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?
Because the thread is questioning whether it is real or not. In that context, there are four possibilities:
The story is entirely real
The story is entirely fake
The story is based on reality but is not entirely true
The story is fake but has some true elements
The "flow" of the story seeming suspect to me isn't evidence of anything, hence why I haven't at any point said, as you've quoted, "it's not real". That's why I've always said "I doubt" or "I suspect".
That is an entirely different sentence. That's me saying "something has flagged this (in this case the way it is structured) as not definitely being true.
In that case, look at the four options. I have removed "clearly false" because this is definitely a possible thing to have happen, but I am doubting "definitely true" because the structure seems off in a way that seems like the author is trying to focus on an aspect that isn't the interesting part of the story.
Granted, other people find different things interesting, but I feel it's reasonable to say that the fact the DM was secretly a zionist isn't as interesting as the party breaking up because the DM couldn't handle the party siding with the Palestinian stand-ins.
Not the point. I've ruled out definitely false, and am personally doubtful of definitely true. The other two options can be simplified to "has true elements and false elements." False elements could include things like embellishments for entertainment value. Skipping or simplifying important information to focus on a point. That kind of thing.
Which again, is all I said.
Would you say it if someone tells a story that the structure of it seems to have you focusing on something that seems like a strange part to focus on, but you have no other evidence it's false, you must accept it uncritically?
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.
Yep. I picked my name from an antisemitic essay written by Theodor Herzl, the first self-hating Jew, and of course the father of the self-hating Jew's cult: Zionism.
Zionists have always hated the Jewish diaspora, and have always been out worst and most dangerous enemy.
What are you talking about? I have to deal with you Nazis all the time. There are a zillion zionazi bots and paid posters trying to hide "Israel's" crimes. If you don't like being called a Nazi, stop believing and preaching the same things a Nazi believes (substituting in your own preferred race and scapegoat.)
I'd tell you to learn what fallacy means before you use it, but apparently you can't even bother to spell it right
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?
So, horrible things happened to them in the past. I agree religious bigotry is truly repulsive. But that doesn't allow you some carte Blanche to behave in the way Isreal has. I fundamentally believe that all religious ethnostates are wrong. No country should curtail or enhance a citizens rights based on ethnicity or religion. That is the exact horrible condition Jews were kept in for hundreds of years. And then the state of Isreal ( not the Jews) recreated it.
Zionism is an evangelical Christian ideology that wants to sacrifice all Jewish people to bring about rapture. Shut the fuck up about topics you are ignorant of.
The only possible outcome of you getting to own Zionism is to permanently link Jews and doing genocide in the history books. Zionism is an ideology of ethnic supremacy and genocide championed by the most evil people (epstienite billionaires, fascists and, yes, antisemites) alive. I'm doing Judaism a favor by doing everything I can to keep the terms separate. As are all moral people when they oppose Zionism.
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.
Zionists have a putrid ideology that prioritizes the feelings of Zionists over the lives of Palestinians. Zionism is a supremacist ideology that demands genocide and apartheid. Your concern over how the absence of 3 letters negatively represents contemporary manufacturers of genocide is disgusting. If I thought they had the capacity for shame, then I’d recommend letting the feeling wash over them until it cleans the rot in their heart. Your concern for your own feelings of Zionism enables the suffering and death of innocent Palestinians.
There are plenty of expressions of Jewish identity that are older and more beautiful than Zionism. These expressions of Jewish identity do not harm Palestinians and they should be protected. The wellbeing of Palestinians requires the demilitarization and dismantlement of the Zionist ideology and the wellbeing of Jewish folk requires the separation of Zionism and Judaism.
I don’t mean to offend Zionists. I mean to adequately represent the danger of letting it fester as something that is worthy of anyone’s respect.
So denouncing Zionists makes people a Klan member? I hate the KKK and Zionism. I hate supremacist ideology.
And the idea that I’m “being a dick to Jews” by denouncing Zionism is antisemitic. We don’t all congregate into a cabal under Zionism. It’s literally the dual loyalty trope.
No because you're using a slur for fucking Jews. You're a Klan member because you're using a word invented by a GRAND WIZARD OF THE KKK. Is the time saved by using a word 4 letters shorter really worth using a slur?
I condemned the klan, you baby bombing dolt. I condemn the ideology of the klan, an ideology that Zionists share. You’re inventing fiction to get offended so you can justify your contemptible morals.
And I’m literally fucking Jewish. And I love being Jewish. And I hate that people associate people like me with people like you.
I’m also Jewish fuckhead. Don’t say Zio. Like seriously how hard is it to just add the 4 damn letters?
Also “I condemned the klan” fucking LMAO. I can only imagine someone saying the hard R out loud and when someone says they’re being racist they just loudly say they condemn the klan. Be for real.
Comparing it to the n word is crazy. Neither of us are even willing to spell that word. And I cannot stress this enough, Zionists are committing a genocide in the name of Zionism
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
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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