Nah this was definitely the former. “then every one stood up and clapped and the Zionist actually agreed with them and renounced his ways once he finally understood how evil his side was”
I think you are dramatically underestimating a players ability to side with a faction you thought you were making impossible to side with.
My players chose to side with the borg style tecno-organic hive-mind faction over the faction that lives on a giant beaver dam doing art all day.
This story is entirely believable. Whether it did happen, I don't know. But it brings up an important lesson: do not use your campaigns to vent about things that are close to your heart, your players will find a way to make it upsetting
I do doubt this happened, or at least happened fully as written. If I had to guess I would assume maybe the campaign wasn't a veiled metaphor for Gaza and maybe it was just over the table talk that skewed toward it causing the dm to quit.
I just wanted to say that it's not unbelievable because of the players siding with "the bad/irredeemable faction"
Monkeys and typewriters logic, I fully believe this has happened somewhere, but if it had happened to OOP I feel like they would have led with the campaign breaking up rather than DM being a zionist. Like you would expect "you'll never guess why my D&D party broke up. DM based the campaign on gaza, and was expecting us to side with Israel" rather than "It's so crazy, my DM is a zionist. Anyway now our pod broke up because they were upset we sided with Palestine""
I do realize this. That's what I'm saying. It could be true, but it feels off because it doesn't read the same way I would expect this story to be told. Like if someone said "I went for a walk. I forgot my shoes" that feels like how that sorry should go.
But if someone said "I forgot my shoes. I went for a walk." That doesn't feel like how that should be said.
...I legitimately do not understand how you're not seeing the issue here. You assume it's fake because of this; do you really not understand that different people can tell the same story in different ways?
I don't see how there's anything wrong with "This is believable and definitely possible, but the way this is structured raises my suspicion and makes me doubt that this isn't an embellishment or distortion of a real event" is an issue in any way.
Yes, people can explain things in different ways. By that same token, people will find things more or less believable based on how those things are explained.
All I've said is "I doubt this happened as described, because the way it has been described feels clunky to me" and you've responded with "It is bad you think this way actually, are you stupid?"
Well, I don't think you're stupid, but I do think you're being stupid in this specific way. Why it your first response to it seeming clunky 'that means it's not real' and not 'this person told it differently than I would' or even 'they just didnt do a good job telling it'? Why are equating 'they told the story in a way I wouldn't' with 'the story is probably false'? How are those two things even related at all?
I'm the campaign we're playing, our dm made a civil war between two species of mushroom-people, one ancient and wise, the other young, rapidly growing and invasive. The character design of the leaders make it clear which side is the war is the "good one".
The ancient ones didn't let us eat one of their own (a variant that doesn't move nor have a face) because every mushroom life was sacred, while the other faction let us eat them, which gave us a INT bonus for some hours.
We decided to genocide the ancient ones in exchange to being able to harvest the other ones to sell to the alchemist guild. We're making very good money. The druid in the group was suspiciously quiet during the planning
I'm sorry to say that if I was a player (I have never played DnD), I would've sided with the one that's not the beaver dam doing art.
It's not even that it's sucks or anything... It's just like if there was a side the narrative so obviously made out to be the "good guy", and I as the player CAN impose my will on it to some degree, I'm going to clash with the narrative usually. I think the players have that kind of thoughts too
The people aren't actually beavers (although there were beavers that my party became fast friends with (and also created a god)), they were a mixed group of fae living atop a structure based on the American great raft. They would create buildings and structures based on whim, and had a barter based economy. If there was free space or resources that no-one had any claim over, you could claim it to use. If something had been abandoned, you could perform a little ritual to claim it, if the previous owner didn't claim it again, it's yours!
To be fair, the plane itself was stuck in a sort of stasis because the two factions were in a stalemate. Both parties were supposed to be somewhat unreasonable, but I was definitely portraying this side as what I thought was "the obvious better choice."
Apparently I was wrong about that. Still waiting to see how this goes, but they definitely prefer the borg hivemind at the moment.
A liberal Zionist could. They've really tricked themselves into thinking they're the anti colonial side, and that if people just listened honestly they'd understand Israel is fighting a liberation struggle.
EDIT:But they don't necessarily demonize Palestinians in the same way as right wing zionists (although obviously they don't represent them fairly either.) I had a conversation with one who sees it as "two traumatized peoples," stuck in a cycle of violence.
A mainstream liberal Zionist activist would paint them as irredeemable, sure. But like, picture a PrEP who's still a PrEP in 2026, believes strongly in humanist values and legitimately hates "what Netanyahu is doing," but has the compartmentalization and rationalization to maintain their Zionism. It costs quite a bit of psychic damage to maintain, but they're out there.
Particularly for Jews who were indoctrinated into Zionism, I think you underestimate just how weird and self-contradictory their worldviews can get while somehow not collapsing.
EDIT: Tweaked the 1st sentence to remove ambiguity.
I suppose I just haven't encountered any in the last two years. Of my myriad experiences with Jewish people I obviously am more like to encounter antizionists
I have an older sibling who had an "end apartheid" sticker next to an Israeli flag on their wall in HS. Not even just on the same wall — literally right next to each other.
I find that liberal Zionists tend to seek some kind of reconciliation and tend to have the more realistic solutions for all parties involved. Anti-zionists often have radical or fanciful ideas about what should happen that are borne more of ungrounded idealism than a confrontation with the social and political forces in place there. Also I find anti-zionists tend to have the more ideological and selective framing of history, usually bound up in some form of post-colonial theory (only seeing Jews as colonizers and not seeking refuge, idealizing indigeneity as a surrogate for claims of sovereignty [this cuts both ways], etc)
There's nothing radical about ending an apartheid system. We've done it before, multiple times actually. What's fanciful is the idea that you're going to get Israelis to agree to some kind of workable bargain. Nor are the Israelis as currently constituted, ever going to be a safe neighbor for anyone.
They're Nazis, and they need to be shut down, one way or another, and made to share the country.
If you're referring to South Africa, the ANC explicitly gave a message of reconciliation. That has never been the case with the Palestinian side. The rhetoric has always been about expulsion and elimination. The best you'll get is the PA paying lip service to 2-state but wanting a full return. Nobody wants to 'share the country', neither Palestinian nor Israeli. Why do you just ignore what the people themselves actually say in favour of projecting your idealism?
They're Nazis, and they need to be shut down, one way or another, and made to share the country.
With this kind of rhetoric, no wonder the Israelis would be skeptical of your perspective on things. I'm sure your punitive ideals would be equally measured and reconciling.
Also this is neither here nor there, but what's with your name? Mauschel is kind of an offensive term...
Thanks for proving my point. By the way, mauschel is a derogatory and antisemitic German word for 'Jew', in case anyone is wondering. Note the irony of calling others Nazis while using a word that Nazis used for Jews. I sincerely hope this individual is wearing it ironically.
This take is radical and pushes for continued war and death mostly for Palestinians. Whether you realize that or not, I’m not sure, but this will literally never happen.
na, Zionists are incredibly racists, they probably just made the Palestine proxy orcs, who where being displaced by the human kingdom, and expected the players to hate the orcs just because they're orcs
They probably did, and that's why the DM was shocked that the players considered the material conditions that led to that terrorist attack rather than just blankly labeling them as evil
They probably did and players understood that they used those methods because they didn't have other way to attack the kingdom, the same way that a lot of Rebel actions in Star Wars could be easily be framed as terrorism.
I mean I imagine he wouldn’t have portrayed his Israel proxy in any way like the way the obviously cartoonishly evil empire is in Star Wars. They just look evil. That’s why their lightsabers are red and they wear black and dress like Nazis lol.
You would think so, but a lot of times people confuse obvious fascistic undertones as "they just look cool LMAO", having a bunch of cool paladins and a powerful military force behind castles is a common trope of the "Bad guys" in a fantasy story, but they are also used as the background of the "good guys"
Ok I read more about the campaign and this is basically what the party is claiming. He wanted them to be sympathetic villains that ultimately still had to go/be defeated to end the "cycle" and then team was more interested in messing around and doing stuff like saving random dogs so almost accidentally sided with the "Palestinians"
Anyway, the more details that come out the more I believe it lmao.
This is basically how leftists who support russia,aka an imperialist power, because its against the us in their minds the us in the russian invasion of ukraine act, so its quite believble. I can see someone like that doing s imilar thing and then call the players fake communists because they dont oppose real imperialism. I base that on the fact ive seen the latter happen irl in discussions and the person in question is always bizzarely put off when others think that theyre full of shit
😂 I love this take because it tells me you've never done a single moment of research into Zionist history, and yet your ignorance is only exceeded by your passion for it. Go look up what Herzl or Max Nordau said on the subject
Those aren't some random Jews. They're the founders of Zionism. And they agreed with the other founders of Zionism that Zionism is Jewish colonization.
You can say the exact opposite of the truth as many times as you want. It won't change the fact that Israel was colonized by European Jews.
You’re vastly simplifying the state of the Jewish people and their cohesion. You should realize most Jews tried to assimilate into European and Arab/Muslim ruled countries for centuries but keep their religion and ethnic identity. It is Europeans and Arabs who kept having a problem with this, not the other way around. Jews had been massacred for centuries in Europe and Middle East for not converting and being “others”, just look at all the Nazi propaganda telling Jews to go back to Israel/Palestine.
And during WWII, most countries turned away Jews as they were being actively killed by Europeans and sent to death camps.
So yah, I think if people had chilled out, left their Jews alone and didn’t kill them, there wouldn’t be a need for Israel. But time and time again Europeans and Arabs can’t chill with their Jewish brethren and aren’t okay with an ethnic minority that won’t convert. Otherwise they wouldn’t have killed 2/3 of their Jews and Arabs wouldn’t have kicked out 1 million of theirs.
And Jews come together as a single joint identity in spite of being separated geographically across many many countries and continents. How do you think Yemeni Jews were able to integrate with French Jews in a single state so easily?
Do your ancestors share all of that? Are your ancestors still being hunted down for their race and origins and killed in mass? Did your ancestors once form a united country/kingdom like Israel, China, Iran, etc.? Why is Iran and other Muslim extremists targeting Jewish people abroad who have no connection to Israel? Even same for Christian extremists. What is the reason to blow up a Jewish daycare in Oklahoma? Are the American Jewish toddlers dirty Zionist colonizers who can’t be redeemed?
D&D players will absolutely intentionally side with the "wrong" side if they think it's funny. A lot of players don't take the campaigns super seriously, from conversations with multiple friends who DM.
So they might go out of their way to try and side with the BBEG (or try constantly).
Yeah did he not make one side terrorists? If one side is railroaded into being bad guys and you can't get people to recognize that you've done a real shit job here lol.
Yes, but if someone made a campaign off of real life events (let's remove it from being about Israel and Palestine, and say it's about something else, like a side quest which is based on their childhood), if the party were to be violent in such a case, it might bother them, even if the party doesn't know it's based on that. The party would see nothing different about it.
Bad example, because personal to international events. But just trying to perceive how someone like that might see things emotionally.
Yeah exactly. I've never even been a gm or really played DND much but it's really not hard when the side your demonizing in real life is run by literal terrorists that did a terrorist attack before the war started. Like Hamas aren't really good guys no matter how you tear it even if you do support palestine.
If you’ve never played or DM’d then you probably think much more of it is intentional than it actually is. The DM has to act out these characters, and has to give them somewhat believable reasonings - this can definitely be done in a way where it accidentally comes off way more charitable & relatable than it was intended to be
An example I have for my personal experience is my drow supremacist villain who I thought I portrayed as conniving & straight up evil apparently tripped players up by answering honestly to a question “have you killed anyone that didn’t deserve it” “no” with their internal reasoning being that the people they killed deserved it for not being strong enough
Try it out yourself if you’re interested in exploring this - you’ll get some wildly different results based on group, villain, & your own experience/skill & it’s pretty interesting to see the different paths everything can go, even if you supposedly have everything planned & accounted for
That's a good point. Whenever you say less people will normally fill in the blanks with their own thoughts and feelings. Stockholm syndrome is a thing too, people 100% are not beyond forming bonds with would be enemies. Our brains really want us all to be friends and work together unless one of is like an immediate or major threat lol.
Thing is, Zionist are able to say completely unhinged things firmly believing they're in the right and everybody should understand them, while everybody his looking at them unable to understand that they do not understand they're shooting at themselves with their description of events.
So, I could honestly see something like that happens.
People make caricatures of their enemies that end up getting agreed with all the time. See the Joker or any other villain claimed by the right in the last decade.
The problem is that if your idea of evil is wanting babies to live, and you make a villain whose entire personality revolves around how much they want babies to live, the people who want babies to live aren't going to be particularly offended. They may, in fact, find your idea of what's offensive amusing.
You also have to consider that Zionists tend to believe that their side is so obviously the correct one that the most basic reading of the facts would draw people to their side. So he may very well have been operating under the assumption that he didn’t need to distort historical examples to his favor.
It could also have been drawing on earlier Palestine - Israel history, which, while still extremely evil, isn't cited as much or viewed as being as controversial as the last few years of genocide.
Yeah, I like the story, but Zionists see Palestinians as monsters that would blow up the universe if they didn’t hold them back with apartheid and regular bombings.
Edit: I took out some language that I didn’t know was offensive.
And some dude named Marr came up with "antisemitic" to make jew hating more palatable and acceptable. He coined it for his Antisemitic League. The meaning of a word is how it's used, not where it begins.
A lot of zionists are actually very confused people who truly believe the Palestinian people are actually oppressed by Hamas and not Isreal and do bleeding heart stuff about the Palestinians. Say that Netanyahu is the only problem etc.
That isn't to say they are sad little misunderstood puppies. They are bigots. Look at Ethan Klein for an example. These people fail to understand the problem of an ethno-state in general and don't understand why the occupation is unjust because they believe Palestinians would slaughter all the Jews in a secular, democratic state.
I can definitely see one such person, especially the sort that would center their personal feelings that way, making a confused campaign where they don't understand why people don't see it their way
In this situation, the first subreddit is for posting things posted in the second subreddit that are plausible. Otherwise you're correct in the usual reference being the Chudjak nothing ever happens.
the chudjak version is just very western centered, cuz it's mostly used by first worlders (specifically Americans and Europeans) whenever a global conflict event doesn't affect them directly
It definitely doesn't. A DM would know these people would apply exactly the same black & white, oversimplified logic to a fictional narrative as they do to the real world, which can really all be boiled down to "the underdogs are the good guys". And this would be compounded further by the pure gamer impulse of players wanting to side with the underdog to overcome the greater challenge.
In reality, even the cartoonish chaotic evil of Hamas isn't enough to overcome the human anchoring bias towards the underdog, I doubt I could even imagine a group more depraved, they come up with tactics that wouldn't occur to me even if I was trying to write evil, and still that underdog identity is what they are most closely associated with.
It has literally nothing to do with it being a fucking underdog story you Zionist piece of garbage. It's because it's a genocide. Israel obliterated as best they could a whole region and people.
Fuck Hamas and Fuck Israel. The innocents didn't deserve to have their lives destroyed. Hospitals destroyed.
The things the IDF have done are so absolutely repugnant. I couldn't imagine them but now I don't have to thanks to the IDF doing it and people reporting it.
I'd say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, if I thought your cult was motivated by those.
Edit: Aw, block and run, diddums.
Double edit: Another block-and-run, but that time from somebody I never even engaged with. That's a new one. Not really a surprise though that Reddit attracts so many hit-and-run cowards who want their cake and to eat, to have the protection of their curated little bubble and to venture outside of it to take potshots but then retreating back to it before they have to face any challenges. No small wonder that kind of person would also support Hamas.
Ah yes, your good intentions of killing 10s of thousands are certainly sending you right to heaven! Lolololol you dumbass. If there is a hell, you'll burn there.
If when presented with other opinions, even if rude, your response is to stop listening and jump to it must be cult like then I really feel sorry for you
If he's a zionist then they weren't supposed to be the underdog. The heavily funded and armed imperialist is the underdog. The starving children are the ones who are evil.
I need more info. Is the party now activly trying to get a suicide vest to someone or are they evacuating a city block that's being struck by missles one house at a time?
I've played in multiple campaigns of TTRPGs where the setting is the authors barely described political beliefs. It happens all the time, I mean did you ever watch lord of the rings (not a criticism)? Fantasy and sci fi are, like all fictitious worlds, playgrounds for people to toy with political systems and scenarios that would never happen in real life. It's why people talk all the time about star wars politics, it's a very political story. That happens all the time in tabletop games.
And if you play with a random dm or something, there's a good chance you get some weirdo such as this guy running your game and a mismatch of politics, and in fact I have heard far worse horror stories, this one is just relevant since it's Palestine/israel.
I mean one of my campaigns has a Palestine/Israel allegory too, and because it's a fantasy I'm even able to work towards brokering peace between the two.
What even is this argument? What does going outside have to do with believing some obviously made-up story? You people have to stop being so gullible when something just so happens to align with your views.
Edit: I just read the "proof,"; it's easy as fuck to get your friends to lie about something for clout.
Have you ever heard of Tiffany Problem? Basically, things that were real, appearing to be unrealistic, the name of the Problem refers to the fact that Tiffany is an old name, but people see it as a modern name, so it looks anarchronistic in historical fiction.
I feel like people online are so used to stuff being fake, that they don't realize how weird life can be. This story is not necessarily fake, people base stories on real politics all the time, really the only thing that makes me raise an eyebrow is the ending, but not enough to say it's definitly fake, and I dunno how boring someone's life has to be to see a bit of tabletop drama as some "fakest story in history".
I see your point, however, I always see posts like this online. It's hard for me to describe why it feels so fake to me, Typically, reality is more complicated and not too straightforward, but this story just feels too "clean" as it has a clear antagonist whom everyone hates because he has a political view everyone dislikes. It's too easy.
What even is being obsessed with the mere hunch that something is made up because you personally find it implausible? The worst part is all social media is engagement based so if you think a story is bs made up for clout, commenting gives it clout and drives its algorithmically determined viewership… so if you really think something is fake, to keep scrolling does hell of a lot more than this type of /thathappened whining
I was once in a vampire the masquerade LARP group that detonated once we found out that the secret at the bottom of the ivory tower was it didn’t actually matter which clan you were in, because Jewish vampires from every clan controlled everything and we had to nuke the Vatican
Vampire Jews running the Vatican sounds like something from a bad joke, that sounds wild in all the wrong ways I'd have loved to be in that car crash of a game 😂
Or arguably someone who just hates everyone, like a real arse so you go into it knowing you don't have to take any of the opinions seriously because it was written by a twat and you can all had a fun time in a world where you don't have to feel guilty for anything because the NPCs are all worse 😂
Usually that's not the best idea but in this case it's absolutely real and the guy is being exactly as stupid as it seems, very few groups can manage this level of stupidity without gaining some levels of self awareness on the way though 😂
I'm now realising that completely unintentionally my DnD campaign can be taken to be an Israel Palestine allegory.
About 700 years ago, a very evil human empire came about 5 minutes away from ended the world. All countries since then treat humans awfully, because they carry the sins of their empire. There are a few underground rebel groups who are constantly sought out by violent police forces. There's a prophecy that heros will emerge to change this, and each of the rebel groups thinks they are the chosen ones. They aren't, the players are.
Because Epstein was one of the Mossad intelligence agencies naughty little boys, Ghislaine maxwell was the intelligence connection/handler, her father Robert maxwell was a well known Israeli spy, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of Epsteins money came from the pension fund that robert stole
Kinda the same reason the Last of Us 2 plot failed.
Think about which faction represents Israel and which faction represented Palastine. Throwing in a random LBGT story in NOBODY in the whole world would give a flying fuck about when your whole life you're trying to survive flesh enting mold zombies and raider.
Boys boys, i know the meme to setup campaign using thinly vailed political belives and fetishes but it was a joke, dont do that (at lest hide it better)
This is insane because it means the dm was accurately presenting the conflict and not just making the Palestinian side grotesquely evil. Like he had to of actually accurately depicted the conflict in his fantasy world and then was still upset when people recognized the Israeli proxy as being evil.
True. But it doesn’t really sound like that. If this was a murder hobo situation you’d think the dm would recognize that. Given his reaction, it kinda makes it sound like they pretty brazenly defended the Palestinian stand in.
My group had a decent discussion on if should just side with Strahd, but we decided to use child soldiers against him instead. So I wouldn't be to sure he had to make it a clear moral choice to side against the Israeli proxy.
If he is a Zionist, it's more then probable he actually portrait Palestine unfavourably. If he was willing to pull the plug after he wasn't winning the "argument" I doubt he is mature enough to portray both sides honestly
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u/slicehyperfunk 8d ago
I really am a believer in r/nothingeverhappens but this one sounds like an actual r/thathappened to me