Take Two!!Every so often, a guy on a message board makes a thread about a downright awful game session, where the DM was little more than a dictator engaging in "screw the PCs no matter what" power fantasies or a creepy male gamer whose sole purpose in life is to drive away D&D's female demographic. Other times it's less the problems of player behavior so much as it is poor decision-making.
I figured that since Halloween's coming up soon, I'd create a thread cataloging all the terrifying (as in "what the fuck where the players/DM thinking?!") gaming sessions. This thread is geared less towards scary "in-game" events so much as notable incidents in player/GM dickery and adventuring plans gone wrong.
You can post or own stories or reference stories from other message boards. I'll start out by listing my own (the Sleeping DM) and another dudes' (Brazilian Death Squad).
The Sleeping DMAbout six or seven years ago I was playing a Living Greyhawk game where the PCs had to venture into an underground Gnome village. The Dungeon Master, either due to late-night partying or working overtime, was visibly exhausted and in no mood to play but came anyway.
The adventure itself was fine on its own merits: the GM did a half-assed job running it. He mumbled through the descriptive text incoherently so we had no idea what was going on. "Okay, guys, you're in a village... and monsters... you're gonna kill it..." The greatest challenge was not from the encounters themselves so much as trying to figure out what we were fighting.
"You see a big lizard. Roll for initiative."
"Does it have wings? Is it Large, Huge?"
"It's a big... dragon thing. It's red. It breathes acid at you. Roll a will save."
We knew that he didn't have his game face on, but we were determined to make it to the end of the adventure for the precious experience and gold. Living Greyhawk had an infamous reputation in its early years for being hard and light on the "treasure side" (I believe some calling it "Living Ghetto"). We weren't going to let six hours of gaming go to waste! How naive I was back then...
During the course of the adventure, we: had the DM replace flying enemies with CR 1/2 orcs (because they're easy to play), had us automatically bypass a magical lock puzzle ("I'm not ready for this shit"),
By the time we reached the climatic encounter with a mecha-badger thing, he winged it: "there are four of you, one of it. You might as well have won. End of adventure." He passed out the post-adventure fill-out sheets, packed his bags, and left. Ever since then, we always checked to see which DM was running the Living games at our game store.
The Infamous Brazilian Death Squad Story (from a now-defunct rpg.net thread):This is a bit long but...
I guess I will just have to mention my brief GMing to the brazilian police death squad.
Everything begun at my local gameclub (by local I mean the only one in a 4,000,000 people city) some five years ago. This club was run by a fellow hobbyist on weekends, was located at a big avenue and had a large 'Camelot' plaque hanging over the door with the picture of a knight. Needlessly to say it attracted a lot of curious people. Well, at the end of a saturday afternoon of particularly intense WEG Star Wars playing I was approached by this timid skinny guy in his late twenties. He had been watching the entire session and was almost apologetic about coming forward to talk to me. Anyway he lived just 3 blocks away and he loved "games", so he wanted someone to GM a game for him and his "work colleagues". They had never roleplayed before. He seemed a nice, clean, eager-to-play guy, so I invited him and his buddies for a AD&D game in the club, the following night.
Nothing would have prepared me and the other player (the club owner) for the cast of foul characters arriving at the club the next night. Just to contextualize the many non-brazilian readers in this thread, there are two kinds of police in Brazil: the semi-illiterate oppressive superviolent military police, and the corrupt immoral wiseguy detective/mobster types from the civilian police. These guys were the second type.
These four men (the skinny guy only showed up later) were villain prototypes and had intimidation skill points worth entire 20th level characters. Even when they nicely said hello they had menace written all over their foreheads. It was night, but they were dressed like beach tourists, wearing soccer team t-shirts and sandals. There were so much male jewelry as to make Mr. T look like a girl playing child´s bijouterie. All of them had pistols attached at strategic holsters in their bodies, at least one of them had knives, and all of them were anxious to play the nice "game of dice".
I should see the size of the problem when a huge black man put two bottles of smuggled whisky on top of the table we would play. He seriously asked me if that was booze enough for all of us (two bottles for 7 people). I replied I didn´t drink. He said he would freeze the liquid for me to eat it and his mouth opened in a big smile filled with golden teeth.
Anyway the quarreling began when I showed them the pre-gen characters. All of them "wanted to be the master". There were also quarreling about who would get which character (they were choosing by the pictures). But that was mild quarreling and they calmed down as their heavy drinking and joint smoking ensued. Oh, and they also loved the dice.
The game finally began at the tavern where I had planned the characters to meet and the players to familiarize themselves with the blessed and (to them) newly-perceived freedom a player has in a RPG. They caught on fast enough with IC dialogue, and besides the incessant joint passing and abusive drinking the players were concentrated, with cellphones turned off and all.
That´s when the prostitutes arrived.
Unknowingly to me and the club owner, skinny guy had arranged for two prostitutes, old acquaintances of these guys, to meet at my friend´s gaming club. Things went downhill from there, with the women disrupting the game and the telling of IC mixed with OOC murder stories. By this point my friend made the second mistake of the evening, trying to stop the game by telling me he was late and had to close the club and stuff. The murderous cops didn´t take his intentions well, and started to get all serious and quiet, trying to intimidate my friend. After all, he wasn´t being a nice host, since they had brought the booze, the girls, the drugs and the guns, and they were not going to leave before knowing "who won" anyway, since everyone of them had (of course) bet 50 bucks his character would "win".
So I wrapped things up by having an all-out combat between the characters, while a detective banged one of the girls against a wall 4 feet away. The winner got 200 bucks and a knuckle-duster, they all had a blast and left me and my shaking buddy glad we were left alive . We never saw any of them again, not even skinny guy.
Maybe not too creepy, but then again my experience is limited. [/story]
In the original BG thread Arturick was nice enough to post the accounts of his chronicles:http://people.ucalgary.ca/~ammaster/arturick.htmAnd of course who can forget Forgotten Realms Creator Ed Greenwood! Apparently a favorite hobby of his involves creeping out gamers at Gen Con:
My concept of Alustriel as de facto ruler of Silverymoon has always been glossed over by TSR (and now WotC) for Code of Ethics/Code of Conduct reasons, because I see her as the Realms equivalent of ‘the Queen of Courtly Love,’ presiding over a Court that amuses itself (along with delighting in wit, new songs, new inventions or clever craftsmanship, and fashions) with dalliances, courtship, and lovemaking. Er, lots of lovemaking. :}
In the same way that real-world kings in some places and times enjoyed droit de signeur [French for: “As the King, I have the right to sleep with anyone” :}], Alustriel takes many lovers for short periods of time, and is one of those rare kind, understanding, warm people who has the knack of staying close, affectionate friends with former lovers, even in the presence of other ex-flames. In fact, it’s quite likely that any meeting of courtiers will contain a majority of folk who have visited the royal bed or baths at one time or another -- and most of them remain fiercely loyal to Alustriel and to her dream of Silverymoon. (In fact, some cynics, such as Torm of the Knights of Myth Drannor, believe she deliberately seduces political foes to transform them into personal friends.) The fact demonstrably remains that to attack Alustriel in Silverymoon will be to evoke immediate defense of her person by dozens of champions who will lay down their lives to protect hers, even knowing she’s the “Anointed of the Goddess” and may not really need their protection.
For obvious moral reasons, published Realmslore glides over all this ‘free love’ stuff (gakk! orgies! Nonononono!) without saying much (though if you read the words of Silverymmon-related Realmslore I’ve written, nothing contradicts it). If you’re portraying Alustriel correctly in play, she loves to laugh (except when to do so would be cruel to others), gives hugs, caresses, and kisses freely, has no personal dignity (nude? Me? Yes, so? Yes, I heard him comment on the shape and taste of my breasts -- that’s why I was thanking him) but a LOT of personal grace and charm, and never forgets details about people (so if meeting a knight she bedded one night eight years ago, she’ll recall the name of his ailing mother and her ailment, the name of his new bride, and any ‘touchy triggers’ any of them might have). Most folk who meet her can’t remain jealous of her or angry at her for long.
The original Mystra seemed to encourage Alustriel to have children (why? Hoho! SO many mysteries, waved before you!), because she conceived every nine months and a day or two, giving Faerun a succession of healthy males in a series of easy births (and being little constricted or uncomfortable while pregnant, because rather than acquiring a ballooning belly, the High Lady always put on weight all over, and retained her poise, balance, and activities). Yes, she’s given birth to females, and no, I’m not going to say ANYTHING more about that for future schemes reasons. :} The new Mystra may have other ideas, because (as far as Elminster knows -- and he doesn’t hesitate to ask her, straight out) Alustriel isn’t pregnant right now, and shows no signs of becoming so.
For details of her current consort, see the quartet of Realmslore columns appearing on the WotC website right now.
“Aerasume” is a surname, and all of the tall, strapping lads who bear it share the same father, who remains Alustriel’s lover on nights when she needs comforting, but these days is often away from Silverymoon on explorative expeditions into the wilderlands. As I said: with very few exceptions, Alustriel remains on good terms with her former lovers, and manages somehow to keep them comfortable with each other (I guess it’s like being members of a club one very much enjoys being part of). So they all get along well together. At long-ago GenCons I often ran Realms play sessions in which PCs were sent with an urgent message to Alustriel [a stranger to them by all but reputation] through a secret portal that admitted them to the Palace but removed all metal -- weapons and, er, BELT BUCKLES -- and all enchanted materials [items and garments vanished, spells operating on the bodies of the PCs just melted away] in doing so. Stumbling over their own falling clothing but under imperative, overriding orders to get to Alustriel right away (and bearing a pass that would let them do so), the racing PCs were directed to a certain chamber, and burst into it to discover that it was taken up by a vast, shallow bath filled with warm rosewater and naked people making love. SOMEwhere in all of that sliding flesh was Alustriel. Their mission: find her.
I loved watching players’ faces, right at that moment.
