Why Life Isn’t a Board Game, a Poker Match, or a Football Field—It’s a Long-Running RPG With a Glitchy DM
Let’s get this straight: life is not a board game.
It’s not poker. It’s not football.
It’s not even Monopoly—unless your version includes existential dread, vanishing healthcare, and a housing market shaped by Lovecraftian horror.
We love tidy metaphors because they let us pretend life has rules.
“Life’s a board game!” Sure—if the instructions are in Sumerian, half the pieces are missing, and someone ate the dice during a depressive episode.
“Life is poker,” they say. Bluff smart. Stack chips. Win big.
Right. Except here, the dealer’s drunk, the cards are haunted, and someone just declared Uno mid-hand.
And football? Please.
There’s no playbook. The opposing team is climate change. And the scoreboard’s being rewritten in real time by billionaires with crayons forged from unpaid labor.
Life isn’t a game.
It’s a janky, homebrew tabletop RPG running on expired Red Bull and chaotic energy.
The Dungeon Master? Probably neurodivergent and off their meds.
The campaign? Half-written, plagiarized from anime, and constantly interrupted by real-life cutscenes of mass trauma.
But it’s what we’ve got.
The Point Isn’t to Win
Because here’s the kicker: in this campaign, there are no winners.
There are survivors.
There are storytellers.
There are those rare, beautiful moments when the dice land just right and you pull off the impossible.
But mostly, there are losses.
The tank collapses. The healer burns out.
The bard sings one last note before the gelatinous cube of despair eats their character sheet.
And the party limps on.
But no one wins when someone’s missing from the table.
If you walk away with all the loot while your teammates bleed out behind you?
You’re not a legend. You’re a glitch in the moral code—hoarding XP while the story falls apart.
The Real World Patch Notes
We reach for metaphors because reality is terrifying. But this isn’t theorycraft—this is the campaign log:
- Mass deportations roll through cities like a cheat code for cruelty. Lives reduced to random encounters. Families treated like NPCs, glitching out as the National Guard gets air-dropped into neighborhoods that were just trying to level up in peace.
- Eggs hit $6.23 a dozen. They’ve dipped since, but try telling your pantry that inflation’s “transitory.” And gas prices? The map’s still bugged—half the party can’t afford to leave the dungeon.
- The Middle East is on fire. Real fire. Airstrikes, proxy skirmishes, and a DM who’s clearly done too much coke and decided to throw in a boss fight three levels too early.
- Meanwhile, back at the base… They’re installing two 88-foot flagpoles at the White House. Because obviously, that’s the emergency. Not housing. Not healthcare. Not hunger. Nope—flagpole aesthetics. A final flex from a leadership team whose charisma modifier is negative empathy.
So Let’s Talk About XP
In this RPG, XP means jack if your party is gone.
The myth of individual success?
It’s a trap card played by the DM’s evil twin.
Climb the ladder, they say. Get rich. Leave everyone else behind.
But in this campaign, that ladder is made of corpses.
The rogue starved while you bought crypto.
The healer collapsed mid-shift because you hoarded healing potions.
The bard stopped singing because no one listened.
You leveled up? Great.
Now tell me—who did you bring with you?
This Is Not a Solo Quest
We don’t pick our party. We don’t control the monsters.
Sometimes the DM is merciful. Sometimes they reroll fate dice in a manic episode and send you up against an economic recession riding a dragon of eco-collapse.
But we show up anyway.
Because the point isn’t to win.
It’s to keep playing. Together.
We survive. We tell stories.
We protest unjust deportations.
We rage against price hikes that make breakfast a luxury.
We mourn children in wars they never started.
And if we’re lucky?
We heal a little.
We find a magic item in the form of community or laughter or a well-timed meme.
And if we’re really lucky…
We get to roll again next week.
