DISCLAIMER: the suggestion was a joke, I'm not actually sad or upset, the polycule is lovely and they have good taste in movies, etc.

True and real, better than Tudyk tbh

Nice! I'm worried about some of my gifts arriving on time but I'm sure it'll be fine...

(moment of insight) The problem is that a lot of people want to be fed quality queer rep on a platter without having to leave the comfort of a streaming platform, and the poppiest of pop culture will never have the queer nutrition they need

bsky.app/profile/pred...

Thank you for your repost and your help and I hope you have a wonderful day!

She wasn't really working for other reasons anyways so I had already removed her from the party for a session so she could undergo a narrative rework, this is great timing for me to try to tweak her to be less pacifistic too, and hopefully that'll allow me to not run into so much trouble with combat

You might be interested to know that I think I solved this. My longest-running character at this point is a pacifist and I think her playstyle has bled over into shifting what I see as success and failure in combat encounters in general.

Oh yeah there are a ton of them! Good luck with yours!

I think you misunderstand. The problem isn't *my* characters dying, the problem is having to deal with killing so many others. And I'm not really willing to sweep away games my friends are eager to run and that we've been doing for years to play only the games I'd like.

But I also think it's probably less of an RPG design problem and more of a personal problem for me to sort through on my own time, maybe with therapy help.

It feels silly of me to ask my GMs to edit their modules to such a degree to remove all those sorts of encounters, and beyond that I also sort of shy away from fighting in other scenarios as well because it feels like the only option so much of the time that I'm eager to try anything else.

I think it might be just the constant "having to kill in self-defence with no other options" that defines so much of encounter design especially in modules (which I've been mostly playing in recently). Not a problem once in a while, but it builds up over time when it's the same pattern repeated.

I know, this is the answer to the wrong question. I know these games exist, I'm not looking for new game suggestions. My friends like playing fantasy tactical games and I (generally) like playing them with my friends, I'm just in a weird space mentally right now with them.