Kill the commoners with your own blade or the effects of your actions. Wage war against populations willy-nilly, blame a third party for the aggression. Increase the price of health care, then belittle people for getting sick or hurt in the first place. The mind reels at such cartoon villainy, but #GOPDnD can help you come to terms with it.
The hashtag, which appears to have originated from the Twitter account of One Shot podcast co-host James D’Amato, has been steadily gaining steam since it appeared last Friday. It usually takes the form of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign leader or dungeon master arguing for (or against) common decency in the face of a rogue player—either the GOP or POTUS himself. Many use spells or in-game terms that just don’t translate to normie speech well. However, some transcend the form.
Grab your bag of holding, we’re going in.
Most #GOPDnDers make use of their limited tweetspace to grapple with a single GOP-affected issue, framed in a way that would make Wizards of the Coast proud.
On “draining the swamp” and building the wall:
On women:
On health care:
Assigning politicians or pundits D&D alignments like Lawful Good/True Neutral/Chaotic Evil, or comparing them to easily identifiable fictional characters, has been played out again and again and again. (And again—it might be time to read a new book, guys.) But the fact that the actions of the Republican Party, or the day-to-day doings of President Donald Trump himself, are so easily paralleled by textbook bad-guy behavior isn’t just hilarious—it is also concerning.
But the parallels only go so far. It’s one thing when a single bad or unfair player in a D&D campaign gets huffy, picks up his or her dice, and storms out of a session. But if the GOP storms out? If the president storms out? How does this end? Will they tear up the Constitution, hold the budget hostage, get countless people killed either by illness or military action? Does our future hinge on a roll of the 20-sided dice? Could that even matter if the leadership is weighting the dice, then disregarding whatever it says anyway? Will we be left sending a bunch of low-level adventurers, played by children, up against the Demogorgon?
Maybe it’s time to look forward to the next campaign. America Second Edition will probably have worked out the bugs in the system by then.
