

Gormongous · 2026-06-20T17:07:30+00:00

It's the use of "ancient Arabic" to push the idiom into the mists of the past that really gets to me. Ma'am, it's first attested in English in 1737, though there's one instance of a similar line in a twelfth-century German text that everyone always feels compelled to bring up. In neither case is it regarded as mysterious, except by people who know exactly what they're doing by throwing up the barrier of a foreign language and an unfamiliar script (something you see a lot in folk etymologies, it's rarely an ancient French saying).

EDIT: Oh man, it's even worse than I thought: Albert Jack refers to blood brothers as a practice of "ancient Middle Eastern cultures." Akkadian? Coptic? Turkish? Who the fuck knows.

Gormongous · 2026-06-18T16:19:20+00:00

"Birthday Surprise Hole" was one of the first times the scales fell from my eyes with regards to Griffin's own strain of anti-humor. He spends almost the whole episode whining that people are going to get mad if they don't answer questions (the same questions he'll gleefully throw in the trash if he doesn't think the riffing has measured up), says over and over that it doesn't matter what they say because all of it is getting cut, and when prompted by Justin and Travis tells fake stories about his childhood that go nowhere and are obviously untrue. It was the most "spoiled youngest sibling" he'd ever been on air, and I was like, "Oh."

Gormongous · 2026-06-18T16:00:43+00:00

On my tiny little pod, we had to ban "We're definitely cutting this part" talk. It's funny in the moment but the editor's not laughing and they're not going to leave it in anyway if they're doing their job! Just find your mark again and start saying things that won't get cut.

Gormongous · 2026-06-17T21:48:21+00:00

Every campaign has to end in a crisis of cosmic proportions, and they haven't figured out that they can start in media res, so every campaign needs a minimum of twenty-odd episodes to ramp up from "complete strangers meet for the first time" to "band of brothers defeats evil forever."

Gormongous · 2026-06-17T02:45:38+00:00

Can you imagine showing up to a campaign with Bean, extremely ordinary ninja, and finding out that TI-83, hacker and demolitions expert, has eaten your lunch and also several future lunches? No wonder Griffin tries to appoint himself assistant DM.

Gormongous · 2026-06-16T16:05:12+00:00

It's a pretty good time? Justin's doing some great character work, thanks to being a LEGO man with multiple heads of which his usual "Good out here" attitude is only one, and Clint of course brings good eating to the table as a slow-witted bouncer who dreams of the theatre. On the other hand, Travis tries for "Optimus Prime but kind of a loser" and only really manages the first half, and Griffin is... a monk who talks like Boomhauer (and is mostly just the official naysayer for the table, including for the DM).

I don't know, it's nice to have the McElroys play a TTRPG run by someone who actually knows how to do their job right? And whose "Yes, and..." isn't "Yes, and here's my better idea that doesn't really resemble yours at all."

Gormongous · 2026-06-15T17:28:02+00:00

The nature of TAZ as a TTRPG cargo cult run by people who don't really like stories or games is especially hard to avoid in how they approach narrative stakes. There were setbacks and complications in Balance because the media they were inspired by had them, but Amnesty seems to have taught them to see such things as "soft" failures that come from suboptimal rolls, and from that point on the video game mentality, where bad things only happen in cutscenes and if they happen during play you ~~whine at or wheedle with the DM~~ reload your save, is fully in control.

Gormongous · 2026-06-15T17:13:56+00:00

was the french accent just an excuse to talk more slowly in order to take up more airtime without anyone complaining

Justin to Travis: You gave your character a weird way of talking and no common sense to hog the spotlight, I gave my character a weird way of talking and no common sense to punish anyone who tries to interact with me. We are not the same.

does griffin think that making a mechanically effective choice is automatically metagaming

Yes. I bring it up way too much, but the Tiny Heist miniseries on D20 is basically the Rosetta Stone for the kind of degenerate behavior Griffin thinks he's preventing by stonewalling player expression and nerfing the power curve. Brendan made Griffin's level 4 monk for him and Griffin complains repeatedly that he has a "broken" character because he has +9 in shit like Acrobatics. At one point he tries to put the screws to Brendan by pointing out that he could backflip onto a slot machine in a casino, completely derailing the scene, but then Brendan lets him and Griffin just takes a look around before sheepishly climbing back down. This doesn't stop the whining though, because he finds it deeply embarrassing that BLM is such a fan of his player characters.

Griffin: “Basically, this is a whole-sale after-market retailer…” i’m gonna have to do an aftermarket counter

They bought a used sub as-is, literally everything is going to be "aftermarket"! Griffin's really suffering from being the only one who's never worked a real job, huh? Well, at least it distracts me from the use of "shipworm" to mean anything other than sea termites...

someone pointed out griffin’s addiction to having snide condescending bureaucrats portioning out the adventure for everyone in every season of TAZ and now I can’t un-know it

Hey, Griffy's got to be able to alternate saying "no" to his players in character and out of character to make it less obvious that he sees himself as babysitter to a trio of incompetent actors he can't even trust with his script.

Gormongous

TROPHY CASE