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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   666 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 26, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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I just think that a high school senior wanting to hang out with 30 year olds and vice versa is disturbing. It adds a lot of risk to the group. Now newcomers need to be vetted to see if they are creeps around this 18 year old. It creates a vector for people to private message this vulnerable young adult and we are the ecosystem to let that happen. Non-adults hanging out with adults is just odd.

I just think that a high school senior wanting to hang out with 30 year olds and vice versa is disturbing.

She doesn't want to hang out with 30 year olds. She wants to hang out with people playing this niche nerd game. Once when I was fifteen, I got into a car with a much older man that I had just met and allowed him to take me to a second location because the local game shop was closing and he offered us more D&D. I don't even remember the guy's name, but I remember the cleric I played.

Wouldn't you tell any creepy new comers to knock it off? Why should it matter if they're creepy towards person A vs person B?

No young people could join Ham radio clubs if they adhered to your standards. Or become masons. I hear VFW halls also run really old. And DAR meetings!

Wouldn't you tell any creepy new comers to knock it off? Why should it matter if they're creepy towards person A vs person B?

I'm not running a group to police other people. But I imagine we'll cross that bridge when it comes up.

No young people could join Ham radio clubs if they adhered to your standards. Or become masons. I hear VFW halls also run really old. And DAR meetings!

Not my problem and not one I am trying to solve. Those groups can run their own standards and solve their own problems.

I don’t think this is as odd as you’re making it out to be. I regularly participate in multiple social groups whose members range in age from 18 to 35. Eighteen year olds are adults, so what you’re describing isn’t a case of non-adults hanging out with adults. Now, from what you’ve said, this young woman might be a bad fit for other reasons, but age doesn’t seem like it should be a factor.

It seems like a perfectly normal part of maturation? She's going to start hanging around thirty year olds at some point.

hopefully when she's 25-29 not at 18.

Why? It's healthy for teenagers to hang around adults and see how they behave instead of going off of movies about frathouses. I remember when I was a teen and ran the grill when my dad's friends were watching football; nobody asked who drank the one mormon's share of the beer if it didn't get more than that.

You do know teenagers are supposed to become adults, right? Like that's the whole point.

It's healthy for teenagers to hang around adults

Is it? It sounds like a recipe for disaster and abuse.

see how they behave instead of going off of movies about frathouses.

I don't care how they learn to behave and frathouses that have 32 year olds in them are creepy. If a 17 year old wants to hang out with 21 years olds I think that is significantly less creepy than hanging out with 32 year olds.

I was a teen and ran the grill when my dad's friends were watching football

You were related to your father and it was his friends. Very different dynamic.

Is it? It sounds like a recipe for disaster and abuse.

Because all you hear about (especially in leftier circles with all their sexual disfunctions and neuroses) are the horror stories. Friendships and meaningful platonic relationships across much wider age gaps are normal and healthy. The thing where everyone spends their first 22 years dealing with peers within 10 months of their own age is an extreme historical oddity.

My best friend is five years older. The relationship has a certain parity now, but we met when I was fourteen and other friends used to joke that he was basically my dad. But it was really helpful to have someone a life stage ahead around to offer advice and buy booze. Two of my other friends had similar relationships with guys from his friend group. It was almost a bootleg Big Brothers program.

Half my actual dad's golf buddies are my age. He's mentored a double handful of men even younger through AA.

I'm not saying your concerns are baseless, but having the group collectively treat her as a kid sister is reasonable and healthy for everyone. And if you just don't want to deal with that, that's fine too. I refuse to let my similarly aged daughter come to D&D because I want to crack jokes with my friends without being in Dad Mode.

Yes, not everyone has a dad, I get it. Try to take care of bastards, learning how to be an adult from normie adults is the way to learn. Should she learn things from retarded woke ideology, instead?

Should she learn things from retarded woke ideology, instead?

She already has considering she goes by They/Them, uses a male name, has blue hair, dresses like a woman, and has two lesbian mothers as parents.

There's no saving that, and I'm not inclined to try.

Well, why didn't you say so in the first place? Now you can just tell this person: "Sorry, this is a based and redpilled roleplaying group. Very stable geniuses only—no mentally-ill people allowed." Problem solved. (This specific wording is a joke, but the underlying meaning is not. However, I don't know whether the other members of your group would agree with this meaning.)

the question is how to handle it in such a way as to not scar this already likely friendless young adult

There's no saving that, and I'm not inclined to try.

These two statements seem contradictory. If the person is already scarred, why do you care so much?

I started off feeling sorry for the girl but the more comments from OP I read, the more I think she might be better off out of that group. She's making a bunch of 30+ year old men feel really uncomfortable that they can't engage in locker room talk and relive their glory days of high school badinage about gay orgy sex! How insensitive of her!

I'm really starting to wonder who exactly is behaving like the 17-18 year olds there.

I'm not going to be able to change this person's woke ideologue-ness because they are already woke af. While this group is not woke its also not anti-woke. I want to spare this person additional mental anguish because clearly they already have a lot of it.

You could always hand her a stack of printed booklets warning her about the dangers of technically-legal-but-practically-danger-fraught romances with large age gaps. (This is approximately one-third a joke.)

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