Thank you so much, doctor, for meeting with me, Torvald Kroraark of Khovaire, Scourge of the Daelkyr & Breaker of Bones. I know I’m not technically real, so I appreciate you taking the time! I think we both know who we’re worried about. Dungeons & Dragons is, at heart, a simple game of communal storytelling shared between friends, but John keeps using it to engage in incredibly risky behavior. Which is to say they’re making me do all these dangerous things, while he avoids dealing with his problems.
I know I’m a big, strong dude but maybe I don’t need to charge into every dungeon or cave or enchanted fortress without looking or thinking about who or what is in there? You’d need a Bag of Holding (literally, a near-limitless parallel space) to catalog all the issues I’ve had with my adventuring party after I interrupted their attempts to plan a careful and clever siege by shouting profanity and charging toward the door. They heal my broken body but I can hear them muttering things like “when is John going to get a real job?” and “did he really get into an argument with a stranger at ShopRite over which breakfast cereal is the best?” But every time my DM tries to talk to John about it, they’re all like “it’s what my character would do” and “everyone knows Count Chocula should be sold year-round” and it gets swept under the rug.
Umm, red flags much?
That’s not even a deception check, that’s a straight uncanny dodge of his issues, which happens a lot, like, definitely more than the laws of probability a twenty-sided die should allow for. Even I, a totally ripped Half-Orc barbarian, know you can’t use violence to solve all your problems; sometimes words cut even deeper than all the sharp, heavy weapons I carry around with me. Weapons John uses both to subdue evil and threaten bartenders and innkeepers instead of paying our bills. This is why he doesn’t have a girlfriend! Just how long are the people in John’s life (both real and admittedly fictional) supposed to put up with this thoughtless, brutish behavior?
Yes, I know “Breaker of Bones” is right there in my name, and I’ve slain a lot of enemies, but maybe I didn’t need to rip that old lady’s spine out of her back and hold it above my head like I was reeling in a big fish? I know she was a zombie and all, but she was also someone’s grandmother before that happened. More importantly, SHE’S NOT YOUR DAD, JOHN! WHY ARE YOU SO ANGRY AT HER!? Seeing her body opened like a lunch bag has to be really traumatic for her family, so maybe take your actual therapy seriously so that others don’t have to?
And I know we all took the death of our beloved party member Boblin the Goblin quite hard, we adopted him after we slaughtered the whole rest of his whole village after all, but maybe a twelve-person multi-species orgy was not the best way to deal with it? I just wanted to sit in my room at the tavern and write in my journal about my feelings over a hot cup of tea, not be entwined in so many bodies that I don’t know whether I’m nailing one of the Tabaxis or I’m in the folds of someone’s fur cloak — although to be fair, putting your junk in someone’s cloak is probably less terrifying than fucking one of those humanoid cat people when they get all riled up.
I don’t know if I can keep up being this person for much longer. All John wants is to maim and kill everything in front of me, but I, Torvald Kroraark of Khovaire, Scourge of the Daelkyr & Breaker of Bones, have so much more going on under the surface. Does he ever stop to think when I’m going to finish reading that volume of elven poetry in my backpack or even when my last hot meal was? I’m so tired of living on Doritos crumbs and repressed childhood trauma.
I know we’re out of time, so I wanted to thank you for letting me talk. It’s so nice to have someone listen for a change instead of anxiously acting on all John’s inner-most fears about their self-worth! We can totally make this a weekly session, except I have this thing next week so we might have to reschedule? For now, I’m off to do what it is I always do when John’s not playing me: scrub the blood stains from my clothes and finish crocheting the cozy for my Karnathi Blood Axe.
