Notable Gaming Experiences: The Gospel According to CobiWann's DM

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Notable Gaming Experiences: The Gospel According to CobiWann's DM

Etherwind: Apr 22, 2008; Can't post for 77 days!; Soiled Meat

I'd like to stress this qualifies as a worst experience for the GM, who was trying to run a serious, terrifying game until Donnie got hold of the plot and headbutted it into submission.

Etherwind posted:

I'll try to remember it in full. It's a worst experience, so it fits in here.

A friend of mine, one of my regular players, borrowed my Call of Cthulhu material and decided he was going to run a game at the gaming society we both attend. This was a bad idea for a couple of reasons, the first being that it's hard to do evocative horror when you have a busy, happy background going on around you (unless you're specifically playing up the social alienation angle). The second, and more important, reason it was a bad idea was because he invited Donnie to play.

Donnie is a good guy. I ran a Blue Rose campaign, he played in it, and it was great fun for all involved. However, Donnie is not a subtle guy, and he's not the sort of guy who can experience horror or exercise fearful judgement when it's required. As evidence toward this, when the group was rolling up reasonable, urbane, ordinary Call of Cthulhu characters, he decided to make a doctor.

With maximum ranks in the "headbutt" skill. More points in "headbutt" than he had in "medicine", and his character was a doctor. My friend convinced him to at least make his "medicine" skill equal to "headbutt", and the game proceeded on track.

You know the old saying, "Give a man a hammer, and everything looks like a nail?" Well, when you turn a man into a hammer, the same thing is true. Donnie tried to headbutt everything even vaguely problematic. It started with a door that wouldn't open, escalated to an ATM (which he scored a critical success against, and landed some free cash) and climaxed with him headbutting a skeleton after stumbling out-

Let's wind it back a bit. During the course of the adventure, when they started encountering horrific skeletons that stalked their every move during the night, the party decided to tool up on weaponry. They visited a mall, broke in, and decided to ransack some of the shops to acquire weapons. Someone got a fire axe from a hardware store. Most got guns from a gun store. Donnie, since he liked fireworks, decided to drive to the local mining supply depot while this was happening, and after headbutting his way into a badly locked supply shack he made off with a backpack full of dynamite.

Eventually they tracked the skeletons down to an old well in the back garden of a manor house, and after a bit of research discovered that it had a cursed stone in at the bottom. Being pro-active, Donnie suggested they lower him into the well with a flashlight and his dynamite, and he'd rig it to blow. It sounded plausible, so they lowered him down with the flashlight and a pistol, and waited until he was in place.

Messing around in the thick mud at the bottom, his flashlight soon failed. Not alarmed, Donnie started feeling around to find the cursed stone, and was in the process of feeling its edges when the cursed blood he was sloshing around in began to form into yet more skeletons, as it was so dark down there it might as well be night. A skeleton grabbed the rope and pulled it down, and then began wrestling with him, dragging him into the mud.

Donnie let out a shout. Up at the top of the well, the rest of the party thought he was asking for the dynamite, and tossed it down. Desperately, Donnie began to headbutt the dynamite, hoping to set it off before the skeleton flayed him alive. Cue the following exchange:

"He's taking a long time down there."
"Can you see what's going on?"
"No, my flashlight isn't working."
"Give me those matches."

The player fumbled and dropped the match, and Donnie simultaneously landed a critical hit with his headbutt.

A massive explosion blew the well to smithereens. Rolling on the resistance table, Donnie survived the initial explosion, was thrown several blocks away, and crashed into some lady's house, breaking his legs. Understandably panicked, the lady called an ambulance, and five minutes later it turned up. At this point Donnie regained consciousness, and rather than be taken to hospital, he held the ambulance crew up with his pistol and stole the ambulance.

Meanwhile, a horrible, rapidly decaying, muddy skeleton made from blood and charred, broken stone clawed its way out of the well in the shadow of the (now wrecked) house and began to advance on the party. Cue a massive combat that grew rapidly more tense, until it was interrupted by the sound of...

Sirens? The ambulance crashed through the fence, ran over the skeleton and screeched to a halt. Donnie, his legs broken, staggered out of the ambulance and fell to the ground, right beside the pinned monster. It proceeded to try and grab him, and he responded the only way he knew how.

With a headbutt.

Edit: and remember, it's Doctor McHeadbutt. He worked long and hard for that PhD in Aggressive Phrenology.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2012 07:22

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 13:36

Etherwind: Apr 22, 2008; Can't post for 77 days!; Soiled Meat

http://wod.wikia.com/wiki/Hunchback:_The_Lurching

Yes, that is a thing.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2012 00:55

Etherwind: Apr 22, 2008; Can't post for 77 days!; Soiled Meat

I've had a problem recently; a character in a long-term game I am running was being a bit of a demanding rear end in a top hat, but was driving the plot forward and generally being entertaining as all hell. The player? Really nice guy, very much interested in making the group function well, and an all-around great role-player.

Turns out that most of the other players really didn't like the way his character was interacting with theirs. I only found out because I happened to ask about it as an afterthought, subsequent to dealing with problems with one of the other players. So I took him aside and have to asked him to tone it down, and he was mortified, outright offering to retire the character and make a new one, and I had to reassure him that it was okay, he only needed to wind it in a bit.

The thing? He's the best player in the group, bar none, and I honestly think the other players are being extremely thin-skinned about the way his character was acting. It's not like he was on a rampage or randomly loving with the party for fun, either: the extent of it was stuff like "His character was really pushy when asking mine for some cash" and "He's a bit quick on the trigger finger when we're being chased by demon-possessed people."

It's a World of Darkness game, and his character is playing to the Faustian archetype of "Make a deal with the devil to further your goals" mixed with the whole "Stare long into the abyss" clich�. Doing it drat well, too. I really feel and felt that the other players are and were in the wrong, but I've bit my tongue, asked him to tone it down, and things are back on track.

Moral of the story? It's the group consensus that matters, and nothing else.

Etherwind fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Feb 12, 2012

# ¿ Feb 12, 2012 23:41

Etherwind: Apr 22, 2008; Can't post for 77 days!; Soiled Meat

Exactly.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2012 23:50

Etherwind: Apr 22, 2008; Can't post for 77 days!; Soiled Meat

When that poo poo happens it is almost always the fault of the person running it.

It's also the single strongest argument for power parity among player characters. I just had someone join a Vampire: the Requiem game I'm running, and he jumped straight in at about the same XP as the other characters (he's holding back a little until he figures out where he wants the character to go). I can't imagine he'd be having half as much fun as a starting character, XP wise.

Seriously, the LARP model of "Start at lower XP and earn your fun and right to participate in the plot in a meaningful way," is the single stupidest thing in the hobby, and it's almost always there to provide an ego boost to senior members.

</rant>

# ¿ Mar 3, 2012 23:44

Etherwind: Apr 22, 2008; Can't post for 77 days!; Soiled Meat

Not going to lie, every time I hear "Hackmaster does X this way..." I always feel like rolling my eyes. It's one of those games which seems to take the approach that everything must be modelled to be true for the game world; it ties role-play and settings considerations to hard mechanics, often unnecessarily. It's not the only game to do it, sure. I have a personal dislike for those sorts of games where players will be told "In order to be this in the setting, you must spend resources (XP or whatever) acquiring this character trait," regardless of whether that trait will actually be mechanically useful to the character. The recent L5R 4th Edition has started doing this sort of stuff in a loving terrible way (Ronin suck mechanically... because they have lovely lives in the setting. Want to play a badass Ronin? You're outshone by just about anyone from a Great Clan unless you're higher XP than them). At least Hackmaster has the excuse of being mostly one big joke.

On that topic, here's a notable experience: a new group of players to my society got stuck with a new GM, and he ran an everything as written game of Hackmaster for them that went on for about a year. They had to roll for everything, ever. His rail-roading reached noteworthy heights when he actually narrated what each character was thinking as they approached a particular city, literally reading off a sheet.

They stuck with it for a year until some of us in the other groups realised what they were subjected to and staged an intervention. Those poor, poor girls.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2012 08:46

Etherwind: Apr 22, 2008; Can't post for 77 days!; Soiled Meat

Not long enough that you couldn't fit it all in a single post, though.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2012 03:35

Etherwind: Apr 22, 2008; Can't post for 77 days!; Soiled Meat

Either this Tuesday or next I'll be running a new campaign, Legend of the Five Rings. If it's any good I may write it up.

In other news, Donnie, the man responsible for Dr. McHeadbutt, has shown back up and is in another group I know. I actually turned him down for a game of Everyone is John last Tuesday because I had too many players (he figured he'd gamed with me before and it'd be better if I took people who were new to the society).

I believe he's playing Scion, though I could be wrong. Should I hear of the saga of Headb�tersson, Son of Thor, I will be sure to pass it along.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2012 07:44

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 13:36

Etherwind: Apr 22, 2008; Can't post for 77 days!; Soiled Meat

Chaltab posted:

Also, all this is cover for the real plan, which is to get a decent sized chunk of Alderaan, fit it with some hyperdrives, and steer it right into the path of the DSII.

This is great.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2012 15:51

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