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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/36002281

Back when I was a senior in high-school, I adopted a freshman dork who got me to watch Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (if only to get him to talk about something other than Skyrim). I'm gonna call him Baby Gronk. He was a good kid and I was trying to show him how to be cool, so I invited him to my next D&D campaign. This was a mistake.

Baby Gronk was dead set on playing as Alphonse. I okayed this. Eberron was not out at this point, so I asked him to present me with the homebrew he wants to use. We then had a little talk about how to mechanically handle being a hollow suit of armor (which he wanted to use as portable cat storage!) and I thought I'd got a good read on what his character is going to be since we both have watched FMA:B. I also made sure he understood that D&D is not like Skyrim; it can be fun to break the game mechanics, but at the end of the day you are playing make-believe with a table of people who are trying to tell a story together.

The campaign taught me a valuable lesson on media literacy. I know my baby dork watched the same show as me. I will never know why he thought the Alphonse he brought to my table was anything like the Alphonse in the anime. His only character trait was that he liked cats. Whenever he got bored he would start looking for cats, even if we were in a blizzard in the middle of nowhere. He almost died trying to pet a Remorhaz, which he somehow thought was a kind of cat‽ There was even one time he nearly caused a party wipe because he got bored in the middle of combat and started looking for cats. It was a serious problem.

I got tired of this catastrophe very quickly, and the players were clearly trying to not bully Baby Gronk. When he gets killed in combat at one point, I decide to take the opportunity to eject him from the campaign. We do a funeral scene, and then I pull him off to the side and give him a postcredit scene where his death was actually faked and now he's being recruited into S.H.I.E.L.D. as a secret agent. I then ended the session, ditched the group chat, and moved the date, time, and location of our weekly dnd sessions so he couldn't find the new group. My friends assured me that I had done the right thing.

The moral of the story I took at the time was "Follow the Half Plus Seven rule when inviting players to your table; if they are too young for you to date, there's gonna be issues at the table." A few years later, I reflected on this again, and realized that the problem was that I was a coward. I did not have the spine to look Baby Gronk in the eyes and tell them "Hey, Alphonse's obsession with cats is ruining the fun of everyone else at the table, including me. Can you dial that back?" That wasn't who I wanted to be. At that point, I started setting more firm ground rules with my players, and dedicated myself to making my tables safe spaces for my players.

I ran into Baby Gronk a few years later after he had graduated. He'd got his own D&D group by then, and told me the campaign I ran for him inspired him to be a DM himself. I still couldn't look him in the eye. We then parted ways.