The Worst Game I've Ever Been In

[pyat]

So, what was the worst RPG you've ever played in?

I have given this question some thought. I discounted some of the games I played in my early teens. They were definitely bad, sure. The gamemasters were unfamiliar with the rules, often poorly prepared (if at all), and curiously vengeful. The player groups were often dysfunctional. But, as I say, I discount pretty much anything before the age of 14 or 15 as more than a sort of formalized game of cops and robbers. The arguments were, in some sense, part of the social activity of gaming.

Friends have heard me speak more than a few times of a particular GM we had through late high-school and most of university. He was a rather misanthropic and angry fellow who looked scornfully at me because I didn't know what a Teddy Boy was. He ran Mage without once explaining the setting to us, trusting us to pick it up by osmosis. We ran through a lot of characters, because he did not believe in staying his hand when it came to PC death. However, I must admit that he fully understood the rules, and had arcanely plotted adventures, and always had something for us to do, even if it mostly involved sitting about and waiting for something to explode in our faces. We went BACK to his table for more, every week.

No, I fear the worst game I've been in was much more recent than that. It was run by a GM with a great enthusiasm for the setting and the game, yet who was curiously unsuited to run it. It was sort of like being invited to the home of a man who loves classic cars, to listen to him talk knowledgeably about car specs and the joys of driving a car, only to find out that he doesn't have a license. All he does is play racing games on his computer.

It was a game of Trinity, and RPG where players take on the role of psychic warriors defending humanity against various threats. Chief amongst these threats are the “Aberrants.” As far as I understood the setting, these were sort of transcended human/terrible amoral monster types, who emerged a few generations before and ended up in a war with mankind. Cthulhian super villains, you might say. That was the vibe I got.


I was running a member of the Legion, an order of psychokinetic soldiers. My wife was a member of the Æsculapian Order, mental healers. wggthegnoll was running a shape-shifting infiltrator. sassy_fae was playing a psychic with the power to control electricity. Finally, danaeris (OW) joined the game after our first adventure, as a telepathic inquisitor. A well-rounded group, one would think, ready to run through any challenge.

First session began with us being summoned to HQ, which was some kind of tower in the Caribbean. Our patron informed us that an aquatic Aberrant, some kind of shark-man-thing, was lurking in the area. We were assigned a submersible and sent to destroy the creature. After a little searching, we were attacked by the creature. Dice were rolled. The pilot (which may have been my character, I'm not sure) lined up for a shot.

“We fire a torpedo!” we said.
“You don't have any,” the GM replied.
“What sort of underwater guns do we have?” we asked. The GM smirked.
“You don't have any. You didn't ask for any,” he replied.
“They sent us out to hunt for a terrorist with superpowers, and they didn't arm our sub?” I asked.
“Nope! You didn't ask!” the GM said.

“Can we call for backup?”someone wondered. This sparked an explanation of how, in the future, radio wavelengths were so full that it was incredibly expensive to broadcast, and so... no, the submarine didn't have any means of communication. When pressed, he allowed us to have an emergency beacon that sent out an automated distress call.

So, Sharkman starts chewing up the sub. Various plans for electrifying the surface of the sub are put forward. This is when the GM informs us that we have no scuba gear, so we can't get out the sub. We didn't ask for any scuba gear, you see. So, we fled to the surface and waited for rescue.

In between sessions, we made up a list of things to ask for, and made sure the sub was armed. The second confrontation was terribly anticlimactic. I believe we just launched torpedoes at the creature's lair, and that was it.

Third session, danaeris joined the group. We started on a new adventure, this one clearly more involved than the previous “Shark Hunt” one. The GM had every supplement book, and had a clear encyclopedic knowledge of the setting. We were going to the Moon! I had high hopes for this adventure, imagining laser battles in spacesuits, or psychic duels, or general “Moon is a Harsh Mistress” sort of stuff. The premise was interesting enough and the GM was enthused. The first lesson I'd learned about gaming was that an enthusiastic GM can make otherwise humdrum games exciting. I was to find out that this GM was the exception.

Aberrants had attacked a Moonbase, slaughtering the inhabitants. Around the same time, a sort of “moon slum” had collapsed, killing thousands of people. Eyewitnesses reported seeing an Aberrant on the scene, and had seen him head toward a sort of research lab/hospital nearby. The lab was blamed for the accident, but no charges were immediately laid. We were hurried to the Moon to find out more, and determine if the Aberrants were still around. A nice combination of detective work and combat, I hoped.

What we actually got was one long ride on the Moon Bus.

We arrived and asked, first, to investigate the scene of the attack. The GM declared that we didn't have enough clout to get a police shuttle, so we rode the monorail halfway across the face of the Moon. Essentially, the GM was giving us a guided tour though the sourcebook. “You leave Moon Station One and get on the Darkside Express, switching over to another monorail at Serenity Station...” At each stop he'd give a capsule description of the settlement, but did not offer any opportunity for interaction. Finally, we reached the end of the line, where he realized the moon rail didn't reach the outpost in question. So... we were given a government shuttle anyway, and flew there. And we were allowed to keep it, and fly back. So I guess we did have enough clout.

The investigation pointed to the director of the hospital as knowing more. If I recall correctly, the clues were pointing to him as the perpetrator of the attack and disaster. From a gamist perspective, I was pretty sure he was a red herring, but also pretty sure that he would know more. We'd found out things like, poor people from the wrecked area were going to the hospital for treatment, and disappearing mysteriously. So, we went to the hospital, and asked to see the director.

We spent two full sessions in a waiting room. No, really. We roleplayed sitting in a waiting room, trying to get around an intractable secretary. It got to the point where I was no longer roleplaying the frustration my character was feeling. I said, in character and out of character, that the secretaries and security staff were clearly delaying us while the director made his getaway. Every approach we tried was stymied. Diplomacy, intimidation, telepathic probes, threatening with arrest, showing off our search warrant, etc., all were met with, “You can't see him yet.” Worse, that message was often coming from the GM, and not merely his NPCs.

I was also told in plain terms that, no, we were not intended to muscle our way in, and that would be “bad.” I personally was rooting for a gun fight or a smash and grab, or something. We were supposed to be members of an elite and well-known and feared agency. We weren't undercover. We were in uniforms with some kind of identifying tattoos and so on, and it was public knowledge that Aberrants had attacked. To my mind, it was as though a group of FBI agent showed up at a business owned by the Bin Laden family, two days after 9-11, with an arrest warrant, and were refused entrance by the parking attendant. Can you imagine that ending without a SWAT team surrounding the block and kicking in several doors? Yet, when I started asking about “calling for back up” or breaking in, the GM refused to consider these options. I want to make that clear – I tried to do these things, and the GM declined to interact with me.

wggthegnoll, whose sole power was the ability to change his appearance, and whose primary skills were infiltration and espionage, decided early on to try and sneak into the building in the guise of a doctor or employee. The GM flatly refused this plan. As in, refused to accept the action at all. Not, “Roll for it, it'll be really tough!” Not, “There are armed guards following you everywhere, you don't have the chance to try.” Not even the pretense of a logical refusal, like, “No, they have brainwave scanners that will detect your true identity.” Just a flat, out-of-game refusal. wggthegnoll did not return after that session.

During the second session, we realized what the GM wanted us to do. He wanted us to hack into the hospital computer and find more clues before proceeding. Which we did. We hacked into a public terminal in the waiting room. After several computer skill rolls, we found clues that supported our original plan of taking the hospital director into custody for questioning.

At that point, magically, we were allowed to see the director. It was a sort of scripted event. It couldn't happen before that, you see.

The director, of course, had left. He'd just got on a spaceship to Mars. And hey, that backup I'd called for in the previous session? A police taskforce suddenly showed up to secure the hospital.

You know what it was like? It was like playing a Sierra Software adventure game from 1986. You're walking down a path and come across a rock. But you can't climb the rock, or destroy the rock with dynamite, or cut through the trees to get around the rock. You need to find a specific tree branch five screens back to lever the rock off the path, or your little computer-self will just stand there and starve to death. Or, “Oops! You went off to slay the dragon without making sure the sword was checked and equipped in your inventory! You moron! You die automatically!”

...

Actually, thinking more about the guy who was our GM, that comparison could account for a lot of things.

Soon, I'll write about the best game I've ever been in.

Comments

[zenten.livejournal.com]

I was playing whatever tradition it was that becomes the cult of X. My character started out the game chained to a wall in a prison. I had heard a fight outside, but I couldn't actually see or do anything. So I bashed my head against the wall to enter into an altered state of consciousness as my focus. I said this is why I was doing it. The ST let me do that for a few minutes, had me take some bashing damage, and then told me that it wouldn't work because it wasn't a valid focus.

That's all my character was able to do the whole session. I didn't go to a second one.