I used to be the Head Storyteller for a Vampire LARP in Albuquerque. In that game, I had a player named Joe. He was smart, clever, and far more mature than most of the other players. You could count on him to take a leadership role when you need it it, and he was happy to play supporting role when it was someone else's time in the spot light. 99% of the time, Joe was an incredible asset to your game.This is a tale about the other 1%.
Like I said, Joe was smart. Too smart. I sometimes didn't get his obscure references, and I'm a fairly history-savvy guy. For example, I'm terribly embarassed just how long it took me to notice that his elder vampire was named Martell - I bet Rob and Gilbert noticed it the first time he was introduced in-character.
But I feel no shame in not catching his Edison set up. The game was set in Albuquerque in the 1800's. Joe arranged for his character to have just moved there (in 1850) from some place in Florida. His assets included two allies - a young engineer and hobbyist inventor back in Florida, and the vampiric Prince of the city that engineer lives in. Not knowing Edisons early career, I just assumed he'd always been from Menlo Park, New Jersey - and thus, I had no clue he'd started out in Florida.
As the game moved through the years, it deviated further and further from established history and the default white-wolf setting. Joe's faction (known as House Iron Horse, as they were rail barons) became positively intertwined with a group of NPCs called Titan Industries. The heads of Titan were european werewolves, using the transcontinental railroad to dominate the chi of the new world and win an age-old war with the native american werecreatures. Titan was intended as a foil, a dangerous obstacle. Joe (and Mike aka Doom) had done a great job of turning that around - they allied with Titan and were reaping all sorts of benefits. This made me very happy, and kept strengthening that connection. We also started pushing the steampunk and technomancy elements of Titan, including one memorable scene with a were wearing cyberware.
Then out of the blue, Joe pulls this deft maneuver that results in his old engineer ally being ghouled by his old Prince ally, and sent to Albuquerque as a birthday present. We'd already said yes to it about a week before Joe pointed out (to one of my narrators) that this Engineer was clearly Thomas Edison. Via email that week, Joe basically laid out that he was going to blood-bond Edison, loan him out to Titan, and become the richest most powerful man in America. He'd been laying the groundwork for this for over 6 months out of character, which included about 15 or 20 years of in-character time.
That munchkinny 1% of him that really wanted to win the game had somehow metastatized and spread throughout my campaign like a cancer. Funny thing is, I would have been okay with the Edison Gambit, if he'd just been honest with me. I would have downplayed Titan a bit, and given him Edison Labs instead. I would have let him be bigger than Rockefeller. We'd already let player action grow Albuquerque to rival New York - and we were still in the 1800's. This was an epic tale, and I was prepared to give players what they wanted as long as they worked for it and were being honest with me.
Long story short, he tells Titan that Edison is on his way. The were-CEO replies "This is not good. My cousin Nicolli is also moving here next week. He and Edison had a falling out a few years ago, and they tend to fight." I had people guest-star as Tesla and Edison for a session or two, constantly arguing. Rob did a killer job playing up Edison's well documented bigotry. Joe didn't figure out a solution to the conflict fast enough, and so eventually we ran a story time as follows:
Edison sits in his lab, working on some project.
Tesla knocks on the door. Edison ignores him.
Tesla pounds furiously. Edison just smiles and hums.
Tesla kicks in the door, and stomps in. Edison says "That wasn't smart - my floor is electrified" and flips a switch.
Tesla jumps, slumps, twitches, jumps again, then turns into a giant werecritter and bites Edison's head off.
End of story.
I penalized Joe's XP pretty harshly at the end of that storyarc - 1/4th to 1/6th what the other members of his faction got. I felt a little bad, but I needed to make sure the point got driven home. He never tried to pull the wool over my eyes again.
Moral of the story - just be honest with your GM. Tricks and duplicity never help.
Secondary Moral - I'm a mean and clever S.O.B. when I'm provoked.
7 comments:
On a completely different tack, I once got myself out of a sticky campaign through a cheap trick.
When I was in high school, I took turns DMing a game with several friends, and while the other DM usually built "sneak into the castle/dungeon and explore" adventures, I plagiarized movie plots for mine. We played through a D&D version of TALES FROM THE CRYPT DEMON KNIGHT and a few others. In this particular adventure, my players had gone off my rails and gotten themselves into some situation whose resolution none of us could conceive.
Earlier on, in a fit of whimsey, I'd rewarded a player exploring a vault with "boots of no shit," which I originally intended as boots who act toward feces the way magnets of the same polarity do. I pictured the PC walking along, poop squirting away from him. Instead, I managed to explain to the players that these boots were actually designed for teleportation. The wearer just taps his heels together three times and says... well, you get it. When one learns their function, one says, "no shit?" Ha ha.
Incidentally, I continued stealing movie plots or concepts for gaming all through college. My most memorable Star Wars RPG adventure involved our players crash landing on an isolated ice planet and finding the remnants of a ship from WH40K Space Hulk. Great fun was had as rooms full of Tyranids were breached, and booby-trapped Imperium technology was wrestled with.
How come we never role-played?
I think you and I really became friends (rather than just work-friends) after I had gone away to college, and thus never had the opportunity.
Well, perhaps if you need an artificial intelligence to be in one of your campaigns sometime, we could use SKYPE to teleconference me in.
Hmm... be careful what you wish for.
Now I'm gonna have to go google SKYPE.
Heh, I have a webcam too, so I could do both audio and video. Plus, since I'm two hours ahead of you, chances are my available time (which skews toward later evening) will overlap better with your gaming time than if we were in the same timezone.
Hmm... there's possibility there. Probably not with my current campaign, since it's pretty entrenched, but we may have potential down the road some time.
I left a couple of really good players back in Albuquerque, too. Perhaps a telecommute solution is in order.
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