MOCking one's self

"Ears" Petrov was the CP2020 character of mine that Jeremy mentioned at his blog. To Quote Jeremy:

"Rolfe's character has less social skills than the fence, no real combat skills to speak of, and didn't otherwise stand out in the crowd."

The following will be as painful to write as that was to read, but I'm pretty sure it will be cathartic.

My concept was actually quite the opposite of how it played out. His back story was that "Ears" Petrov was the guitarist of a band called "Eyes, Ears, Nose and Throat," which had a number one hit as recently as a year ago and then broke up suddenly when the lead singer went cyberpsycho and killed the drummer. He had failed to invest in his brief flash-in-the-pan, and was now slumming it while trying to figure out how to make a name for himself again. The other band members had been the ones with ambition - he had oodles of talent but no taste for marketing.

This could be seen as an obvious parallel to my situation in regards to the gaming industry - I'd been a bit of a force for the last six months to a year before Wargames West Distribution suddenly went out of business (due to emotional complexities on the part of owner), and then I vanished completely. My work was emulated (and in at least one case plagiarized) by other Distributors, but my name was no longer associated with it. Despite having been really good at marketing games, I was a total flop at marketing my own talents once that Industry Giant fell off it's beanstalk.

The dice then conspired with Rob and Sarah to completely hammer this metaphor home.

My character, Ears Petrov, was intended to be the face man, since no one else had any such desire during the big character-creation session. I was a Rockerboy with totals of (attribute + skill) of 16 to 18 on Charismatic Leadership, Wardrobe & Style, Social, Perform, and Human Perception. I could solve most difficult tasks in that niche by rolling a 3.

Sarah, as GM, felt it was important Charismatic Leadership (exclusive to Rockerboyz) not replace skills such as Leadership, Oratory, or Streetwise. Sadly, she told me this several sessions after character creation. I ended up rolling Charismatic Leadership once in the entire campaign. She also favored Persuasion / Fast Talk over Social, and favored rolls of Personal Grooming over Wardrobe & Style. This all cut into my character's effectiveness. Sarah had yet to establish her style as a GM, and her self-confidence was lacking, as such I wouldn't question her judgment or rules calls, not even in private.

Rob, missing the first session and character creation, asked what roles we had, and then built a fixer. Having never played cyberpunk before, I thought fixer was some sort of techie, so I didn't speak up about already being the faceman. Via cyberware and a more efficient distribution of points (stemming from years more experience at CP2020 in high-school campaigns where point-weaseling was encouraged) had totals of over 20 in Human Perception and Persuasion / Fast Talk. To further strip me of my spotlight, every time we both rolled for either of these skills, his die would be a 9 or 10, and I rolled far more than my fair share of 1's.

Despite the fact that I'd known and gamed with Rob for 5 years and never known him to be at all dishonest, I started getting irrationally paranoid. Eventually I started asking Sarah after sessions "did you see any of his dice rolls tonight, or just hear totals after modifiers?" which didn't help the situation at all. My being so accusatory of her high-school chum was rude, even if it was behind the scenes. I was pissing off my wife and GM, by repeatedly making an ass of myself out of jealousy over Rob's dice karma. Sorry. Had I just asked to revise my character to match the skills she found pertinent to social interactions, she probably would have said yes.

I feared the dice, and tried to avoid rolling them. This was doubly true for things my character should have been good at. After about 4 or 5 sessions of that, I was so fed up with it, I just changed my character concept to match my die-rolls. It was easier for me to play a burned-out loser than to get yet another critical failure on a skill I was practically maxed out on. I started cracking jokes about how bad his band was, and how he was nothing now that Eyes and Throat were dead. When Sarah asked me to make some item cards for cool low-value stuff we could find as random loot, I presented her with the card on the right.

I even badgered an NPC to shoot me with my own gun at one point. Everybody was shocked, so since it was my gun I claimed OOC that I knew what I was doing and the math of it guaranteed she couldn't hurt me. This was a lie - a critical hit on a head-shot would have meant a new character and a great tale about fateful last words. Yet despite all this, I really loved that game. I am a truly complicated individual.