Go to Hell, Part 2
Guys… It’s 2:49 am
Post Gen Con afterparty.
I will get the blog up….
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OK! Sorry for the delay. If our pals in The Anti-Party have wound up in Hell, I think I just got back from Gaming Nirvana.
Anywhoodles, there can be little doubt that Assassin turned out to be a poor match for his imminently-former party. It’s not the worst breakup I’ve ever seen though. You already know about that sordid episode. I don’t think I ever told my tale of in-game offenses though.
Is it time for another tale from the table? Does a fetchling assassin brood in in the Shadow Corner?
So no shit, there we were. I was in my early 20s, and the night snow in Cheyenne was coming down like a breath weapon. I should have gone home before the storm hit, but my hosts were kind enough to fix me up a place on the couch. (In retrospect, I suspect that only one of my hosts was kind.)
We decided to game on.
It was already late when the dice started rolling. It was some rules-light homebrew horror system. The shtick was that you play yourselves in your location right now. The minimal role distance is designed to ratchet up the tension, meaning you’ve got the resources you know about IRL to draw upon, and local landmarks in your town might become haunted. I made a number of poor decisions that night, but this was the first. Ahem:
“Hey Cool Gamer, you had a session with a new therapist today, right? The one on base? Cool.”
And so I had my McGuffin. Horrible monsters began to spawn into existence at random. This only happened when Cool Gamer said anything vaguely monster-related. I’d decided that, as an airforce guy, the military had experimented on him in this alternate-reality horror Cheyenne. Something had been unlocked in his mind, and he could conjure damn near anything into reality.
(On the off chance that you’re reading this, buddy: That was a dick move. I still regret using IRL trauma as grist for a horror game, even if I still think the premise was kind of cool.)
“What the hell was that noise?” said Asshole Gamer. His PC self got up to check the door. The snow was thick though. He couldn’t see anything.
“What if it’s zombies?” said Cool Gamer. We’d just been playing Left 4 Dead couch co-op. And as he made the suggestion, his PC-self’s superpowers made it zombies.
There was a combat.
“What if there’s a tank?” said Cool Gamer.
Suddenly there was a tank.
It went on like this for a while. They went to the armory on the local base. Fought waves of the undead. And after several hours of this business, they finally realized what was going on.
“The snow is letting up,” said Asshole Gamer.
The snow did not let up.
“The snow is letting up,” said Cool Gamer.
It did.
“I shoot Cool Gamer in the back of the head,” said Asshole Gamer. They hadn’t investigated the medical records or found the antidote. They just spontaneously decided to PK their roommate and supposed best friend.
I made my second mistake of the evening, describing how Asshole Gamer’s PC self was court-martialed, thrown into prison, and had a grossly-explicit Bad Time there.
(On the off chance that you’re reading this, buddy: That was a dick move on my part. You’re still an Asshole Gamer though.)
The game ended with bad feelings all around.
“The snow’s letting up,” I said.
It wasn’t. But I walked home in the storm anyway.
The lesson is simple: Don’t punish bad behavior in-game. Talk that shit through out of game. Break character long enough to be an adult.
If you’d like to confess any similar sins, feel free to tell your tale in the comments for today’s discussion. Promise to do better, and I shall forgive you your transgressions.
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Get some sleep, Claire!
Also, what’s Oracle holding/threatening Assassin with?
Looks like a stall stalagmite to me.
*small*
“Stalagmite”
You can remember it’s called a “smalagmite” because it’s small
I live! Will post pics from Gen Con on the Handbook Twitter / Facebook soon. 🙂
Yeah, that’ll happen when you drop your mates in the cackey. :-/
I don’t think it’ll do the Anti-Party any good to do that in the Lower Planes, mind you…
Sleep well, Claire!
Well it’ll be cathartic at least.
And so Assassin learns the consequences for not getting out of dodge before people find out about the little city well thing…
Did someone say…?
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kvS6zMThiZU/sddefault.jpg
Huh. Who knew Sorcerer was actually a Saiyan all along?
Of course. The verbal component to fireball, after all, is KAMI HAMI HA!!!
I’m certain Kineticist will have OPINIONS about this.
Yeah, like “OMG that is so cool! Wanna cosplay together?”
lol. Since Laurel figured out she’s a fangirl Kineticist has lowkey become one of my favorites. 😀
“What do you mean I have to face the consequences of my actions?! I’m a player character!”
-Every antagonistic D&D player.
Get some sleep, Claire.
Well at least one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/consequences
This is a case where it really depends what sort of Hell it is. In the standard plane of Hell as found in ye old Planes Manual, this sort of cut throat, murderous action could be seen as cause for new devil recruitment! …they can only be minor devils per Hell politics standard clauses until they betray their new underboss in a way that looks good to higher ranked devils.
Or maybe we’re just in Assassin’s personal Hell and everyone else is trapped in the Hell where Assassin has been made a devil and they his ‘play things.’ Pick your Handbook, player…!
I have one, and I’m still sorry about it even though it was a temporary thing. The setting featured overcharged magic that gave hidden, secondary effects to spells. In this case, a heal was cast, and the princess grew toughened skin. It was a temporary effect, but the damage was done and the game cratered because the player wanted to be pretty and this messed with their character image.
Lesson learned: Players are very sensitive about how their character looks. Mess with that at your peril.
You remember that time Laurel’s fashionista elf got reincarnated as a dwarf? Yeah. Same deal.
In high school, I had one player who wanted to try out playing Evil for a while but didn’t want to wreck the whole campaign or derail his primary character’s arc. After some pondering, I introduced a Mirror of Oppostion and, through complicated plot shenanigans I can no longer recall, his character’s doppleganger became first a werewolf and then a vampire.
That, in and of itself, was not the issue. We ran the adventures/depredations as a separate, parallel campaign in the same world.
The problem was that as a DM, I got bored with the whole “grimdark” setting before my chief player did. My solution: have some heroic NPCs kill off the evil character for good.
(As you’ve said, dick move. I woulda/shoulda/coulda talked it out with him instead and maybe persuaded him to put that campaign on the back burner for a while.
I think we overvalue surprise in this hobby. Communicating what is happening in our heads to the rest of the table is a part of the game we rarely talk about. Seems like it ought to be more central though.
Not that it matters because homebrew lore, but I wouldn’t be my (nonexistent) glasses-adjusting pedantic self if I didn’t point out that the lower planes in D&D generally don’t work that way.
Firstly, mortal souls that go to the lower planes via dying wash up from the Styx as a “Soul larva”: A person-sized slug with the face of the person they were in life.
Secondly washing up from the Styx wipes all your memories.
Thirdly, larvae that wash up in Hell would immediately be processed in Lemures to start their climb up the Infernal hierarchy. If you want the more Christian “You were a bad person so fiends will torture you for eternity” afterlife, that’s not D&D Hell, but rather Carceri.
Fourthly, you go to the afterlife that matches your alignment. Unless they’re all LE (With that capitalization of both alignment letters) or under an Infernal contract they’d probably end up all over the afterlife.
Handbook-World has its own unique afterlife system. Its inner workings can best be summarized as, “If it serves the gag, it’s true.”
Regarding your 4th point: perhaps for their “complicity” is Assassin’s misdeeds they have all been condemned to an alignment shift?
D&D alignment is a snapshot of your moral outlook, not a cosmic scorecard.
Yeah, and the snapshot was “in their final days, they helped poison a town’s well”. 😛
I actually really like this idea–the idea that because the same act damned them, they share the same afterlife. It makes sense.
Anyways, in D&D, Oracle doesn’t even exist. I don’t think typical Forgotten Realms cosmology applies.
I’m discussing vanilla D&D lore. It happens to overlap with the Realms, but it isn’t specific to the Realms. Please don’t inflate the importance of that terrible setting.
It exists. It’s a Sorcerer subclass. “Divine Soul Sorcerer”.
D&D alignment is moderated by a DM, and telling a transgressing player to “change the alignment on your character sheet to Evil” is a fairly standard reaction to crossing a (often poorly-communicated) line.
I’d probably modify that, “Would you like to modify your alignment?” at my table.
Then have a discussion, making sure to listen to the player’s side first. Don’t moderate. Collaborate!
Like many people, I’ve made the mistake of punishing characters for their players’ behaviour before, though admittedly I did it more often as a regular player than a GM. In one game, the party sorcerer was being disruptive by stealing from her fellow PCs, but instead of asking the player to cut it out, I had my wizard hit her with a Shocking Grasp when she tried to touch them. Later in that game, I felt the party fighter was hogging all the useful items, so when he tried to claim an energy-protection amulet when he already had a similar one and my wizard didn’t, my response was to blast the item with magic to ensure neither of us got it. Both times were petty and stupid and just hurt feelings, and I very much regret them.
In happier news, I did manage to prevent such an incident a few years back: When a Discord friend asked the server for help killing off a problem player’s character, I said it’d be better to talk it out if they could, and if that player couldn’t be reasoned with, just stop playing with them. While I can’t undo the times I’ve done it in the past, I can help keep other people making the same mistake.
Thus do we learn from our mistakes. Thus do we grow. Good on ya. 🙂