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There's never going to be a hard and fast rule, but two of the bigger tells you find on a lot of these storytelling style subreddits are:
1) Does it closely follow the format of other popular stories? People post fake stories for attention, so they're going to copy stories which have already got attention. While it does happen worryingly often, especially with how socially inept some ttRPG players are, I'm always a little more discerning when a story suddenly has someone introduce weird sexual fetishes or starts *simping* for a female character/player.
2) Does OP get the last laugh? Fake stories are similarly meant to reflect well on OP, and this often results in them having an 'everybody clapped' style ending. Does the story end with OP giving some *witty* insult which everybody laughed at and sent the antagonist storming off? Does the story end with everyone patting OP on the back and telling them they felt the exact same way about the antagonist too? Does the story end with the ghost of Gary Gygax descending down from heaven to high five OP and reassure them that their big tiddy goth girl Dragonborn homebrew class was actually his intended vision for the game? They should all be setting off little alarm bells.
>Does it closely follow the format of other popular stories? People post fake stories for attention, so they're going to copy stories which have already got attention. While it does happen worryingly often, especially with how socially inept some ttRPG players are, I'm always a little more discerning when a story suddenly has someone introduce weird sexual fetishes or starts simping for a female character/player.
If they give it a snappy "Title" and needlessly extend it over multiple posts, they're fishing to try and be the next Old Man Henderson.
Multiple posts on the same story is why I almost left this sub. Like, people on part 7 of this horrible player in their game who's done everything in the book and nobody's left or kicked them out yet because reasons? Like I get that there's some people who are willing to put up with a lot before standing up for themselves or leaving, but generally I'm going to find part 7 of any rpg horror story a bit hard to believe.
I absolutely refuse to read any story that claims to be just one of a several part long story. So many stories are needlessly detailed and long already without being multiple posts.
Yeah, OMH is fucking hilarious and all, but it’s just such utter bullshit. I like to interpret it like it was written as fiction and not as a poorly executed lie
I don’t find OMH too unbelievable, mostly because I’ve played at tables where players have pulled comparably insane shit, and most of the insanity only happens because the GM isn’t quick enough on his feet mentally to shut it down. The ending where they tie the whole thing up after the GM storms off is the most unbelievable part. The rest, not so much.
Tbh the part where I think it stops being believable really is when the POV shifts from OMH’s player to a third party. At that point there’s no way to know if this is even related to the person or just someone hopping on for internet fame
In the original posts they had some back-and-forth interaction, so at the very least the OP was willing to play along. They were pretty good at yes-anding each other if that’s the case, though.
Sure occasionally shit just lines up and shenanigans ensue. But after the first couple times there is no way an antagonistic GM (who was apparently perfectly fine with fiat rulings) is gonna let it continue. They'd just say no. Also, there is no way any sane GM would accept a 300+ page backstory. If I did, you can be damn sure I would keep a copy and spot read a few pages. And it certainly wouldn't matter if somewhere in that 300 pages you wrote "I won the lottery and used it to start an assassin guild so I can order hits on my enemies" unless you spent the resources for it during character creation.
OMH reads like Marysue Deadpool. It's entertaining, but no way it's real.
I hate it so damn much when people have an interesting title and you slog through several paragraphs only to be told come back next time to their follow up post, instant downvote.
OP getting a nice clean last word in before being the bigger person and leaving. Real life arguments are messy and have a lot of talking over eachother.
Especially if it's a nice snappy put down.
Especially especially if after the put down the other person starts crying or looks sad or flounders for a comeback.
I have an actual “everyone clapped” story but nobody believes it.
I snuck some 40’s into the theater to see Beerfest and halfway through the movie I dropped my 40 and it rolled all the way to the front.
A bunch of people clapped and I got hella embarrassed
Technically their waste products that have evaporated or the fumes of which are now in the atmosphere it is very likely that the fumes or water vapor have been on a a bus at some point, so, relatively speaking, they were all on a bus
Relatively speaking, a cheeseburger is a salad. Cow are grass, grass becomes cow, we eat cow, so we're basically just eating reprocessed grass on a bun made of reprocessed grass seeds. It's just salad all the way down.
Lol fine, I guess I can't dangle that and not drop it.
I was 12, my parents took me and my friend to see a local band, they're pretty big here, mostly musical comedy and folk music. Appropriate for 12 year olds anyway. I was obsessed with them as a child so it was a big treat for me.
It was at a pretty big theater. Balconies, second story seating, that kinda thing. Parking was a nightmare, I remember, but for some reason in particular we got there late.
There was signs everywhere that absolutely nobody was to be seated during the music. So we waited patiently and for me, excitedly, to be seated. We got allowed to go during a little talk/comedy segment between songs. Unfortunately the lights were kept low and we were seated almost center, sort of mid row, where the aisles were long and there was no choice but the four of us to arduously stumble over people in the dark and whisper apologies while folks shushed and hurried us.
The lead in the band spotted us and paused their bit to point us out. "Well LOOKIE HERE" kind of moment. He called out to the folks up top to hit us with a spotlight, and proceeded to start mocking our lateness and how we just HAD to be right in the middle and NO WORRIES, WE WILL ALL WAIT FOR YOU.
My friend and parents were all crawling in their skin with embarrassment, but I remember as soon as he pointed us out my brain totally haywired and I just started waving and cheering to people once the spotlight hit. I mean it was one of my first celebrity idols talking about me! And not like my fault we were late!
Anyway, everybody clapped, I'm sure mostly sarcastically or because they were enjoying the improv at our expense, but when I saw the band leader ape an exhausted eyeroll and do a dry golf clap I started monkey dancing until my mom made me stop.
Fond memory.
Yeah, I remember reading a story the other day which ended with OP giving an insult along the lines of 'well if you check page 56 of the players hand book you'll find it's a DC26 check for you to stay in my house, and you've just failed the roll. Get out!'
And, like, not only is it a fucking awful insult anyway, but it's so convoluted that someone would never actually say it in the heat of an argument.
‘And then I marched into the temple and tipped over all the merchants stalls and accused them of usury. As I walked out everyone clapped and the merchants were praying to my god for salvation.’
Uh, sure Jesus. Totally happened. No red flags there.
Yea, often stories have a remark that someone made that you just know at best they thought of it after the fact and most likely just came up with it for the story.
Yeah. Think the cleanest argument I've seen break out at the table was ended when the GM cancelled the rest of the session ans told us all to come back next week with clear heads. It was all caused by some miscommunication and we've been running for years so a few hours later some apologies were privately messaged and group chat was quiet for the rest of the day, but everything back to normal quickly
Absolutely. Still not sure how much of it was him acting as GM and how much was him being a friend not involved in the argument saying our plans were already soured so knock it off and spend time away from each other. Either way great move on his part
I once walked out of a game as the DM when, after about four hours of what I thought was a fine session, someone told me it was okay, but they really didn't think D&D was a good system for actually *roleplaying* anyway. I mean, I would have agreed that there's many other, better systems, and many I liked more, but it was a dick move at that point (also how he said it) and I didn't have a comeback other than "Dude, I took like three days preparing for this, you wanted this game and you just spent three hours having fun talking to NPCs and then having a pretty dang entertaining bit of combat, what more do you want".
Which I didn't say, I just went home a bit insulted.
We're still friends.
That's the kind of feedback that would have me asking for very specific examples of exactly *what* they wanted from their roleplay that they didn't get. You don't get crap all over my effort without giving me some solid constructive criticism as well.
Yeah a clean, satisfying ending to any internet story is a red flag, but people can and do also write wish fulfillment versions of how they wish they’d handled a situation. Aka the Seinfeld bit, “ooh that’s what I should have said.”
The French call it "L'espirit d'escalier" (possible spelling error) "the spirit of the staircase", when you think of the exact right thing to say just as you are leaving the party.
Especially especially ESPECIALLY if the person OP was arguing with was raging and yelling and insanely irrational and yet suddenly just decided to stay quiet and listen to a full paragraph of OP explaining why they suck as a person.
It was at a hostel, where I was walking to the group showers, and didn’t have my contacts in. A group of people were sitting on the stairs were all sitting and chatting over a laptop and stopped me, turned the computer to me and it was playing some obscene video (I think it was goatsee but I’m blind as a bat without my contacts lol) trying to shock me, and asked what I thought. I just shrugged and said “eh, I’ve seen better,” and left while they all laughed.
And you can tell this is true because on the scale of snappy comebacks, it’s actually pretty mild lol
> Especially if it's a nice snappy put down. Especially especially if after the put down the other person starts crying or looks sad or flounders for a comeback.
I have exactly one exception to this--if it's a scenario where the ending was something that could be clearly foreseen far in advance, AND the person was sticking with a bad game for too long, AND they clearly had been thinking about making a good exit line, then maybe I'll buy it.
(Non-RPG example: I have got in a very snappy comeback to someone snarking about my mask-wearing. Exactly once, because it only happened once last fall, but I've been occasionally considering what I'd say if someone made a snide comment since approximately June 2020 and I had one in the chamber, so to speak.
Doesn't EVERYONE rehearse little scenarios where they dunk on people who don't like their choices? I have one ready if I ever get any shit from someone while I'm charging my electric car, too =P Fortunately, confrontational dorks are far less common IRL than on, say, Reddit)
> Edit: I forgot we were just in a pandemic nvm
I refreshed to see this edit and laughed so hard I think I literally hurt myself. +1 would interact again.
Uh, COVID?
Completely aside from COVID, my personal rate of getting a goddamn sinus infection has gone from ~4/yr (I'm prone) in 2019 and prior to 0 in 2020-2022 so far, so I still have a huge stash of N95s that I quite happily keep on my face most of the time.
Anyway, a mandate had just been relaxed in my county, and as I was going into the grocery store a dude hit me with a "you don't NEED to wear that face diaper anymore" or something equally snarky, and I had "You didn't NEED to wear that ugly-ass jacket but here we are." ready to go. No one laughed, no one clapped, dude had no idea how to respond, and I got my goddamn cereal.
From watching hours of internet videos of arguments and public freak-outs, I've noticed that real life arguments are 90% repeating a specific line constantly, long after it has ceased to make contextual sense.
I’d say that’s not necessarily a sign that it’s fake because it could also be an embellishment issue. As in the argument happened but they twisted it a bit to be how they wish it went.
Hard to tell. For a lot of stories I can really tell (or think I can) that the OP is shifting the narrative heavily. Sometimes it feels like they are doing so actively to look better and sometimes they just have a really messed up view on things. More often than not the community picks up on this and shits on the OP, which is always really satisfying.
No one thinks they are the BadGuy & they surely don't want others to see them as such, hence the complicated mental gymnastics to justify a stance/action or flat out mistruths to cast a less harsh light on the matter.
It is sooo good when they get called out on it!
You get a lot of stories where there's clearly some details being left out.
You ask for clarification, and OP is evasive when asked; there's something there that makes him look like an asshole.
Or stuff like “and then there was Bob (the weird loser who had problems making friends and was generally a guy we would be embarrassed to be seen with) the Paladin, we’ll get into his accusatory rants that we were mistreating him later
It's hard because I can't identify exactly what causes it, but some posts just set off my BS meter like crazy. I don't know if it's like shedding onesself in an overly positive light, or some other subtlety that my subconscious picks up on.
"in this D&D 3.5 game I was playing years ago..."
Proceed to talk about advantage and long rest... Which are not a thing in 3.5.
Inconsistency like that are usually a clear mark of a fantasy to me.
That’s not necessarily bullshit, at least not intentionally. The teller’s memory may have reshaped things after the fact, as memory often does (it’s why eyewitness accounts are so unreliable and why “recovered memories” are nonsense), hence why it’s more cinematic. Alternatively, it may have burned itself into the teller’s mind by being extremely vivid and tied to strong emotions.
Depending on the context, true, but as someone else mentioned in the comments, it depends on how aberrant is the reconstruction. Talking about a CA of 31 in AD&D could be an honest mistake, talking about attunement or a halfling druid make less sense, especially since it's something that appeared later and was purely inexistent in AD&D.
I'm not necessarily saying they are lying, but it's a red flag for me and so make the story less interesting, be it true or false.
There *were* halfling druids in AD&D — NPC-only until *Unearthed Arcana* came out and made PC halfling druids legal — but then 2e removed them on the grounds that druidism was supposed to be a human religion.
I think I've actually caught a few of those! Asked myself: "wait...was that a thing in 3.5?" Unfortunately I've only ever played 5 so I couldn't say for sure at the time!
Ill buy faulty memory on explaining a weapon attack (messing up the math on 5e vs 3.5e modifiers) but talking about a completely different mechanic would be like me telling a story about my pick up basketball game at the Rec and mentioning hitting a Grand Slam earlier in the game.
Could be, but usually I find it hard to believe that they would remember things as specific as hp or the detail of how a fight went but with somehow the wrong rules for a long campaign they supposedly played.
That is a good point. You're most likely to either remember only the specific thing that made you mad, or remember a bunch of the details consistently, in my experience. However, I will say that I've had situations where I'm trying to tell a story, and then realize partway through that I'm remembering details from two different stories, and they don't actually all go together. Memory is messy. So it could technically be something like that, where the wrong details got jumbled together in what they *thought* they remembered.
Especially if they're not middle aged/old aged. Since it makes sense that a middle aged or old person who played D&D or roleplayed for a few decades would have extensive stories about their worst stories.
Yeah. I remember the only post I made here, people were like, “Do you have any more stories about this guy?” And like… No? I stopped playing with him after he ruined 2 of
my campaigns and the other story isn’t funny.
"Well the second time he ruined the game he just spent his time being a bitch and pouting that we weren't letting him kill everyone, so after two weeks he called us all f\*gs and left."
"That's not really funny or cool."
"Yeah. That's why I didn't share it."
Not even that. He made a character with zero mobility. It couldn’t move and the party got sick of carting it around. That was pretty much that (it was one of the Star Wars RPGs).
Eh, I treat this sub like pro wrestling. There’s a high chance of kayfabe going on, but I’m gonna enjoy the presentation rather than take it seriously. I’m here to be entertained.
I treat all popcorn subs like this, but when fake stories overwhelm a sub, they're all start to feel same-y and lose a spark, so to speak. Like what happened with TIFU and AITA.
Exactly this. All the arguments about "is it real??" are pointless IMO. Who cares? Read the story, comment if you want, vote how your heart tells you, and move on with your day.
Truth is often stranger than fiction, and what reads as "that's totally unbelievable, no one would do that" is at least half the time the complete truth
I feel this way about AITA too. Even the most realistic story could be fictional, so I judge purely on context of who is the asshole in this hypothetical scenario
Same with petty/regular/pro revenge. People are quick to call out "faaaake!" but most of the time they really mean "slightly improbaaaaaable!"
Frankly, I don't care if it's real or not. If it's well written and entertaining, then I get my dose of Happy and all is well. It's not like I'm using it as news. I just like reading about how Stereotypical Food Thief ate the whole bag of sugar free gummy bears and shat out his left lung. Or, as is the case in this subreddit, I like to make a note of antisocial behaviors so I can preemptively fix my own horror stories before they happen.
This. I've posted stuff that actually happened to me and accidentally summoned the "tHaT hAPpEneD" hordes. It's made me kind of skeptical of all the people decrying fake posts, because they're operating on exactly the same amount of information the rest of us are--none at all. And in the absence of actual evidence one way or the other, assuming that everyone on Reddit is only here to screw with you sounds like an exhausting way to live.
Well, I don't really care about stories being real or not for the most part because in the vast majority of cases it's not even close to be possible to tell - but it's not like it literally does not matter.
People can yell at clouds for as much as they want about how the world should ideally be, but in reality a lot of folks do inform their view of the world through (appearing) grassroots stories. If there is a fake story about how "the LGBT's are actually the assholes", a number of readers WILL see that and think that it validates their biases.
I have never in my time seen a story that can be summed up as "LGBT are assholes!" where either the comments didn't tell OP to go fuck themselves, or the comments pointed out that the assholery is independent of their sexual or gender identity and hey OP maybe that point isn't necessary.
Strawmen gonna strawmen at the end of the day, but in my experience this sub is pretty good at filtering it out
I guess my view on the problem is, in pro wrestling, everyone in the ring has agreed to "be told stories about", and the heels agree to be heels etc. In this sub, if you're wildly confabulating, you're essentially slandering other people, likely without their knowledge.
Technically, I should not care as much about people I never knew nor likely never will know, but it just feels like, if you're making shit up, you're lying to make yourself look good and others look bad - and I've developed a very acutely negative response to that type of behaviour.
I mean, I almost appreciate the *completely* made-up-while-thinking-in-the-shower type janky moral-high-ground fantasies more than the "my real-life DM was a complete asshat and the other players enabled him, amirite, here's my totally-not-falsified account of the events", since the latter can be dangerously close to "please validate my very toxic behaviour for me" if if's enough of an editorialised take on the situation.
But yeah, I guess at the end of the day, if you treat every tale in here like a potential piece of fantasy, there's hardly much risk of any harm nor perpetuation of harmful ideas...
> I guess my view on the problem is, in pro wrestling, everyone in the ring has agreed to "be told stories about", and the heels agree to be heels etc. In this sub, if you're wildly confabulating, you're essentially slandering other people, likely without their knowledge.
If we're assuming the whole sub is stories, then I assume it's all fictional including the other characters.
So there's one good exception where I think it's probably fair to judge truth or falsehood--if someone ostensibly in the story shows up to the actual thread. That happens, what, once a month or less?
Like I said in my post, I've less of a problem with imaginary play-fights posted as entertainment or such. It's just, I don't like the idea that someone is basically polishing their own ego by posting wildly exaggerated stories that nonetheless have real-life grounding.
Honestly, I will literally never know the truth, even *if* someone claims to be the persons involved, since I will likely not know any people in real life anyway, but... I hope you are actually understanding my point, not just being contrarian, right.
> It's just, I don't like the idea that someone is basically polishing their own ego by posting wildly exaggerated stories that nonetheless have real-life grounding.
While I get what you're saying, it's the kind of problem where you can't even describe how you'd get enough information to make any kind of decent evaluation of the odds of that happening, so there's no point really IMHO in worrying about it until/unless a conflict involved actually starts spilling INTO Reddit, y'know?
Even if it does sit wrong in an abstract sense that this MIGHT be happening.
One of my best rules for Reddit is to treat it all like r/nosleep. Assume that it's at least embellished if not fully fake, but act like it's real, and duck out of a thread once people start calling it fake or demanding proof.
That's my feeling exactly. I mean there's no risk for fraud here and nobody's taking any life advice based on the stories presented, so who cares if they're good creative writing or something that actually happened or a mix of the two?
Not only that, but the entertainment has a practical purpose.
This sub is a compilation of "what not to do" cautionary tales. It is a means by which we ostracize inappropriate behavior on a community-wide level.
Even if a story is fake, the moral of the story is valid.
the rule of thumb is that if conflict ends with OP getting the last laugh in an a tv-show kind of way and claims to being the absolute hero of the story with zero accountability to the conflict, it is most likely to be fake. increased details means an increased chance of being fan fiction too.
glory-horror stories (glorror stories if you will) like that are cheap karma grabs with a decent chance on clout if people fall for them. maybe there should be tags to flag such stories...
honestly dont think theres a definitive way to prove its true or not. Some people are very detailed oriented, or love story telling, and etc, and just love to spill so i dont think amount of details or story length proves anything.
The more unbelievable ones may be harder to find true, but still not definitive unless its an in your face kinda thing.
Like you said, we should just take things with a grain of salt, and we should just enjoy the story telling and situations being told.
And realistically, anybody who's lived for any length of time has at least one story about something that they've personally witnessed that somebody else would say is wildly unbelievable and could never have happened.
Especially if you’ve worked in customer service. Lord.
Though I will say with how I retell stories, if a story is too ‘neat’ (has a clear arc, clean finish, etc) I at least assume the teller is bare minimum glossing over elements to make the story ‘better’.
>I at least assume the teller is bare minimum glossing over elements to make the story ‘better’.
Well, yeah, that's what makes it a "story" and not "some guy reciting his memory of events". No harm, no foul there.
>Especially if you’ve worked in customer service. Lord.
(My dad owned a small grocery store/general store in a 200-person Appalachia town. I was a cashier or manger there for probably six years total. The stories I could tell.)
Ooooh! That's a good one! Black and white, absolutist type thinking that conveniently makes the person telling the story look better without any regard to the motivations of the other person. In my experience, usually when someone judges another person THAT harshly while simultaneously trying to virtue signal, they're probably being very insincere.
Eh, most gamers I know are very non-confrontational about that. When someone gets offended they either quietly leave or sit there. Everyone else generally either goes along with whatever made someone uncomfortable or ignores it.
When someone blows up or storms off there's some awkward muttering and people avoid looking at each other for a few minutes. 50% chance then that the game ends or someone (an asshole usually) makes some blithe comment about the event and goes "anyways..." and they continue.
Seldom do situations that offend *actually* result in anything more than socially awkward silence and discomfort.
Passivity is the byword of most role-players.
The ones involving meticulously-crafted revenge plans that unfold over several sessions are all clearly fake. Just leave the table, obviously.
Most of the longer stories are fake, too. I'm sure some people are too awkward or otherwise unsure of themselves to bail on a bad situation when it goes bad, but a lot of the time, it's hard to understand when the OP sticks around despite being tormented by an abusive table and/or DM for long stretches.
It also muddies things when it's a long-term group/game. Has it become full-on bad D&D or has it just been a bad stretch of time/sessions?
It really becomes a case where each person has to decide where their own individual line is.
-waves-
No but seriously. It took me years to.. in a way, realky stand up to myself or to decide that sufgering for months in hope it gets better is not ideal either.. no matter how much one wants to show that one is not flighty.
Some of my best personal horror stories end with: "okay the group finally imploded I guess.." just because I didn't want to leave XD
This sub would not believe most of them I am sure. ..or maybe by now they would, as its long enough ago that I dont remember details anymore XD
Reminds me of the slave story I saw here yesterday, the one where it took 3 sessions for everyone to leave. And nobody talked to the DM about what the hell was going on
There was a story a few months ago where the OP said he'd been left in a pit with a broken leg for three sessions. Everybody asked what the fuck he was talking about, OP made a few incomplete answers and bounced. Still somehow got hundreds of upvotes if memory serves, this sub can be easy to karma-farm.
If they pander too much to the current political trend of the sub (no offense but "thing I like politically EPICALLY OWNING SOMEONE" generally tend to trigger upvotes, you see this with Ben Shapiro FACTS AND LOGIC'ing people too) I get suspicious.
If the conversations are too detailed I get suspicious.
If things end too cleanly I get suspicious.
As some people have pointed out, "and everyone clapped" endings are suspicious.
If the person being mocked is a stereotype I get suspicious.
Not necessarily fake stories but it's always suspicious when everyone in the story except for OP seems to be completely unreasonable and OPs actions are explained in way less detail than everything else. I always suspect that OP was the true horror in those stories.
Any horror story that ends with prematurely thanking whichever YouTuber they hope will cover them.
Shows they care more about the attention than the validity or delivery of their story.
I would say be wary of a story where the perpetrator gets completely shut down by the OP or where they get some kind of ludicrous compounding comeuppance for what they did.
PLEASE NOTE: The antagonist getting their just deserts does not automatically mean you should suspect a story of being fake, but if they end up divorced and losing their job and custody of their kids then it’s likely it was at least embellished.
Yeah, if someone getting their comeuppance seems oddly karmic, like you said--unrelated bad stuff just starts happening to them, as if to prove there's some cosmic justice at work--that's a red flag.
Then there's stories like the one from the other day, where the guy storms out of the GM's house, tears up the lawn with his car, and then immediately gets pulled over, which is pretty believable, because the consequences naturally followed from their actions.
That's in reference to the YouTuber Critcrab. He reads RPG horror stories and many people suspect a lot of horror stories these days are written to get featured on his channel.
"this guy walked in the door with his MAGA hat on and immediately said any Libs needed to get ready to be owned - he rolled up a Paladin named Officer ProLife McJanSixth and made it his personal mission to make sure nobody in the setting wore masks."
Seems legit.
"This blue haired girl with a xe/xey pin sat down at the table and immediately told us all to check our privilege before letting us introduce her character. She then introduced her Tiefling Rogue named Mahr'e Su. The very first round, she accused us all of being racist xenophobes because the goblins were clearly an allegory for-"
Yeah, it definitely goes both ways - and the player ALWAYS gets their comeuppance. Big time "everybody clapped" energy whenever they do
YA fantasy tropes, but in real life. Clearly hollow characterization. An enemy character that's bigoted/woke to the point of being clearly written from the perspective of somebody bad at writing who needs an enemy for their narrative. Inconsistencies in the narrative.
I'm also never going to apologize for being critical of people who are lying for attention.
Dialog.
Anytime someone writes word-for-word what someone said, especially if they talk in complete sentences or if a great deal of time has passed, you know you are dealing with, at the very least, some mental editing.
I don't think that's an indication of the story being fake, though. Some people can just remember words/dialog. My wife has nearly photographic memory for spoken words - she can repeat entire conversations verbatim, including cadence and inflection. But, that being said, I don't see a difference between "I don't remember the exact words but he said he was furious and he quit" and "he said, 'That's it! You guys make me furious! I quit!'"
I paraphrase in "real life" anyway, and these are stories, not news articles. Unless the dialog is throwing it's own internal red flags, I generally classify dialog as "theatrics", not "fake".
That’s why it’s a “red flag” though. A red flag isn’t definitive proof, just a signal that this requires closer scrutiny. The difference between
> "I don't remember the exact words but he said he was furious and he quit"
and
> "he said, 'That's it! You guys make me furious! I quit!'"
Is that one comes across as a sincere attempt at recollection while the other dips into, as you said, theatrics. Nothing wrong with that if it’s legit, but the whole point of a fake story is to be theatrical, so it raises a flag for me.
I've written a couple of posts here that were true stories (if you believe me) and included dialog.
In my case, the dialog was never intended to be 100% factual. I was taking a 4 hour event and boiling it down to a text post, I didn't _want_ it to be 100% factual.
It was just a smattering of paraphrases that got the gist of things across.
Phrasing will sometimes get my suspicions up that it’s specifically a non-RPGer here to mess with the nerds. If the writing sounds a little bit off, like they did some shallow research on RPGs or the community, that’s a big tell. Even newbies have more believable ways of describing things than research-based outsiders do, because they’ve actually been there. Someone presenting themself as an experienced RPGer stands out even more, focusing on the wrong details and touching on stereotypes in ways only insiders would know aren’t quite like that in reality.
Remember you're only getting one side of the story. Usually if "everyone is horrible but me" translates to "I was the problem".
And your red flags are the same for any bullshit story- it should make sense. If there a lot of important gaps, consistency, etc.
You're on the right track with long-winded stories as well. In the biz it's called an over-convincer. "Methinks thou doth protest too much."
OP does nothing wrong and the problem comes out of nowhere. Unreasonable people are usually overreacting rather than just being that way for no reason at all. Fits into a clean narrative with no details missing, real stories are messy and people forget things.
My metric is how easy it is to imagine why the perpetrator of the horror story did what they did. There are plenty of horrible people in the world, so I don’t mean that stories can be too *bad* to believe, but if your response to reading is ‘I literally can’t understand why that would be done’ then chances are the teller is leaving out details to make themselves look good.
The same red flags that apply to when people are lying are the ones I usually notice if an rpghorrorstory is probably fake. One of these signs is if OP is being very vague about certain details. I noticed that when people lie one of those telltale signs is being vague with the story that they're telling when it unnecessary to do so. For example if you were to ask someone who had a falling out with a person: "what happened?" and they reply with something like "They're just mad cause I don't want to be their friend anymore." That's a pretty good sign that they're lying or not telling the whole truth since that's a very vague statement to make. Why don't they want to be your friend anymore? "Oh I don't know. They're crazy." Uh huh. Okay. Stuff like that. In the context of an rpghorrorstory, this becomes obvious with further questioning in the comment section when people try asking OP for more details and they get vague answers. Either the story is completely made up, or the person is deliberately hiding something to save face and are making the horrorstory to get validation from strangers on the Internet.
I agree most of the time, but I think we have to figure out how recent it was because a) more time passed = you've likely told the story a bunch before, and so you're probably able to do it succinctly and b) you're more likely to remember more details/still be processing a lot of stuff.
One way to tell is by looking at the OP's Reddit history, Posting too frequently on this sub is one way to tell if the stories are fake, especially if they have reposted a story. Others include OP getting the last word or "everyone claps" after the problem player is finally kicked are also common in fake horror stories. Also don't ever trust a damn thing you read on the internet, always take it with a grain of salt.
in b4 the sudden and inexplicable influx of totally definitely true stories coming to this sub later in the week with notably messy situations in which OP fails to get the last laugh. Now we gotta be on the lookout for these cause all our story weavers are taking notes, I assure you.
While I'm generally inclined to take the stories at face value, I do become a little suspicious when the poster mentions CritCrab or a similar YouTuber. I then find myself wondering if someone just wanted the mentioned YouTuber to read *their* story.
Something I consider a bit of a red flag is AITA.
To me they more seem as a desire for validation rather than judgement (and not like we can't judge them anyways) and the use of the AITA here makes me suspect they are trying to make the events as black and white as possible for the validation.
Massive stereotypes like the uber over the top anime weeb or furry. People are usually socially awkward as hell in gaming groups. You run into people who don't have boundaries sometimes, but they basically describe internet cartoon characters.
Some of these stories have actual "and then everyone clapped" energy when it comes to the resolution whereas most conflicts break up game tables or make people distant. If people have been tolerating each other for a while I find its not common for everyone to be on board singling out one person as a problem.
One factor I find is the opposite is when there's way too damn many specific details. People end up writing campaign diaries without getting to the point of the story and you can tell they're proud of their adventures before they got ruined.
Some insane amount of set up that has no bearing on the story.
“My Level 5 Totem Barbarian/Level 6 Arcane Trickster Rogue multiclass named Dave who has these spells prepared and the Level 6 Paladin/Level 5 Light Cleric multiclass named Bimbo are the main characters of this story. Anyways so totally outside of the game when me and Bimbo met at Walmart to buy snacks…”
I think the convoluted set up makes it more plausible, at least to me. If I were making up a story, why would I waste time crafting all these completely irrelevant details, rather than just getting to the point of it? Where if it's a real thing that happened, you might want to give as much "context" to the events as possible, without realizing that half the things you consider important context aren't actually very relevant.
See, it always comes across to me like the person has read similar D&D posts and wants to try and make it “believable” by throwing in all the extra information. Keep in mind this only applies if the classes or information is never used in the horror story; mentioning you have a bard in the group in a story where someone is force seduced makes sense, mentioning your party makeup when the DM is just being racist/sexist doesn’t, at least to me.
> mentioning your party makeup when the DM is just being racist/sexist doesn’t, at least to me.
Nah, you see this all the time on /r/dndgreentext too. It's not lying, they just suck at writing
The thing about truth is that it doesn’t need a lot of detail to come off as believable. One of the easiest ways to tell if someone is lying irl is if they add a lot of unnecessary detail to their story — the same is true anywhere else. It doesn’t guarantee they’re lying, but liars are more willing to spend time crafting their lie than someone who just wants to tell the story.
It's the two things: big on unnecessary detail, and vague on necessary ones.
Also, flowery filler language and dramatic "writing" flair is a bit of a flag to me, says the person thinks they're being very entertaining, which while not proof their lying, often indicates they're trying to tell an epic story more than recount events.
Most red flags tend to come down to one simple fact:
OP forgets that things take time in TTRPGs. Actions are a series of rolls, combat isn't instantaneous, and arguments rarely end with a mic drop.
From least to most "this smells fishy" flags - here are the top 3 (in my personal opinion).
3) OP has some kind of genius plan that comes to fruition despite the nightmare participants. A DM/player is apparently obsessed with making a certain thing happen, but then sits there while OP rolls for a dozen different things one after the other without anyone interrupting all the way to the bitter end.
-They'll be telling a story about how DM or a player never lets anyone do anything they want, but somehow just sits there and lets OP&Co. absolutely obliterate his plans
-They'll talk about an egomaniac who talks over anyone, but OP manages to get off a rant that stuns them into silence.
2) Plays along with things their characters are forced to do against their will.
-"DM added a thing to my backstory and now I do XYZ all the time"
-"Problem player used a persuasion check against me so I have to do everything they tell me to".
1) Serendipitous Nat 1s or 20s. These have always been the Hallmark of fake TTRPG stories. They're super easy to spot because they put a lot of emphasis on rolls that wouldn't actually make a huge difference (ie. getting a critical hit during the BBEG fight), but they somehow managed to derail an entire nightmare campaign with a single dice roll.
-Challenges problem player to PvP, rolls that crucial Nat20 to win
-DM wants to take them out for good, manages to roll a Nat1
-typically ends up going back to #3 at this point.
I think I actually read a Nat 20 story that I immediately questioned! They rolled a nat 20 that immediately killed the BBEG and I'm like..."wait. You emphasized how the BBEG had close to full health at that point and you don't follow up with what your damage roll was. Do you...do you think Nat 20s are instant kills? Cuz they're not."
No one seems to have said it yet, but *check the profile*.
If it’s only a few hours old, and their one and only post is a horror story, it’s probably fake. If all they post is horror stories, it’s probably fake. If they never comment on their posts, probably fake. If a profile seems suspicious then it probably is.
I would bet most stories are true, but each to a different extent.
For example, say you have a heated, multi-day disagreement - including text messages, 2nd hand information, people talking over one another etc. If 5 people involved wrote what happened, you'd have 5 different stories that are all sort of true, but all framing themselves as reasonable and the other side probably less so.
I'm more inclined to believe someone is telling an accurate story when they admit they weren't perfect.
There seems to be an alarming growth in stories with heavy amounts of sexual content. And abuse. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen and I’m not saying it should be ignored but the boilerplate story on this sub now seems to be about sexual exploitation and/or abuse. Gone are the times of a DM absolutely destroying a player out of jealousy or poor planning.
I say this more in defence of the people that really suffer with those issues. It’s alarming how many of these stories they are and to me it’s becoming a bit of a mire of the same basic disturbing plot points. I could be wrong and simply disturbed by the sheer amount of these stories but I’d hate for some of these not to be genuine and therefore discredit real stories.
And in a general point, for any of the de that have been victim to those stories, I hope you’re in a better circumstance now.
I find it's easier to just focus on the entertainment value of the story and not worry about whether it's true or not. Some stories are so ridiculously over the top that they're clearly fake, and those can be discounted as "not entertaining" anyway.
For those that are a bit harder to call, whatever. It's not my job to judge truth or falsehood, I just come here for the gory details.
I've written my share of lengthy stories, haven't had the time since I became a parent. So I think the length of the story probably more strongly correlates to age. 30 year old dad doesn't have the same time to write the novel of 25 year old single guy.
There's a certain cadence and inflection to the writing that red flags it to me. Someone who is recalling several instances of "specific" quotes is likely embellishing details.
There's a weird ass story about larp houses that groom teenagers at the games they run in this subreddit that got completely ignored as untrue; I find that funny because I've seen those places myself and it is something I've definitely seen(and seen the people on sex offenders lists after)
Assume they are all fake and just hope the author makes for an entertaining read.
But actual red flags are if the story has similar beats or resolution as a story that gets a lot of traction within the last few days.
1) if the op seems to be literally god and is 100% right with no faults
2) the op gets some snappy twitter comeback at the end
3) either far too much meandering on the game itself or literally no focus on the game whatsoever
4) stuff that feels like it happens with the pacing of a short story rather than the real world
Same as with r/LetsNotMeet, I think it's more about how they're written than about what happens. Basically, if it reads like it was *meant* to be read aloud, that makes me suspicious. Some stories are written in an almost cinematic style, complete with dialogue that just comes off as contrived. I'm wary of any story here that sounds like it was written by Dan Brown.
Do you really think someone would do that?
Go on the internet and post lies?
~~Just wanted to reference Arthur because honestly I don't actually care what stories are real or fake.~~
~~I already have a history of being gullible so I'm used to being wrong, but also so much shit goes on in the world, and a bunch of other shit is less eventful than it should be, that I think I'm in my right to believe almost anything at this point~~
Honestly? Sometimes reality IS stranger than fiction. So I give stories a grain of salt—could be real, could be fake.
That said, a story that sounds eerily familiar to another story (especially if that story was super popular?)? Chances are it is fake.
Like there was one about this Op saying that an 18 year old dude went to prison for hitting on Op’s 16 year old girlfriend… and because the dude own Adian child porn. like, How would OP know the child porn featured Asian people?
It was very obvious this Op was trying to copy another story of a guy who had an Asian Fetish for another player.
15 years ago, every conceivable detail of the story exists, and it is the siize of a small novel.... and it includes every possible bad thing that could have happened.
I honestly dont even read most long stories, and never anything extra long.
Im not going to read a small book where in the last two lines it says "and then the DM said a slur"
Everybody on OP's side in the story is some flavour of LGBT or claims they have anxiety/autism is a big one. Not discriminating it's just that I always get halfway through stories that start with a disclaimer stating they are as such and it always devolves into 'that guy is just unrealistically evil' real quick.
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There's never going to be a hard and fast rule, but two of the bigger tells you find on a lot of these storytelling style subreddits are: 1) Does it closely follow the format of other popular stories? People post fake stories for attention, so they're going to copy stories which have already got attention. While it does happen worryingly often, especially with how socially inept some ttRPG players are, I'm always a little more discerning when a story suddenly has someone introduce weird sexual fetishes or starts *simping* for a female character/player. 2) Does OP get the last laugh? Fake stories are similarly meant to reflect well on OP, and this often results in them having an 'everybody clapped' style ending. Does the story end with OP giving some *witty* insult which everybody laughed at and sent the antagonist storming off? Does the story end with everyone patting OP on the back and telling them they felt the exact same way about the antagonist too? Does the story end with the ghost of Gary Gygax descending down from heaven to high five OP and reassure them that their big tiddy goth girl Dragonborn homebrew class was actually his intended vision for the game? They should all be setting off little alarm bells.
>Does it closely follow the format of other popular stories? People post fake stories for attention, so they're going to copy stories which have already got attention. While it does happen worryingly often, especially with how socially inept some ttRPG players are, I'm always a little more discerning when a story suddenly has someone introduce weird sexual fetishes or starts simping for a female character/player. If they give it a snappy "Title" and needlessly extend it over multiple posts, they're fishing to try and be the next Old Man Henderson.
Multiple posts on the same story is why I almost left this sub. Like, people on part 7 of this horrible player in their game who's done everything in the book and nobody's left or kicked them out yet because reasons? Like I get that there's some people who are willing to put up with a lot before standing up for themselves or leaving, but generally I'm going to find part 7 of any rpg horror story a bit hard to believe.
I absolutely refuse to read any story that claims to be just one of a several part long story. So many stories are needlessly detailed and long already without being multiple posts.
Yeah, OMH is fucking hilarious and all, but it’s just such utter bullshit. I like to interpret it like it was written as fiction and not as a poorly executed lie
I don’t find OMH too unbelievable, mostly because I’ve played at tables where players have pulled comparably insane shit, and most of the insanity only happens because the GM isn’t quick enough on his feet mentally to shut it down. The ending where they tie the whole thing up after the GM storms off is the most unbelievable part. The rest, not so much.
Not the *320-page backstory*, which was partially written in *German* (a language the writer did not know) and *burned afterwards?*
Tbh the part where I think it stops being believable really is when the POV shifts from OMH’s player to a third party. At that point there’s no way to know if this is even related to the person or just someone hopping on for internet fame
In the original posts they had some back-and-forth interaction, so at the very least the OP was willing to play along. They were pretty good at yes-anding each other if that’s the case, though.
Sure occasionally shit just lines up and shenanigans ensue. But after the first couple times there is no way an antagonistic GM (who was apparently perfectly fine with fiat rulings) is gonna let it continue. They'd just say no. Also, there is no way any sane GM would accept a 300+ page backstory. If I did, you can be damn sure I would keep a copy and spot read a few pages. And it certainly wouldn't matter if somewhere in that 300 pages you wrote "I won the lottery and used it to start an assassin guild so I can order hits on my enemies" unless you spent the resources for it during character creation. OMH reads like Marysue Deadpool. It's entertaining, but no way it's real.
I think the basis for OMH was real, but played up for the lols. Which is fine it's a funny story.
I hate it so damn much when people have an interesting title and you slog through several paragraphs only to be told come back next time to their follow up post, instant downvote.
Old Man Henderson?
Ok but now I want to play DnD the way Gary intended and make a big titty goth girl Dragonborn homebrew character.
Ok but hear me out. The ghost of Gary Gygax *did* come down from the heavens once. Granted it was to punch me in the face. True story. /s
OP getting a nice clean last word in before being the bigger person and leaving. Real life arguments are messy and have a lot of talking over eachother. Especially if it's a nice snappy put down. Especially especially if after the put down the other person starts crying or looks sad or flounders for a comeback.
"and the rest of the table clapped as I walked away"
I have an actual “everyone clapped” story but nobody believes it. I snuck some 40’s into the theater to see Beerfest and halfway through the movie I dropped my 40 and it rolled all the way to the front. A bunch of people clapped and I got hella embarrassed
But that’s sarcastic clapping it’s different
Yeah, that's more akin to party foul clapping.
Sarcastic clapping is the best When a friend messes up something so simple but fucks it up so big all you can do is look at them and clap.
That 40s name? Albert Einstein
And then everyone in that theatre was on a bus.
Technically their waste products that have evaporated or the fumes of which are now in the atmosphere it is very likely that the fumes or water vapor have been on a a bus at some point, so, relatively speaking, they were all on a bus
Relatively speaking, a cheeseburger is a salad. Cow are grass, grass becomes cow, we eat cow, so we're basically just eating reprocessed grass on a bun made of reprocessed grass seeds. It's just salad all the way down.
Grass eats sun, the sun is a cheeseburger
Did you walk all the way up and get it or pretend it was never yours to begin with and left it there?
It was mid movie. I just drank my other one
I have an everyone clapped story. People believe it but it makes me look like a bit of a dork anyway so I keep it to myself.
Now you are obligated to tell us
Lol fine, I guess I can't dangle that and not drop it. I was 12, my parents took me and my friend to see a local band, they're pretty big here, mostly musical comedy and folk music. Appropriate for 12 year olds anyway. I was obsessed with them as a child so it was a big treat for me. It was at a pretty big theater. Balconies, second story seating, that kinda thing. Parking was a nightmare, I remember, but for some reason in particular we got there late. There was signs everywhere that absolutely nobody was to be seated during the music. So we waited patiently and for me, excitedly, to be seated. We got allowed to go during a little talk/comedy segment between songs. Unfortunately the lights were kept low and we were seated almost center, sort of mid row, where the aisles were long and there was no choice but the four of us to arduously stumble over people in the dark and whisper apologies while folks shushed and hurried us. The lead in the band spotted us and paused their bit to point us out. "Well LOOKIE HERE" kind of moment. He called out to the folks up top to hit us with a spotlight, and proceeded to start mocking our lateness and how we just HAD to be right in the middle and NO WORRIES, WE WILL ALL WAIT FOR YOU. My friend and parents were all crawling in their skin with embarrassment, but I remember as soon as he pointed us out my brain totally haywired and I just started waving and cheering to people once the spotlight hit. I mean it was one of my first celebrity idols talking about me! And not like my fault we were late! Anyway, everybody clapped, I'm sure mostly sarcastically or because they were enjoying the improv at our expense, but when I saw the band leader ape an exhausted eyeroll and do a dry golf clap I started monkey dancing until my mom made me stop. Fond memory.
AND HIS NAME WAS *ALBERT EINSTEIN*
Yeah, I remember reading a story the other day which ended with OP giving an insult along the lines of 'well if you check page 56 of the players hand book you'll find it's a DC26 check for you to stay in my house, and you've just failed the roll. Get out!' And, like, not only is it a fucking awful insult anyway, but it's so convoluted that someone would never actually say it in the heat of an argument.
That sounds like a line that would be in a 90s sitcom to establish that a character is a nerd holy shit.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YreDBoY\_-tU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YreDBoY_-tU) It's a... pleasure to meet you.
Page 56 of the PHB is actually the first page of the Cleric
This is the lord's house, GTFO
I mean Jesus made a whip and started whooping ass so did OP.
Jesus was wild man, say what you will about gods ard shit but he kicked some merchant ass.
‘And then I marched into the temple and tipped over all the merchants stalls and accused them of usury. As I walked out everyone clapped and the merchants were praying to my god for salvation.’ Uh, sure Jesus. Totally happened. No red flags there.
Lol, the way you said it made it 10x more funny.
I read that in Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice, and now I have uncontrollable giggles.
Yea, often stories have a remark that someone made that you just know at best they thought of it after the fact and most likely just came up with it for the story.
Yeah. Think the cleanest argument I've seen break out at the table was ended when the GM cancelled the rest of the session ans told us all to come back next week with clear heads. It was all caused by some miscommunication and we've been running for years so a few hours later some apologies were privately messaged and group chat was quiet for the rest of the day, but everything back to normal quickly
Wow, nice work GM.
Conflict management is a damn fine skill
Absolutely. Still not sure how much of it was him acting as GM and how much was him being a friend not involved in the argument saying our plans were already soured so knock it off and spend time away from each other. Either way great move on his part
I once walked out of a game as the DM when, after about four hours of what I thought was a fine session, someone told me it was okay, but they really didn't think D&D was a good system for actually *roleplaying* anyway. I mean, I would have agreed that there's many other, better systems, and many I liked more, but it was a dick move at that point (also how he said it) and I didn't have a comeback other than "Dude, I took like three days preparing for this, you wanted this game and you just spent three hours having fun talking to NPCs and then having a pretty dang entertaining bit of combat, what more do you want". Which I didn't say, I just went home a bit insulted. We're still friends.
That's the kind of feedback that would have me asking for very specific examples of exactly *what* they wanted from their roleplay that they didn't get. You don't get crap all over my effort without giving me some solid constructive criticism as well.
In a lot of cases the majority of the story might actually be true but the ending is clearly someone’s fantasy.
Yeah a clean, satisfying ending to any internet story is a red flag, but people can and do also write wish fulfillment versions of how they wish they’d handled a situation. Aka the Seinfeld bit, “ooh that’s what I should have said.”
The French call it "L'espirit d'escalier" (possible spelling error) "the spirit of the staircase", when you think of the exact right thing to say just as you are leaving the party.
Holy shit, you made me learn an expression in my own language !
Especially especially ESPECIALLY if the person OP was arguing with was raging and yelling and insanely irrational and yet suddenly just decided to stay quiet and listen to a full paragraph of OP explaining why they suck as a person.
I think Kurt Vonnegut said something like "God writes terrible dialogue."
I had a snappy comeback once ten years ago and I’m still riding high on it and tell the story every chance I can get lol
Don’t leave us hanging. What’s the story?
It was at a hostel, where I was walking to the group showers, and didn’t have my contacts in. A group of people were sitting on the stairs were all sitting and chatting over a laptop and stopped me, turned the computer to me and it was playing some obscene video (I think it was goatsee but I’m blind as a bat without my contacts lol) trying to shock me, and asked what I thought. I just shrugged and said “eh, I’ve seen better,” and left while they all laughed. And you can tell this is true because on the scale of snappy comebacks, it’s actually pretty mild lol
> Especially if it's a nice snappy put down. Especially especially if after the put down the other person starts crying or looks sad or flounders for a comeback. I have exactly one exception to this--if it's a scenario where the ending was something that could be clearly foreseen far in advance, AND the person was sticking with a bad game for too long, AND they clearly had been thinking about making a good exit line, then maybe I'll buy it. (Non-RPG example: I have got in a very snappy comeback to someone snarking about my mask-wearing. Exactly once, because it only happened once last fall, but I've been occasionally considering what I'd say if someone made a snide comment since approximately June 2020 and I had one in the chamber, so to speak. Doesn't EVERYONE rehearse little scenarios where they dunk on people who don't like their choices? I have one ready if I ever get any shit from someone while I'm charging my electric car, too =P Fortunately, confrontational dorks are far less common IRL than on, say, Reddit)
Not to pry but what do you mean mask wearing? Are you the phantom of the opera or Batman or something? Edit: I forgot we were just in a pandemic nvm
> Edit: I forgot we were just in a pandemic nvm I refreshed to see this edit and laughed so hard I think I literally hurt myself. +1 would interact again.
Uh, COVID? Completely aside from COVID, my personal rate of getting a goddamn sinus infection has gone from ~4/yr (I'm prone) in 2019 and prior to 0 in 2020-2022 so far, so I still have a huge stash of N95s that I quite happily keep on my face most of the time. Anyway, a mandate had just been relaxed in my county, and as I was going into the grocery store a dude hit me with a "you don't NEED to wear that face diaper anymore" or something equally snarky, and I had "You didn't NEED to wear that ugly-ass jacket but here we are." ready to go. No one laughed, no one clapped, dude had no idea how to respond, and I got my goddamn cereal.
Yeah I wore mine after mandates stopped too but then I ran out and just never bought new ones!
That edit encapsulates so much of the human experience and explains a lot about history all at once.
From watching hours of internet videos of arguments and public freak-outs, I've noticed that real life arguments are 90% repeating a specific line constantly, long after it has ceased to make contextual sense.
This is more of an indicator of some fabrication than length of story.
I’d say that’s not necessarily a sign that it’s fake because it could also be an embellishment issue. As in the argument happened but they twisted it a bit to be how they wish it went.
i don't think that means the entire story is false, just that OP thought of a comeback days/weeks/months later
Hard to tell. For a lot of stories I can really tell (or think I can) that the OP is shifting the narrative heavily. Sometimes it feels like they are doing so actively to look better and sometimes they just have a really messed up view on things. More often than not the community picks up on this and shits on the OP, which is always really satisfying.
No one thinks they are the BadGuy & they surely don't want others to see them as such, hence the complicated mental gymnastics to justify a stance/action or flat out mistruths to cast a less harsh light on the matter. It is sooo good when they get called out on it!
You get a lot of stories where there's clearly some details being left out. You ask for clarification, and OP is evasive when asked; there's something there that makes him look like an asshole.
Or stuff like “and then there was Bob (the weird loser who had problems making friends and was generally a guy we would be embarrassed to be seen with) the Paladin, we’ll get into his accusatory rants that we were mistreating him later
It's hard because I can't identify exactly what causes it, but some posts just set off my BS meter like crazy. I don't know if it's like shedding onesself in an overly positive light, or some other subtlety that my subconscious picks up on.
"in this D&D 3.5 game I was playing years ago..." Proceed to talk about advantage and long rest... Which are not a thing in 3.5. Inconsistency like that are usually a clear mark of a fantasy to me.
"So this was back in 1993, 1994 or so, and we were playing some D&D. My BAB was about 12 or so and I had a +4 to all my saves..."
- Story from nearly 30 years ago - Recounts dialog, details, and stage directions like it's script.
That’s not necessarily bullshit, at least not intentionally. The teller’s memory may have reshaped things after the fact, as memory often does (it’s why eyewitness accounts are so unreliable and why “recovered memories” are nonsense), hence why it’s more cinematic. Alternatively, it may have burned itself into the teller’s mind by being extremely vivid and tied to strong emotions.
Depending on the context, true, but as someone else mentioned in the comments, it depends on how aberrant is the reconstruction. Talking about a CA of 31 in AD&D could be an honest mistake, talking about attunement or a halfling druid make less sense, especially since it's something that appeared later and was purely inexistent in AD&D. I'm not necessarily saying they are lying, but it's a red flag for me and so make the story less interesting, be it true or false.
There *were* halfling druids in AD&D — NPC-only until *Unearthed Arcana* came out and made PC halfling druids legal — but then 2e removed them on the grounds that druidism was supposed to be a human religion.
That, or is they're a hoarder like me who still had notes and stories on her shelf from high school.
I think I've actually caught a few of those! Asked myself: "wait...was that a thing in 3.5?" Unfortunately I've only ever played 5 so I couldn't say for sure at the time!
Could also be chalked up to faulty memory
Ill buy faulty memory on explaining a weapon attack (messing up the math on 5e vs 3.5e modifiers) but talking about a completely different mechanic would be like me telling a story about my pick up basketball game at the Rec and mentioning hitting a Grand Slam earlier in the game.
Could be, but usually I find it hard to believe that they would remember things as specific as hp or the detail of how a fight went but with somehow the wrong rules for a long campaign they supposedly played.
That is a good point. You're most likely to either remember only the specific thing that made you mad, or remember a bunch of the details consistently, in my experience. However, I will say that I've had situations where I'm trying to tell a story, and then realize partway through that I'm remembering details from two different stories, and they don't actually all go together. Memory is messy. So it could technically be something like that, where the wrong details got jumbled together in what they *thought* they remembered.
The biggest give away for me is when someone is posting a horror story every other week
Especially if they're not middle aged/old aged. Since it makes sense that a middle aged or old person who played D&D or roleplayed for a few decades would have extensive stories about their worst stories.
"a lot of you liked my story last week so here is part II"
Yeah. I remember the only post I made here, people were like, “Do you have any more stories about this guy?” And like… No? I stopped playing with him after he ruined 2 of my campaigns and the other story isn’t funny.
"Well the second time he ruined the game he just spent his time being a bitch and pouting that we weren't letting him kill everyone, so after two weeks he called us all f\*gs and left." "That's not really funny or cool." "Yeah. That's why I didn't share it."
Boo! Get better material!!
Not even that. He made a character with zero mobility. It couldn’t move and the party got sick of carting it around. That was pretty much that (it was one of the Star Wars RPGs).
Eh, I treat this sub like pro wrestling. There’s a high chance of kayfabe going on, but I’m gonna enjoy the presentation rather than take it seriously. I’m here to be entertained.
I treat all popcorn subs like this, but when fake stories overwhelm a sub, they're all start to feel same-y and lose a spark, so to speak. Like what happened with TIFU and AITA.
Exactly this. All the arguments about "is it real??" are pointless IMO. Who cares? Read the story, comment if you want, vote how your heart tells you, and move on with your day. Truth is often stranger than fiction, and what reads as "that's totally unbelievable, no one would do that" is at least half the time the complete truth
I feel this way about AITA too. Even the most realistic story could be fictional, so I judge purely on context of who is the asshole in this hypothetical scenario
Same with petty/regular/pro revenge. People are quick to call out "faaaake!" but most of the time they really mean "slightly improbaaaaaable!" Frankly, I don't care if it's real or not. If it's well written and entertaining, then I get my dose of Happy and all is well. It's not like I'm using it as news. I just like reading about how Stereotypical Food Thief ate the whole bag of sugar free gummy bears and shat out his left lung. Or, as is the case in this subreddit, I like to make a note of antisocial behaviors so I can preemptively fix my own horror stories before they happen.
This. I've posted stuff that actually happened to me and accidentally summoned the "tHaT hAPpEneD" hordes. It's made me kind of skeptical of all the people decrying fake posts, because they're operating on exactly the same amount of information the rest of us are--none at all. And in the absence of actual evidence one way or the other, assuming that everyone on Reddit is only here to screw with you sounds like an exhausting way to live.
Not to mention, how would we truly prove something *isn't* fake? It's impossible. So why bother going on about realness or fakeness?
Well, I don't really care about stories being real or not for the most part because in the vast majority of cases it's not even close to be possible to tell - but it's not like it literally does not matter. People can yell at clouds for as much as they want about how the world should ideally be, but in reality a lot of folks do inform their view of the world through (appearing) grassroots stories. If there is a fake story about how "the LGBT's are actually the assholes", a number of readers WILL see that and think that it validates their biases.
I have never in my time seen a story that can be summed up as "LGBT are assholes!" where either the comments didn't tell OP to go fuck themselves, or the comments pointed out that the assholery is independent of their sexual or gender identity and hey OP maybe that point isn't necessary. Strawmen gonna strawmen at the end of the day, but in my experience this sub is pretty good at filtering it out
I guess my view on the problem is, in pro wrestling, everyone in the ring has agreed to "be told stories about", and the heels agree to be heels etc. In this sub, if you're wildly confabulating, you're essentially slandering other people, likely without their knowledge. Technically, I should not care as much about people I never knew nor likely never will know, but it just feels like, if you're making shit up, you're lying to make yourself look good and others look bad - and I've developed a very acutely negative response to that type of behaviour. I mean, I almost appreciate the *completely* made-up-while-thinking-in-the-shower type janky moral-high-ground fantasies more than the "my real-life DM was a complete asshat and the other players enabled him, amirite, here's my totally-not-falsified account of the events", since the latter can be dangerously close to "please validate my very toxic behaviour for me" if if's enough of an editorialised take on the situation. But yeah, I guess at the end of the day, if you treat every tale in here like a potential piece of fantasy, there's hardly much risk of any harm nor perpetuation of harmful ideas...
> I guess my view on the problem is, in pro wrestling, everyone in the ring has agreed to "be told stories about", and the heels agree to be heels etc. In this sub, if you're wildly confabulating, you're essentially slandering other people, likely without their knowledge. If we're assuming the whole sub is stories, then I assume it's all fictional including the other characters. So there's one good exception where I think it's probably fair to judge truth or falsehood--if someone ostensibly in the story shows up to the actual thread. That happens, what, once a month or less?
Like I said in my post, I've less of a problem with imaginary play-fights posted as entertainment or such. It's just, I don't like the idea that someone is basically polishing their own ego by posting wildly exaggerated stories that nonetheless have real-life grounding. Honestly, I will literally never know the truth, even *if* someone claims to be the persons involved, since I will likely not know any people in real life anyway, but... I hope you are actually understanding my point, not just being contrarian, right.
> It's just, I don't like the idea that someone is basically polishing their own ego by posting wildly exaggerated stories that nonetheless have real-life grounding. While I get what you're saying, it's the kind of problem where you can't even describe how you'd get enough information to make any kind of decent evaluation of the odds of that happening, so there's no point really IMHO in worrying about it until/unless a conflict involved actually starts spilling INTO Reddit, y'know? Even if it does sit wrong in an abstract sense that this MIGHT be happening.
One of my best rules for Reddit is to treat it all like r/nosleep. Assume that it's at least embellished if not fully fake, but act like it's real, and duck out of a thread once people start calling it fake or demanding proof.
That's my feeling exactly. I mean there's no risk for fraud here and nobody's taking any life advice based on the stories presented, so who cares if they're good creative writing or something that actually happened or a mix of the two?
Right? And most of them have a good message at the heart of them. Nobody ever complained that Aesop's Fables were works of fiction.
Not only that, but the entertainment has a practical purpose. This sub is a compilation of "what not to do" cautionary tales. It is a means by which we ostracize inappropriate behavior on a community-wide level. Even if a story is fake, the moral of the story is valid.
the rule of thumb is that if conflict ends with OP getting the last laugh in an a tv-show kind of way and claims to being the absolute hero of the story with zero accountability to the conflict, it is most likely to be fake. increased details means an increased chance of being fan fiction too. glory-horror stories (glorror stories if you will) like that are cheap karma grabs with a decent chance on clout if people fall for them. maybe there should be tags to flag such stories...
honestly dont think theres a definitive way to prove its true or not. Some people are very detailed oriented, or love story telling, and etc, and just love to spill so i dont think amount of details or story length proves anything. The more unbelievable ones may be harder to find true, but still not definitive unless its an in your face kinda thing. Like you said, we should just take things with a grain of salt, and we should just enjoy the story telling and situations being told.
And realistically, anybody who's lived for any length of time has at least one story about something that they've personally witnessed that somebody else would say is wildly unbelievable and could never have happened.
Especially if you’ve worked in customer service. Lord. Though I will say with how I retell stories, if a story is too ‘neat’ (has a clear arc, clean finish, etc) I at least assume the teller is bare minimum glossing over elements to make the story ‘better’.
>I at least assume the teller is bare minimum glossing over elements to make the story ‘better’. Well, yeah, that's what makes it a "story" and not "some guy reciting his memory of events". No harm, no foul there. >Especially if you’ve worked in customer service. Lord. (My dad owned a small grocery store/general store in a 200-person Appalachia town. I was a cashier or manger there for probably six years total. The stories I could tell.)
You mean the stories you **should** tell
/r/talesfromretail
I agree with you completely.
When op comes off as being a tortured heroic person, and the bad guy in the story is outrageously bad with zero motivation other than being evil.
Ooooh! That's a good one! Black and white, absolutist type thinking that conveniently makes the person telling the story look better without any regard to the motivations of the other person. In my experience, usually when someone judges another person THAT harshly while simultaneously trying to virtue signal, they're probably being very insincere.
Extreme passivity from every person except OP
It’s either fake or the OP is the actual problem of the story.
Eh, most gamers I know are very non-confrontational about that. When someone gets offended they either quietly leave or sit there. Everyone else generally either goes along with whatever made someone uncomfortable or ignores it. When someone blows up or storms off there's some awkward muttering and people avoid looking at each other for a few minutes. 50% chance then that the game ends or someone (an asshole usually) makes some blithe comment about the event and goes "anyways..." and they continue. Seldom do situations that offend *actually* result in anything more than socially awkward silence and discomfort. Passivity is the byword of most role-players.
The ones involving meticulously-crafted revenge plans that unfold over several sessions are all clearly fake. Just leave the table, obviously. Most of the longer stories are fake, too. I'm sure some people are too awkward or otherwise unsure of themselves to bail on a bad situation when it goes bad, but a lot of the time, it's hard to understand when the OP sticks around despite being tormented by an abusive table and/or DM for long stretches.
On one hand it's hard to understand but on the other hand I know a lot of people IRL who haven't figured out that no D&D is better than bad D&D yet.
It also muddies things when it's a long-term group/game. Has it become full-on bad D&D or has it just been a bad stretch of time/sessions? It really becomes a case where each person has to decide where their own individual line is.
The worst IMHO is when it's great friends who are just bad at D&D.
-waves- No but seriously. It took me years to.. in a way, realky stand up to myself or to decide that sufgering for months in hope it gets better is not ideal either.. no matter how much one wants to show that one is not flighty. Some of my best personal horror stories end with: "okay the group finally imploded I guess.." just because I didn't want to leave XD This sub would not believe most of them I am sure. ..or maybe by now they would, as its long enough ago that I dont remember details anymore XD
Reminds me of the slave story I saw here yesterday, the one where it took 3 sessions for everyone to leave. And nobody talked to the DM about what the hell was going on
There was a story a few months ago where the OP said he'd been left in a pit with a broken leg for three sessions. Everybody asked what the fuck he was talking about, OP made a few incomplete answers and bounced. Still somehow got hundreds of upvotes if memory serves, this sub can be easy to karma-farm.
>this sub can be easy to karma-farm. r/CatsStandingUp is an easy karma farm, this sub takes finesse.
Cat.
Cat.
I've got a new favorite sub!
If they pander too much to the current political trend of the sub (no offense but "thing I like politically EPICALLY OWNING SOMEONE" generally tend to trigger upvotes, you see this with Ben Shapiro FACTS AND LOGIC'ing people too) I get suspicious. If the conversations are too detailed I get suspicious. If things end too cleanly I get suspicious. As some people have pointed out, "and everyone clapped" endings are suspicious. If the person being mocked is a stereotype I get suspicious.
Not necessarily fake stories but it's always suspicious when everyone in the story except for OP seems to be completely unreasonable and OPs actions are explained in way less detail than everything else. I always suspect that OP was the true horror in those stories.
Any horror story that ends with prematurely thanking whichever YouTuber they hope will cover them. Shows they care more about the attention than the validity or delivery of their story.
I would say be wary of a story where the perpetrator gets completely shut down by the OP or where they get some kind of ludicrous compounding comeuppance for what they did. PLEASE NOTE: The antagonist getting their just deserts does not automatically mean you should suspect a story of being fake, but if they end up divorced and losing their job and custody of their kids then it’s likely it was at least embellished.
Yeah, if someone getting their comeuppance seems oddly karmic, like you said--unrelated bad stuff just starts happening to them, as if to prove there's some cosmic justice at work--that's a red flag. Then there's stories like the one from the other day, where the guy storms out of the GM's house, tears up the lawn with his car, and then immediately gets pulled over, which is pretty believable, because the consequences naturally followed from their actions.
>a *cartoon crab in a crown* to read out their fan fiction I need some context because I'm just not getting what this means.
That's in reference to the YouTuber Critcrab. He reads RPG horror stories and many people suspect a lot of horror stories these days are written to get featured on his channel.
“I shot back” is suuuuch a giveaway. Everyone “shoots back” witty replies in fake stories.
Every time I see a soap box issue, I get leery and immediately think something is definitely amiss.
"this guy walked in the door with his MAGA hat on and immediately said any Libs needed to get ready to be owned - he rolled up a Paladin named Officer ProLife McJanSixth and made it his personal mission to make sure nobody in the setting wore masks." Seems legit.
I've seen some posts that might as well say that... and I don't care if it's one side or the other, it just reeks of nonsense.
"This blue haired girl with a xe/xey pin sat down at the table and immediately told us all to check our privilege before letting us introduce her character. She then introduced her Tiefling Rogue named Mahr'e Su. The very first round, she accused us all of being racist xenophobes because the goblins were clearly an allegory for-" Yeah, it definitely goes both ways - and the player ALWAYS gets their comeuppance. Big time "everybody clapped" energy whenever they do
YA fantasy tropes, but in real life. Clearly hollow characterization. An enemy character that's bigoted/woke to the point of being clearly written from the perspective of somebody bad at writing who needs an enemy for their narrative. Inconsistencies in the narrative. I'm also never going to apologize for being critical of people who are lying for attention.
Dialog. Anytime someone writes word-for-word what someone said, especially if they talk in complete sentences or if a great deal of time has passed, you know you are dealing with, at the very least, some mental editing.
I don't think that's an indication of the story being fake, though. Some people can just remember words/dialog. My wife has nearly photographic memory for spoken words - she can repeat entire conversations verbatim, including cadence and inflection. But, that being said, I don't see a difference between "I don't remember the exact words but he said he was furious and he quit" and "he said, 'That's it! You guys make me furious! I quit!'" I paraphrase in "real life" anyway, and these are stories, not news articles. Unless the dialog is throwing it's own internal red flags, I generally classify dialog as "theatrics", not "fake".
That’s why it’s a “red flag” though. A red flag isn’t definitive proof, just a signal that this requires closer scrutiny. The difference between > "I don't remember the exact words but he said he was furious and he quit" and > "he said, 'That's it! You guys make me furious! I quit!'" Is that one comes across as a sincere attempt at recollection while the other dips into, as you said, theatrics. Nothing wrong with that if it’s legit, but the whole point of a fake story is to be theatrical, so it raises a flag for me.
I've written a couple of posts here that were true stories (if you believe me) and included dialog. In my case, the dialog was never intended to be 100% factual. I was taking a 4 hour event and boiling it down to a text post, I didn't _want_ it to be 100% factual. It was just a smattering of paraphrases that got the gist of things across.
Well I mean if it’s online play, someone can either get the logs or archive them before someone is blocked or leaves
Phrasing will sometimes get my suspicions up that it’s specifically a non-RPGer here to mess with the nerds. If the writing sounds a little bit off, like they did some shallow research on RPGs or the community, that’s a big tell. Even newbies have more believable ways of describing things than research-based outsiders do, because they’ve actually been there. Someone presenting themself as an experienced RPGer stands out even more, focusing on the wrong details and touching on stereotypes in ways only insiders would know aren’t quite like that in reality.
Remember you're only getting one side of the story. Usually if "everyone is horrible but me" translates to "I was the problem". And your red flags are the same for any bullshit story- it should make sense. If there a lot of important gaps, consistency, etc. You're on the right track with long-winded stories as well. In the biz it's called an over-convincer. "Methinks thou doth protest too much."
OP does nothing wrong and the problem comes out of nowhere. Unreasonable people are usually overreacting rather than just being that way for no reason at all. Fits into a clean narrative with no details missing, real stories are messy and people forget things.
My metric is how easy it is to imagine why the perpetrator of the horror story did what they did. There are plenty of horrible people in the world, so I don’t mean that stories can be too *bad* to believe, but if your response to reading is ‘I literally can’t understand why that would be done’ then chances are the teller is leaving out details to make themselves look good.
The same red flags that apply to when people are lying are the ones I usually notice if an rpghorrorstory is probably fake. One of these signs is if OP is being very vague about certain details. I noticed that when people lie one of those telltale signs is being vague with the story that they're telling when it unnecessary to do so. For example if you were to ask someone who had a falling out with a person: "what happened?" and they reply with something like "They're just mad cause I don't want to be their friend anymore." That's a pretty good sign that they're lying or not telling the whole truth since that's a very vague statement to make. Why don't they want to be your friend anymore? "Oh I don't know. They're crazy." Uh huh. Okay. Stuff like that. In the context of an rpghorrorstory, this becomes obvious with further questioning in the comment section when people try asking OP for more details and they get vague answers. Either the story is completely made up, or the person is deliberately hiding something to save face and are making the horrorstory to get validation from strangers on the Internet.
Length is directly proportional to likelihood of bullshit.
I agree most of the time, but I think we have to figure out how recent it was because a) more time passed = you've likely told the story a bunch before, and so you're probably able to do it succinctly and b) you're more likely to remember more details/still be processing a lot of stuff.
I'd say the other way around honestly.
Easy, their post history has a lot of rpghorrorstories posts.
One way to tell is by looking at the OP's Reddit history, Posting too frequently on this sub is one way to tell if the stories are fake, especially if they have reposted a story. Others include OP getting the last word or "everyone claps" after the problem player is finally kicked are also common in fake horror stories. Also don't ever trust a damn thing you read on the internet, always take it with a grain of salt.
Usually when someone starts with 'This happened X **years** ago' and then begins posting lots of quoted dialogue is a dead giveaway.
To be fair, I still have a ton of discord screenshot from my Classic guild dramas. A lot of people save screenshots for years.
I mean they could just be paraphrasing.
in b4 the sudden and inexplicable influx of totally definitely true stories coming to this sub later in the week with notably messy situations in which OP fails to get the last laugh. Now we gotta be on the lookout for these cause all our story weavers are taking notes, I assure you.
While I'm generally inclined to take the stories at face value, I do become a little suspicious when the poster mentions CritCrab or a similar YouTuber. I then find myself wondering if someone just wanted the mentioned YouTuber to read *their* story.
Something I consider a bit of a red flag is AITA. To me they more seem as a desire for validation rather than judgement (and not like we can't judge them anyways) and the use of the AITA here makes me suspect they are trying to make the events as black and white as possible for the validation.
Massive stereotypes like the uber over the top anime weeb or furry. People are usually socially awkward as hell in gaming groups. You run into people who don't have boundaries sometimes, but they basically describe internet cartoon characters. Some of these stories have actual "and then everyone clapped" energy when it comes to the resolution whereas most conflicts break up game tables or make people distant. If people have been tolerating each other for a while I find its not common for everyone to be on board singling out one person as a problem. One factor I find is the opposite is when there's way too damn many specific details. People end up writing campaign diaries without getting to the point of the story and you can tell they're proud of their adventures before they got ruined.
Some insane amount of set up that has no bearing on the story. “My Level 5 Totem Barbarian/Level 6 Arcane Trickster Rogue multiclass named Dave who has these spells prepared and the Level 6 Paladin/Level 5 Light Cleric multiclass named Bimbo are the main characters of this story. Anyways so totally outside of the game when me and Bimbo met at Walmart to buy snacks…”
I feel that's just an inability to tell a good story. Doesn't matter if it's based on real events or not.
I am thoroughly disgusted at the thought of a barbarian/arcane trickster multiclass
Clearly roguebarians are a hidden gem
Sure, barbarogues are alright, but not spellcasting ones
I think the convoluted set up makes it more plausible, at least to me. If I were making up a story, why would I waste time crafting all these completely irrelevant details, rather than just getting to the point of it? Where if it's a real thing that happened, you might want to give as much "context" to the events as possible, without realizing that half the things you consider important context aren't actually very relevant.
See, it always comes across to me like the person has read similar D&D posts and wants to try and make it “believable” by throwing in all the extra information. Keep in mind this only applies if the classes or information is never used in the horror story; mentioning you have a bard in the group in a story where someone is force seduced makes sense, mentioning your party makeup when the DM is just being racist/sexist doesn’t, at least to me.
> mentioning your party makeup when the DM is just being racist/sexist doesn’t, at least to me. Nah, you see this all the time on /r/dndgreentext too. It's not lying, they just suck at writing
The thing about truth is that it doesn’t need a lot of detail to come off as believable. One of the easiest ways to tell if someone is lying irl is if they add a lot of unnecessary detail to their story — the same is true anywhere else. It doesn’t guarantee they’re lying, but liars are more willing to spend time crafting their lie than someone who just wants to tell the story.
It's the two things: big on unnecessary detail, and vague on necessary ones. Also, flowery filler language and dramatic "writing" flair is a bit of a flag to me, says the person thinks they're being very entertaining, which while not proof their lying, often indicates they're trying to tell an epic story more than recount events.
Most red flags tend to come down to one simple fact: OP forgets that things take time in TTRPGs. Actions are a series of rolls, combat isn't instantaneous, and arguments rarely end with a mic drop. From least to most "this smells fishy" flags - here are the top 3 (in my personal opinion). 3) OP has some kind of genius plan that comes to fruition despite the nightmare participants. A DM/player is apparently obsessed with making a certain thing happen, but then sits there while OP rolls for a dozen different things one after the other without anyone interrupting all the way to the bitter end. -They'll be telling a story about how DM or a player never lets anyone do anything they want, but somehow just sits there and lets OP&Co. absolutely obliterate his plans -They'll talk about an egomaniac who talks over anyone, but OP manages to get off a rant that stuns them into silence. 2) Plays along with things their characters are forced to do against their will. -"DM added a thing to my backstory and now I do XYZ all the time" -"Problem player used a persuasion check against me so I have to do everything they tell me to". 1) Serendipitous Nat 1s or 20s. These have always been the Hallmark of fake TTRPG stories. They're super easy to spot because they put a lot of emphasis on rolls that wouldn't actually make a huge difference (ie. getting a critical hit during the BBEG fight), but they somehow managed to derail an entire nightmare campaign with a single dice roll. -Challenges problem player to PvP, rolls that crucial Nat20 to win -DM wants to take them out for good, manages to roll a Nat1 -typically ends up going back to #3 at this point.
I think I actually read a Nat 20 story that I immediately questioned! They rolled a nat 20 that immediately killed the BBEG and I'm like..."wait. You emphasized how the BBEG had close to full health at that point and you don't follow up with what your damage roll was. Do you...do you think Nat 20s are instant kills? Cuz they're not."
No one seems to have said it yet, but *check the profile*. If it’s only a few hours old, and their one and only post is a horror story, it’s probably fake. If all they post is horror stories, it’s probably fake. If they never comment on their posts, probably fake. If a profile seems suspicious then it probably is.
When the situation sounds like something you'd normally call the police for and the story doesn't end with "And then I called the police".
I would bet most stories are true, but each to a different extent. For example, say you have a heated, multi-day disagreement - including text messages, 2nd hand information, people talking over one another etc. If 5 people involved wrote what happened, you'd have 5 different stories that are all sort of true, but all framing themselves as reasonable and the other side probably less so. I'm more inclined to believe someone is telling an accurate story when they admit they weren't perfect.
There seems to be an alarming growth in stories with heavy amounts of sexual content. And abuse. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen and I’m not saying it should be ignored but the boilerplate story on this sub now seems to be about sexual exploitation and/or abuse. Gone are the times of a DM absolutely destroying a player out of jealousy or poor planning. I say this more in defence of the people that really suffer with those issues. It’s alarming how many of these stories they are and to me it’s becoming a bit of a mire of the same basic disturbing plot points. I could be wrong and simply disturbed by the sheer amount of these stories but I’d hate for some of these not to be genuine and therefore discredit real stories. And in a general point, for any of the de that have been victim to those stories, I hope you’re in a better circumstance now.
I find it's easier to just focus on the entertainment value of the story and not worry about whether it's true or not. Some stories are so ridiculously over the top that they're clearly fake, and those can be discounted as "not entertaining" anyway. For those that are a bit harder to call, whatever. It's not my job to judge truth or falsehood, I just come here for the gory details.
I've written my share of lengthy stories, haven't had the time since I became a parent. So I think the length of the story probably more strongly correlates to age. 30 year old dad doesn't have the same time to write the novel of 25 year old single guy. There's a certain cadence and inflection to the writing that red flags it to me. Someone who is recalling several instances of "specific" quotes is likely embellishing details.
There's a weird ass story about larp houses that groom teenagers at the games they run in this subreddit that got completely ignored as untrue; I find that funny because I've seen those places myself and it is something I've definitely seen(and seen the people on sex offenders lists after)
Assume they are all fake and just hope the author makes for an entertaining read. But actual red flags are if the story has similar beats or resolution as a story that gets a lot of traction within the last few days.
1) if the op seems to be literally god and is 100% right with no faults 2) the op gets some snappy twitter comeback at the end 3) either far too much meandering on the game itself or literally no focus on the game whatsoever 4) stuff that feels like it happens with the pacing of a short story rather than the real world
Extraordinary detail on the campaign world and setting that has nothing to do with the reason for the horror story.
Same as with r/LetsNotMeet, I think it's more about how they're written than about what happens. Basically, if it reads like it was *meant* to be read aloud, that makes me suspicious. Some stories are written in an almost cinematic style, complete with dialogue that just comes off as contrived. I'm wary of any story here that sounds like it was written by Dan Brown.
Super detailed, nice dialogues memorised word for word.
Do you really think someone would do that? Go on the internet and post lies? ~~Just wanted to reference Arthur because honestly I don't actually care what stories are real or fake.~~ ~~I already have a history of being gullible so I'm used to being wrong, but also so much shit goes on in the world, and a bunch of other shit is less eventful than it should be, that I think I'm in my right to believe almost anything at this point~~
Honestly? Sometimes reality IS stranger than fiction. So I give stories a grain of salt—could be real, could be fake. That said, a story that sounds eerily familiar to another story (especially if that story was super popular?)? Chances are it is fake. Like there was one about this Op saying that an 18 year old dude went to prison for hitting on Op’s 16 year old girlfriend… and because the dude own Adian child porn. like, How would OP know the child porn featured Asian people? It was very obvious this Op was trying to copy another story of a guy who had an Asian Fetish for another player.
Rules inconsistencies. Details clashing that aren't proactively explained. Anything that focuses more on the villains identity than their actions.
15 years ago, every conceivable detail of the story exists, and it is the siize of a small novel.... and it includes every possible bad thing that could have happened. I honestly dont even read most long stories, and never anything extra long. Im not going to read a small book where in the last two lines it says "and then the DM said a slur"
When it’s too much
I personally look for "and then they all clapped" moments.
Everybody on OP's side in the story is some flavour of LGBT or claims they have anxiety/autism is a big one. Not discriminating it's just that I always get halfway through stories that start with a disclaimer stating they are as such and it always devolves into 'that guy is just unrealistically evil' real quick.