Any seasoned Dungeon Master knows that one of life’s impossibilities is keeping your players on track. Whether they’re going the extra mile to determine if a very plain chair—which you have emphasized is a very plain, very unimportant chair—is somehow important to the plot, poking the proverbial bears that you’ve suggested they don’t poke, or trying to have sex with every taverngoer they spot, herding Dungeons & Dragons players is like herding teleporting puppies.
But it’s not just in a textual sense that players go off-track; sometimes they diverge emotionally too, and sometimes, a hilariously large portion of TikTok joins them.
Our story begins with one @tumbleweed2319, who illustrates for us one of the latest plot points faced by the heroes of his Dungeons & Dragons campaign. As the party was on the verge of being eliminated by a malevolent magical crystal, Fartbuckle, a goblin companion of the party’s who the DM conceived as a sort of comedy relief character, stepped up to the crystal, sacrificing himself to de-trigger its power (“I…save… friends…”). Though we didn’t know much of Fartbuckle’s story or the experience that the party had with him, the fact that they were inconsolable says quite a bit.
But they weren’t the only grievers in this scenario; the #fartbuckle TikTok tag brings up hundreds upon hundreds of videos memorializing the brave goblin, with reenactments, fan art, fan animations, and live reactions to his death all making their rounds by the dozen. Even Donald Glover was moved to honor Fartbuckle (it’s no great assumption that Troy Barnes was channeled here).
Now, when you name a non-player character something like Fartbuckle, the last thing you would probably assume is for your players to become well and truly invested in him. This may seem like the inversion of a situation where players aren’t taking the campaign seriously (rather than make light of the serious things, they become serious about the silly things), but really, it’s an extension; propping up a character named Fartbuckle is an inherently silly thing to do. Roleplaying Tips suggests that players who goof off tend to do so out of disengagement.
We of course don’t actually know if this was the case for @tumbleweed2319’s campaign, but if so, how brilliant of him to have turned the players’ self-imposed stakes on their head by turning Fartbuckle into a hero who’s willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of his friends. Take note, aspiring Dungeon Masters.