I scrunch down in the shower tray like a spatchcock chicken.

Pfft. Beginner.

Rotate like a rotisserie chicken.

The cheese doesn’t look completely melted.

John Carpenter?

Ah, no, indeed. I meant John Christopher. Thanks for the spot!

Also like all of those people are dead.

A lot of them are also fictional. Besides, death isn’t the handicap it used to be. Oh, Red Dwarf! Plus Blake’s Seven, Black Mirror, Inside Number 9, The Inbetweeners, Friday Night Dinner, Peep Show, Spaced, The Detectorists, The Thick of It, Happy Valley, Broadchurch, Luther.

Peaky Blinders. Derry Girls.

And Slow Horses, how could I have forgotten Slow Horses?

If that’s what attracts you from that list, that’s what attracts you, I guess.

Cheers, mate. My mum died a couple of years before him and he followed the same pattern as my uncle and both my grandfathers. Outlived their wives but died within two years after. Basically they all died of grief.

My wife’s younger than me so I keep telling her I’ll outlive her!

Anyway, I’m a plucky orphan now. I keep expecting Dickensian high jinks and a pick-pocketing mentor with a heart of gold.

And sorry to hear about your old people. It’s tough when you get to a certain age and can see the decline. My father-in-law is suddenly massively doddery compared to how he was just this time last year.

‘The Big Rhodes Ireland burger’.

I mean, all of that would make for a heck of a festival.

Did you not spot Blandings (which I prefer to J&W) in there?

Did something similar regularly when my dad was in a 2-year death decline. Leave work on the Friday, drive up to Scotland, spend Saturday making sure he had food, etc, drive home again on Sunday. But I wouldn’t do that for funsies.

Furriners? Small boats? Where’s my outrage bib?

I don’t much care for desserts but sticky toffee pudding is next level.

Plus the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Monty Python, afternoon drinking, Agatha Christie, Shakespeare, the English language, the games of cricket, football, rugby, golf, croquet, badminton, tennis, and rounders (basically baseball). David Attenborough, The BBC World Service, I’m sorry, I Haven’t a Clue, Taskmaster, The Office, afternoon tea, Kipling, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Austen, Dickens, the Brontë sisters, and George Orwell. Oh, and J. K. Rowling if you’re prepared to tolerate her shit. Heavy metal, punk, goth, new romantics. Imaginative swearing and football chants. Formal gardens. Constable and Wren, Tolkien, Chaucer, Scott, Bronte, Dahl, and Wodehouse. Blackadder, Black Books, Father Ted (a bit problematic), the King James bible, The Young Ones, The Goons, Mr Bean and Benny Hill, James Bond, Auld Lang Syne. Pink Floyd, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Gilbert and Sullivan, the Cornetto Trilogy, Oscar Wilde, John Donne, Gin & Tonic, Dr Who, Sherlock Holmes, Black Mirror, Sapphire and Steel, Queen, Ed Sheeran, Adele, Dua Lipa, The Spice Girls (heh), Jennings and Derbyshire, Just William, Biggles, Jeeves, Wooster, Blandings, Enid Blyton’s (a bit racist) Secret Seven and Famous Five, John Wyndham, John Carpenter, Moorcock (Elric and various Eternal Champions), Alice (in/through Wonderland/Looking Glass), CS Lewis (Narnia), Iain Banks, 2000AD, Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog, Nemesis the Warlock, Commando Comics, V for Vendetta, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, the Beano, the Dandy, Viz, Not The Nine O’Clock News, The Fast Show, Would I Lie To You, Eight Out Of Ten Cats Does Countdown, the crytic crossword, Brass Eye, The IT Crowd (also a bit problematic), Toast Of London, The Mighty Boosh, Just A Minute, QI, Mock The Week, Whose Line Is It Anyway?

What have you got?

Also, make sure you’re dressed like Goofy.

Dan seems like an equal opportunities bf.

I enjoy classless. I started on Red Box D&D back in 1982 (I think) and it was an absolute revelation for me and a foundational moment for my entire life’s ‘hobby’ compared to the computer adventure games I’d played up until that point (The Hobbit, Colossal Cave, Zork, etc). But a few short years after that I was introduced to Runequest and D&D just seemed like a child’s game in comparison. Again, I want to make it clear I’m not dismissing anyone else’s game. If D&D is your one true love then that’s awesome and I’m glad you love it and hope you have many, many more years of gaming enjoyment.

But I, personally, found the class system and the level system just too artificial and not reflective of living, breathing characters. It felt (to me) like a cartoon version of role-playing compared to Runequest where PCs were deeply, and fundamentally, embedded in the game world, and the limitations on them were in-game, world-based limitations, rather than game system limitations which were not a natural outcome of the world, but of the arbitrary decisions of the game designers. I’m thinking ‘woshippers of Humakt (the RQ god of Death) can’t kill people who surrender’ vs. ‘magic users can’t wear armor’ kind of limitations.

I want to stress, once again, I’m not trying to shit on any one else’s game fun. The more people playing TTRPGs the better as far as I’m concerned.

Well good. I feel like you shouldn’t (easily) be able to tell. My question was about me, though. What character class am I? I’m good at soft people skills, cooking, archery, carpentry, languages, project management… am I allowed to wear metal armor? Can I cast spells?

My point isn’t that D&D is bad, it’s not, but it’s also not for me. Different people like different things and that’s great. If you like knowing that someone is playing a cleric or a barbarian (and therefore you also know all the associated limitations and specials of that character), I’m not trying to piss on your picnic. But for me it’s too much like ‘I play a knight and can only more in L-shapes’. Like I said, game pieces, not characters.

Zaraaraasnaan sounds more like a real person than a game piece. What character class am I?

I was more thinking about the abstraction of things like character classes and levels. “I’m a knight and can only more in L-shapes.” or “I’m a seventh level human.” That’s what I mean about it being more like a board game than an RPG. Compare “I’m a third level barbarian” to, eg, Call of Cthulhu and “I’m a pilot who was a POW in WWI which is when I picked up fluency in German.” One of those is a potential character, the other is just a playing piece.

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