Captain Idiot, Game Master
The Horror, the Horror
Bryce : hihabnabitmkiii : Hi.
Bryce : Captain Idiot GM'd...
habnabitmkiii : Ooh, I can't wait to hear.
Bryce : In to Schadenfreude are we?
habnabitmkiii : Hm?
Bryce : I was just suggesting that the primary source of entertainment from hearing about it would be the joy at other's suffering. :)
habnabitmkiii : Well, I'm just certain that it was an interesting experience.
Bryce : Yes, it was. We started out on a planet... (fade out)
Bryce : I was a Space Parrot Warrior Monk, because he had started us out with four times the normal XP and I had leveled up. My friends were a Space Gnome psionist and a Human Ninja.
Mind you, there are no ninja in the rules. Captain Idiot just made it up on the spur of the moment because his brother asked him to let him be a ninja a bunch of times.
habnabitmkiii : Haha. So the starting stats and attributes were improvised?
Bryce : Pretty much - whereas humans of any class normally start out with d10 Dexterity (possibly plus a bonus of 1 or 2 for being in a class where it would make sense, like Rogue), the Ninja started out with d20 Dexterity. (And no bonus, so he -could- have ended up as a Ninja with 1 DX.)
But he rolled a 16 so everything was okay-ish. 16 is phenominally good, but hey, he's a ninja. (Apparently ninja are different species from regular humans on account of their ahem improvised starting stats.)
So, the three of us - Space Gnome, Space Parrot, and Space Ninja - set off in search of adventure.
But all we find are stores. Hey, that's good, the first time. The second time, it's okay, if they have good stuff. The third time - one begins to think that shopping is being used to stall for time...
We did get some good stuff, and we had absurdly high starting credits. Plus we found more in various minor random encounters. I got the distinct impression that none of them were planned. Somehow, an "invisible human rogue" attacked the Space Ninja while he and Space Parrot went to the psionics shop. Space Ninja was about to get a bullet in his head when Space Parrot swooped down and whacked the evil rogue.
Captain Idiot apparently didn't think he could argue with the dice so that attempt to murder his brother^W^WSpace Ninja was averted. (Despite his own clarification that GM did not, as we had previously thought, stand for "Game Master", but actually meant "God Master".)
habnabitmkiii : So GMs can change dice rolls?
Bryce : Technically, the GM can decide by fiat if something succeeds or fails, but it is frowned upon, and it is certainly unsporting to do so after calling for a roll.
habnabitmkiii : Ah.
Bryce : (The GM can fudge minor things of course, it's not like a good GM rolls for everyone not tripping each turn.)
So, we went into the psipack shop, which had LOTS of good stuff, including over 160,000 credits worth of Bulk Psipacks that are used for transporting psionic energy in great quantity. (Around 800 PP when a typical psionic costs 4 or 5.)
I got the impression they were there because the bulk psipacks are between some decent level ones on the list in the rules appendix for psipacks, and it was easier to say "all the ones from here to here" as opposed to listing the ones that would reasonably be there.
habnabitmkiii : Did you get to adventuring?
Bryce : Eventually...
For the second time, I thought the plot was starting (finally! it had been like 2 hours) when this cyborg ran in and killed the shopkeeper. Maybe Captain Idiot thought that he would pose a challenge to three characters with about 250 XP each (by this time - XP flowed like water). He didn't. Inside of one round, the cyborg was dead and being looted.
Now, there was no sign (e.g. notes) that this cyborg had any kind of stats, but I guess it wouldn't have mattered since Space Gnome bought some poison darts that were advertised (correctly) as causing instant death.
habnabitmkiii : Niice.
Bryce : Yeah... Plus space gnome had telekinesis so I guess if he'd not found a variety of cooler weapons as the game went on he could have killed anyone already.
So. We vainly looked for any indication of plotsign, but none was found. Then we realized that since the shopkeeper was dead, we had a shop's worth of psipacks.
"Um, they're are uh, (looking at list of psipacks) 12 of these ones, 4 of these, 8 of those, and uh (getting bored) 10 of the rest."
"Ten each?"
"Yeah."
"We load them all into the ship and take off!"
We did so.
habnabitmkiii : Does that mean there were too many for you to have them all on your party?
Bryce : Yeah. Bulkpacks are big, like 1/4 a cubic meter. I suppose we could have carried the rest, but only if the Space Ninja had carried a lot of them. Space Parrot was pretty limited in the amount he could carry, being a medium-sized bird, and Space Gnome was, well a Gnome. Except he spent most of the time with major buff psionics running so he probably could have carried a small car.
habnabitmkiii : Hahah.
Bryce : Space Gnome decided to check to see if there was anything in the back of the shop. He found 2 lightsabers, including one that "looked like it had a purple blade, and said 'Mace Windu' on the side, and when you turn it on, a voice says in your head, 'I am mace windu and I have the force in me.'"
"I have a lightsaber with the Force _in_ it?"
"Yeah."
He also found three of the best blaster in the rules, but (I speculate that this is not a coincidence) after I made some comment to the effect that a space parrot probably couldn't hold a machine gun type thing, there was this monkey there.
Somehow, it was a sentient, talking monkey, and then the third blaster was sized for the monkey.
habnabitmkiii : Haha.
Bryce : Sensing danger, I used my Puppet Master ability to take over the monkey. There were some resigned complaints from Captain Idiot but he allowed it. With the monkey safely under psionic control, Space Gnome used his Turn and Influence powers to make the monkey "his furry pet".
High numbers were rolled, and thus the monkey was made his furry pet.
(Insert 90's console RPG music here) A monkey joins your party!
/me thinks that this means the GM will be running a PC...
But it turned out that the monkey was pretty passive and just did what Space Gnome told it to do. We got off that planet and while we were travelling Space Gnome made a bunch of imprints with his Create Imprint skill. He imprinted some of my stuff with Haste, so as to enhance my natural parroty speed of 4 meters/turn to 19 meters/turn (zoom!), up to five times a day, and made another one for himself, and one for Space Ninja.
Since we had a store's worth of psipacks, we had more than enough PP to do this, but I don't think Captain Idiot bothered to calculate how much PP any of those imprints would have required to make, much less any temporary mental stat penalties. Of course Space Gnome was awesome and very twinked out, so I don't think it would have been a big deal.
So... we got to the next planet. There was more shopping, I think, and another pointless random encounter maybe - my memory of it is slipping. Then Captain Idiot dropped a bombshell - well, actually, it didn't supprise me or, as far as I know, anyone else.
"Well, I really didn't have anything planned out... so, could you go to New Dramidia? (some other mumbles that imply there will be an adventure there, finally, about 3.5 hours in)"
So, uh, we went there. We got there and were attacked by robots in trench coats, that all looked like Mr. Smith from The Matrix.
Obviously, that triggered our quick kill them before they kill us response.
We did, in two rounds.
habnabitmkiii : How many were there?
Bryce : About 8... plus three psionists and two imperial soldiers.
habnabitmkiii : Ah.
Bryce : We did this on top of a "six story tall plaza", by the way. Just so you can picture the setting.
habnabitmkiii : Which is where you happened to land?
Bryce : No, we landed a short distance away. Space Parrot flew to the top of the "plaza", Space Gnome scaled the walls with his +25 DX, +25 ST, +25 RS Buff of Brokenness, and Space Ninja apparently ascended the tile tower by force of coolness alone... I looked away from the miniature map, and when I looked back, he was somehow up there.
habnabitmkiii : Hahahah.
Bryce : Yeah. I didn't press that issue of how someone ascends a 6 story anything in one turn. Anyway, we made short work of the Smiths. I puppet mastered the psionists and made them attack the smiths; Space Gnome threw some of his ample collection of lightsabers (seriously, he kept accumulating them throughout the game - he must have had like five near the end, one of which seemed to contain Mace Windu's soul and another of which had a "poison blade") at smiths and soldiers and used his telekinesis to decapitate them and get his lightsabers back; and Space Ninja threw some kind of poisoned shuriken or something at one of them. (I think he wasn't paying much attention.)
habnabitmkiii : So how many actions per turn did you get?
Bryce : Me? 19, because I used the Haste imprint Space Gnome gave me. Space Gnome, probably at least that many, and same for Space Ninja. We only used up like half our actions before somehow our turn ended and the bad guys got one turn.
habnabitmkiii : I suppose the GM would be a bit embarrassed if you managed to kill all of his monsters in one turn.
Bryce : Yeah, especially if he had no stats for any of them and could have made them much tougher :)
The bad guys (one of them, it wasn't specified) were declared to have "shot the parrot", but Space Parrot's player character complained that it was a little arbitrary - Space Parrot was, after all, about seven stories vertically and perhaps a dozen meters horizontally away from any of the shooters, and had a hit difficulty of thirty-something. We helped him with the rules for determining to-hit. It was a miss, by a substantial margin, because Captain Idiot gave the smiths very little marksmanship skill and mediocre dexterity.
You'd think that maybe some of the other guys would try shooting us, or maybe even the same guy, since he'd be expected have more than one standard action, but no. It was somehow our turn again, after one of the psionists somehow "breaking free" from my puppet master and then doing nothing with his new freedom.
We finished them off without much effort. Space Gnome did a flip off the side of the building, used his telekinesis to fly past the remaining guys and decapitate them with his lightsaber, and land peacefully. Space Parrot flew down and helped loot the bodies. Space Ninja took the elevator. (Elevator? Was that there before?)
We were joined by a robot that looked like one of the smiths but was supposedly wanting to join an adventuring party. We were skeptical of course but he kinda followed us and we weren't bored enough yet to follow the "The only good NPC is a dead NPC" rule of extreme desperation.
Oh yes, when looted, the smiths were found to be (1) absurdly wealthy and (2) also robots. (?)
habnabitmkiii : Hahaha. So, this is the extent of his imagination?
Bryce : It gets... slightly better.
We saw an advertisment for a quest. There were a lot of signs of it being made up on the spot as well.
"What's the quest for?"
"Um... you have to go there. Uh, you get a paid vaccation and money if you do it." (Paid vacation?)
Because there was little else to do, we went to the advertised office and met a receptionist. She told us that there was this guy, um, Randall, who was, um, trying to conquer New Dramidia. No, the Universe. How? He's a psionist. Well, no, he has an army. Lots of people.
"Where is he?"
"He was last sighted in sector 4." (We assumed he meant in galaxy sector 4, which is very far away from sector 3906, where we were.)
"Sector 4? That's too far away!"
"No, uh, he was last sighted here."
"Here? Right here?"
"No, out where you guys were fighting."
"How'd you know about that?"
"Uh, the police told us. They sent a report."
Somewhere about this time we started getting suspicious of this receptionist, so Space Gnome brought out the usual battery of psionic interrogation techniques. After it was determined that she was a bad guy I used puppet master on her and made her dance while explaining the evil plan.
habnabitmkiii : Hahahahah.
Bryce : The guards (there were guards? yeah!) reacted to this, so we killed them. (bored much?)
The "manager" of the office comes out, saying "What's going on?!?!". So I shot him with this absurdly powerful psionic ability that Captain Idiot had let me get from the psionist's guild (traded them for some psipacks) , killing him in one blast of aetherial energy.
Captain Idiot made no attempt to save this guy, or let him have some kind of resistance, but he did spend several minutes whining about how that guy was actually Randall and that we'd messed up the plot. (Which he was improvising... and we had had no clues at this point that the manager was anything but an ordinary manager, and we certainly did not suspect that he was this Randal l fellow.)
habnabitmkiii : Hahah.
Bryce : Yeah. You'd think that a sensible GM would have just had the manager be a mid-level crony of Randall, and brought in the big boss at a more opportune and dramatic time? But no, that was the Big Cheese himself, who, when looted, produced more of the same. (Money... a wallet, nothing cool. Basically the same thing that every single bad guy had been carrying except for an occasional weapon.)
This was about four hours in and morale was low. Space Ninja's player had wandered off and came back only when he (seemed to) sense some need for him. I started complaining about the wanting quality of Captain Idiot's GMing as tactfully as I could manage to be at the time.
Captain Idiot pouted a bit while I showed Space Ninja's player that you could "make a d20 out of d4s, if you had enough of them."
Space Gnome's player just kinda sat around and sometimes looked at the rules, apparently devising additional ways to end up with 500 Psipoints and stats that were one step away from Yoda.
habnabitmkiii : What kind of stats does Yoda have, then?
Bryce : Good ones, I suppose... assuming he uses Haste and Kinetic Boost buffs before every battle. Which, I think the evidence indicates, he does :)
Anyhow, captain Idiot told us to get into the ship again for the next adventure. Go to planet Numfok. Okaaay... you're the boss. "We decide to go to Numfok!" XP was dolled out again, 100 XP each. That's a lot. We spent some time bringing our characters to a higher plane of awesome, and Space Gnome leveled up into something that apparently coudld get 48 Intelligence. (Average for a human is 6.)
habnabitmkiii : Wow.
Bryce : Yeah.
habnabitmkiii : What kind of psi could he not do?
Bryce : Hmm. There was less and less each time I looked at his character sheet :) I think he didn't have some of the really high level Bright Psionics, e.g. Blazing Electric Death and such.
He had taken three classes, Bright, Empath, and Sage, so he knew some psionics from all of the disciplines at this point.
He read some psionic books and made more imprints. Apparently he was now skilled enough to make higher-level imprints and made Space Ninja and I Invisibility imprints that could be used 10 times a day.
So, uh, it was a long space trip during which nothing much happened. Well, Space Gnome started imprinting parts of the ship with various psionics, and he imprinted his monkey's teeth to do Resiliancy damage directly.
habnabitmkiii : Hahah!
Bryce : Yeah. He debated imprinting its fur to shock people, but decided that it might be a bad idea.
So, we got to Numfok, and landed. "As you open the doors, a bunch of guys in trench coats (trend here?) come on and grab you and take you to a lab."
Bryce : _Hua?_
A chorus of objections. But I'm invisible, remember? I was practicing with my new imprint. He has kinetic boost 25, and they can just grab him? Didn't we see them outside? What about the imprint on the door that zaps people other than the three of us? How did they know there was an invisible hasted parrot?
At this point, two players were up from the table. I tried to explain to him that it was, er, traditional to, you know, use these plastic thingies with numbers on them as part of the game.
Even if they were so awesome as to just be able to do that without rolling any dice, we should at least get to role-play out the encounter.
I was -this- close to just leaving, as I was pretty fed up by this point (five hours of my life I'd like to have back), but I decided - hey, this trench coat lab thing was the most interesting thing that had happened in the whole game. So I sat back down, and withdrew my objections. The others didn't seem to press the issue of how this "just happened" either.
"Okay, fine, so what happens?"
"Yeah, so, where are we?"
Stony silence from Captain Idiot. "No, you made fun of it (?) so it isn't going to happen."
"Okay... well, then, what now?"
"Can we go somewhere else?"
"No. The game's over!"
"So... are we going to pick up here next week?" Asked Space Gnome.
"No! You're all dead!" (Captain Idiot gets up, runs to his room, slams the door. It isn't very loud. He opens it, and slams it again, much harder.)
Then Captain Idiot's uncle chases after him, loudly explaining that this abuse of the house is not allowed. The rest of us wait at the table a few minutes before realizing that he isn't coming back.
So, that was it. We picked up and left. On the way out, comments were made about how the aforementioned little sister of my friend had been a better GM, because we may have ended up absurdly powerful with no actual adventure, but at least it was outrageously funny doing that.
So, anyway, I'm kinda upset about the whole debacle. Thanks for listening.
habnabitmkiii : Ah. No problem, I enjoy listening. Especially these stories about your RPGs.
Bryce : I guess in retrospect some of that stuff that happened was pretty funny, albeit most of it from a "wow, that's really so bad it's funny" kind of way, but trust me I don't rate it as a positive experiance. Plus now Captain Idiot may try to kill me, since I think he blames me for pretty much any game-related social misfortunes.
Right now anyway, I'm pretty irritated with him.
habnabitmkiii : Because of his actions after the game was over?
Bryce : Yeah.
Well, that and his total lack of preparation, general lack of comprehension of reasonable values for weapons and other things in the rules, not having any kind of actual pre-planned plot or background...
But I'd forgive that as just lousy GMing. It's just that he made it personal by acting like it was all our (as people, not characters) fault.
habnabitmkiii : I can understand why he might be irritated with you or the other players, but it still isn't right.
Bryce : Yeah. I was getting fairly upset by the end at all this stuff, and then his blatantly unrealistic GM fiat with the lab thing, but I was ready to sit down and give him one more chance at this.
It was like that he was waiting for us to get to that point, where we all were going to take it in the hope that he had something good (finally) or challenging (for the first time), then he said, "well, no!" and stormed off.
Oh well. I'm curious if he'll show up to the next session of the game I GM. He usually gets over these moods very quickly, but I don't think he realizes that not everyone has a memory of ten hours [like he does].
habnabitmkiii : Hm.
Bryce : The group continues to put up with him. He gets along with most of them somewhat better than he gets along with me. Plus he lives at the house where the game is hosted, so he's kinda a "free" player. And when he's good he adds something to the game. Actually in fairness he's been being pretty good in my game. I even had a brief side-story that featured his character in the last session, which he seemed to enjoy. So, I can hope that these games on tuesdays have been anomalies.
habnabitmkiii : Why is it that you've had player GMs the last few times, though?
Bryce : Hmm. Well, my friend Casey (Space Gnome tonight. Actually, he's always a Space Gnome because he's firmly convinced that they are the fount of awesome, but that's another issue) was GMing on tuesday, you'll recall, until the total party kill ended his campaign. (Oh, I rue the day that my character Elfy stole CJ's money and thus set off the chain reaction that led eventually to this session tonight) Then his cousin Dylan was going to GM, but he backed out at the last minute after describing this cool campaign that we got fairly psyched up about.
So, we had a one-off session where we just did player-vs-player combat (which ended up being TOTALLY dominated by hasted psionists) and we alternated GMing. (There really wasn't much to do, just roll dice and make rulings about disagreements.) Someone (I don't truthfully remember who, it may have been Casey) suggested that everyone should have a chance to GM.
And thus somehow we decided that indeed, everyone should get a chance to GM. Since the saturday game was alive and well, and we didn't want to mess with the campaign there, whereas the tuesday game was kinda dead at the moment, we are now having a different person GM.
So far the longest one of these "campaigns" has lasted has been 3 sessions...
I'm waiting for Captain Idiot's cousin's turn though. He has an active imagination.
habnabitmkiii : Hm.
Bryce : Sigh. Well, I guess if nothing else this is serving to illustrate who should not take over as GM when I go up to university next year.
habnabitmkiii : Hah, yeah. I'm going to bed. 'night.
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