YMMV / Puffin Forest

• Broken Base: While nobody can deny that his videos are humorous, some people have questioned whenever or not Ben is a good or fair DM at times. Ben himself even lampshades this in a few of his videos.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • The party's treatment of Wallace of Parnast is objectively reprehensible, but it's so over-the-top it lands here, especially in the first video where the Tiefling calmly asks for the copper penny he'd given Wallace earlier back after letting the boy get beaten up by a treant for an hour.
  Ben: And so with his limp, broken arm, little Wallace reaches into his bag, pulls out a small copper penny, and gives it back.
  • Later, the half-orc is the only one willing to revive Wallace after he falls unconscious - and only does so as a Cruel Mercy, as he wants to make damn sure that Wallace is fully aware of how utterly useless he is. And on the ride back into town, they opt to just drag Wallace behind the wagon rather than give him a seat.
    • The second video reveals that the entire party is Lawful Good, making the contrast even more stark.
  • In a similar vein, the party's treatment of Flynn the aarakocra bard. Treating other races differently is bad. Treating a Bird People like a pet and refusing to listen to him no matter how right he is is hillarious.
  • The guards in "Pokemon Tabletop Gangsters". Campus security beating up children? Not funny. Campus Security apparently hired from the mafia and gleefully taking any chance they have to beat children within an inch of their lives and perfectly willing to use torture? Absolutely hillarious.
  • Asiago’s fire spells setting the town on fire would be a bad situation, until it burns down the hospital, the puppy shelter, the orphanage (with a sign that says “now with extra orphans”) and the fire department in one go. Then it becomes hilarious.
  • Asiago in general is built on this. A pyromaniac who routinely sets her enemies on fire? Not funny. That pyromaniac is also an adorable little girl, while the party encourages her to set a reduced number of children on fire? Hillarious.
  • Ben's description of the Magic: The Gathering card Karona, False God.
  You give another player Karona, then they pass it to another player, and it just kinda goes around the table, makes sure that everyone has it.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Boshack from Curse of Strahd is one of the most popular characters not played by Ben thanks to his deadpan snack, an excellent evil written character when that is so rare in a DND game and having a surprisingly great character arc
• Fan Nickname:
  • The Malikar Campaign for the campaign that featured Malikar as the first main villain. Ben only refers to it as his current or last campaign.
  • Technically, the Turtle Fuckers is this trope. Their actual name was the Turtle Molesters, but a poorly placed censor beep made it sound far worse than it actually was. Turtle Fuckers sounds far funnier, however, so This Very Wiki keeps using it.
• Fridge Brilliance: Ben states he originally played a smuggler in the Star Wars TTRPG because he liked Han Solo's hat, despite Han never wearing a hat. However this makes more sense in the context that Ben had never watched the movies when he started playing the game. He most likely only really knew that Harrison Ford played Han and his mind jumped to another character Ben knew Harrison had played around the same time: Indiana Jones, who indeed has a nice hat.
• Fridge Horror: Trixie Starbright wanted to use Mewtwo's powers to become the most popular girl in school. We're not told how this would work, but given that Mewtwo is a psychic pokemon, we can make some guesses...
• Genius Bonus: When he's running from a preprinted module he often leaves out details that aren't strictly related to the story and helps hide quite how spoilery they can be. For instance the adventure in "An Abserdly Difficult Mission is mostly about the players and how they handled it and poking fun at how silly some of the situations are out of context, but he plays off the duel with the enemy champion and the Dragon's Screw This, I'm Outta Here as him screwing up and trying to fudge the mistake when in reality he ran the scenes exactly as spelled out in the book.
• Heartwarming Moments: In the Curse of Strahd campaign, Garo and Boshack's friendship. They are practically polar opposites, one being a cleric of a sungod and one being a warlock of a sun-eating Eldritch Abomination, but despite their bickering, they consider each other genuine friends and often just talk and enjoy each other's company.
• He Really Can Act:
  • "Secrets of the Skeleton Town", as noted under Moment of Awesome bellow, demonstrates that Ben is prefectly capable of putting aside his usual comedic tone to do Lovecraftian Horror instead.
  • In the Curse of Strahd story he gets to flex his horror muscles... As well as some tragedy.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • I don't want your sass, Jimmy!
  • ಠ_ಠ^explanation This expression is used for any character suffering an in-game annoyance
  • Abserd as the name of characters with a class in every level.
  • "I waarned you!"^explanation  A (possibly homebrew) magic item that appeared in one of Ben's videos, the defective Sword of Warning, had a habit of giving vague warnings before taking any opportunity to claim it was right. Anytime something bad happens in one of Ben's videos, a comment will innevitably quote the sword
  • He fell down so hard he became X^Explanation From this video, where the tiefling warlock wants to switch to a Sword Mage, and the DM used the in-universe explanation of the warlock hitting his head to hard that he forgot all his warlock powers and spontaneously learned a new skillset. Since then, any Contrived Coincidence used by the DM results in a comment about the players hitting themselves so hard that the coincidence happened.
• Nightmare Fuel: Unsurprisingly, "Secrets of the Skeleton Town" since it comes from Call Of Cthulhu. Especially the man-eating bugs.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The Curse of Strahd story part 5. Barovia is really getting to Garo, with him becoming nitably more ruthless. And because the Hags have managed to turn the young girl Gertrude into a hag without her knowing, the party has to kill her. And Garo has to talk to her and keep her distracted while Ezmerelda casts her spell. Kind, pious Garo has to sit down in front of a young frightened child, and reassure her, knowing full well that he has to kill her in just a minute.
  • The story's final ending isn't much better: The seemingly benevolent ruler the party chose to replace Strahd turned out to be a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who accepted the same pact of blood as Strahd, killing her brother to seal it, and ruling Barovia with her dark magic. Garo, forced to remain due to his pact with the Fanes, eventually became the Abbot to her Strahd: a broken man placating the dark lord, lest she punish the people. Ultimately, Garo decides that the letter from Kolyan was right. Barovia should be left to its sorrow, until everyone therein is departed for a better life.
  • In one episode of Ben's Worst Sessions, he talks about a pair of new players he once played with where the first session just ended up being awful, and he admits that the part he really feels bad about is that he never saw those players again. As far as he knows, that first session ended up turning them completely of the game, and he's sad that he never got to tell them that not every game is like that.
  • In the appropriately named "Tragedy + Time = More Tragedy", Ben talks about his first campaign of 5e. Their party had recently recruited a pair of brothers namd Xarek and Bodhi. Bodhi died soon after from a Cone of Cold attack, and the players (not the party, the players) were left completely at a loss for what to do, since it was the first death they'd experienced. They eventually decided to not retcon his death, and instead spent a few sessions taking his body back to his parents, leading to a series of scenes where they sat down and talked about the deceased's life.
    • Then it gets even worse, as the party has to help the parents fight of a fiend that has invaded their home. The mother is killed, and Xarek is banished to another plane, leaving the father to believe he is the last of his family. He takes the body of his wife and walks of into the forest, never to be seen again.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: As far as we're told, a lot of characters in from the Covenant and Malikar campaigns never reappear, despite being immortal and inhabiting the same world as the Otterton campaign. Of note is the Fighter who could easily become a King in the Mountain-type, and Shiro, who would be an excellent Big Bad due to his Take Over the World tendencies and immortality.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Weirdly, Ben in "Why Won't My Character Just DIE Already?!" In the video, Ben wanted to change his character only for this to get vetoed by the Dungeon Master and rest of the party (because the party needed a healer), leading him to try to kill off his own character by being careless. Ben thinks killing his own character against the DM's wishes was acting immaturely, but the comments for the video were overwhelmingly on his side. General consensus is that the DM and other players were ruining Ben's fun for arbitrary reasons.