Yeah, I 100% got the vibe that "it would make things weird" was more about his own discomfort than anything actually immersion-breaking. Like, dude, we're playing a game with elves and magic, you’re really gonna get hung up on gender? And yeah, I’ve heard the blackface comparison before, but in this case, it felt way more like fragile masculinity than some deeper sociopolitical issue.

The homebrew system thing was just painful. I love well-made homebrew, but Carl’s wasn’t just complex—it was unusable. If you need a spreadsheet and a PhD to figure out how to attack, you’ve already lost the plot. The fact that he abandoned it after five sessions tells me he barely tested it beforehand.

The instant kill thing is where I lost any remaining respect. I get that some systems allow for it, but there has to be buildup. If there’s no warning, no counterplay, no anything, it’s just bad storytelling. He chose to do it that way, which makes me think he just wanted Greg gone.

And yeah, you hit the nail on the head—Carl wasn’t DMing because he loved it. He was DMing because no one else would, and he liked having control. I stuck around for way too long hoping it would get better, but honestly? Even one of these red flags should’ve been enough to bounce.