The Turk

I was chatting with a Turkish gent, and he told me about his time playing D&D as a kid.

And to prelude a short anecdote, I have to take my hat off to the bunch of young teenagers reading hundreds of pages of rules in a second language, translating character-sheets on-the-fly, and live-translating the rules for magical items whenever a question comes up.

The Turk played as a shit-stirrer. He wound people up with awful characters, and enjoyed his characters' various deaths, which were always self-inflicted and entirely deserved. But he had limits, he informed me.

The limits came up as any bunch of boys in the group would inevitably wander onto the notion of raping people. His go-to response for the modern day (being older, wiser, and therefore a better shit-stirrer) was to pull out his phone and press record, then ask the offending man to repeat the plan. This shut them up, or switched them to whining about not being allowed to have fun.

I've been lucky with my groups - usually blessed with good friends. But I do recall, in the earlier years, having to just tell people to fuck off with that shit. Apparently some experiences are universal.