Eskrima, RPGs, And Other Things

[citrakayah]

Recently, I’d been part of a party of adventurers in a Dungeons and Dragons game that met every Saturday (though we were moving to Wednesdays and Fridays). Note the past tense.

Last night, I was taken aside and informed that group dynamics were “not working out.” Given that my character was straight-laced chaotic good and over half the part was chaotic/neutral/lawful evil (though I really think the chaotic evil character wasn’t that evil, since he was merely a sociopath who killed evil people), I can buy that. Or maybe I somehow managed to piss everyone else off and not notice it, and no one explicitly told me. And the GM is open to, perhaps later in the year, doing another campaign that I can participate in.

I’ll acknowledge that I was a bit upset due to the fact that I hadn’t noticed any such undercurrents, but I guess that’s the price one pays for being autistic and having few social skills. I’m a lot less elegant offline than online. Would have been nice for them to tell me what it was, though. On the other hand maybe it wasn’t anything specific.

In any event. This does give me more time to participate in things like the Wildlife Society (whose last meeting I missed), eskrima (last few meetings missed in part due to being unable to find the location), and various other things. But still, kind of unfortunate.

Would be nice to join another campaign, whether face-to-face, play-by-post, or IRC.

In other news:

1. My echocardiogram was rather bizarre, at least in terms of my experience, though my heart was apparently normal. Also they won’t send me images of my echocardiogram, which is unfortunate because the video was kind of cool.
2. I started a speculative evolution forum called Saecula Novae because the mod on Speculative Evolution did several things I disagreed with, including but not limited to: closing and deleting threads without formal notice, unevenly enforcing rules, and not creating forums for community projects like promised.
3. Fuck anarchocapitalists. (Trigger warning: Sheer, mindblowing insensitivity to rape, which is used to score political points for a stupid ideology.)

Comments

[yourdeer]

Almost everyone I've played D&D with refuses to run evil-aligned campaigns, simply because sticking to the motives is really hard and it's difficult to keep people acting as a team. Monster campaigns? Yes. Morally-grey campaigns? Yes. Political intrigue? Yes. But straight up "my alignment is evil" has been generally frowned upon as something that makes it way harder for everyone there to actually have fun.

It is hard when one player character is the odd one out, whether or not the player actually is. This has happened with our friend Will, who is very dear to us but always wants to play a Lovecraft-inspired, mentally unstable magic-user. Usually there are no problems with that besides predictability, except when we're trying out new systems or doing one-offs. It made it really hard to GM Mouse Guard, because there is no magic in that world and a zany character in Mouse Guard is likely to get people killed, so I had to improvise a lot to figure out how to allow him to be useful and have fun as part of the group.

[citrakayah]

Indeed. In the campaign, my character was constantly paranoid--acitan view evil as a form of irrational insanity, and the character he was paranoid against had started a fight with a very wimpy cleric and then killed him by making him explode (necrotic cyst). Part of what I hate is when people play evil characters not for interesting roleplaying opportunities, but because they merely wish for more powerful characters who can break the game--not that that was what happened, that I can tell.

Though I don't understand how someone would enjoy playing a murderous psychopath...

[jewelfox]

I once saw a dialogue option in my brother of origin's playthrough of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which amounted to "That's all well and good, but I've decided to kill you now." It seemed, at the time, to have come out of nowhere and to be a complete nonsequitur.

The next time that brother GMed a Star Wars tabletop RPG, I decided to use that line to respond to everything.

He killed my character off. I deserved it. But boy, was it fun. >_> Not because of the psychopathy but because of the randomness.

I think the problem is when people have very different expectations of what they want out of a game, and are unwilling either to communicate those expectations to each other or to respect each other's expectations. Like when that brother deliberately sabotaged one of my games by driving his truck off a cliff, after getting frustrated with bad die rolls, without even talking about how to make the game work first. Or when he and his friend went through the motions of an entire side RPG campaign, taking 10 minutes to reply (in chat) and offering no feedback even when asked directly, and then I found out later they were talking behind my back about how the game had jumped the shark.

Sorry. >_> Um, in this case it sounds like they want an excuse to act out being mean, and decided it'd be easier to get rid of you than accomodate you. I suspect that they would have just murdered you in-character by that point.

[citrakayah]

Actually, about half of us were trying to figure out how to murder each other, and one character already kind of tried to include me in collateral damage after he nuked a town via daemon.

[jewelfox]

So did you manage to take any of them with you? >.>;

[citrakayah]

No. I didn't die, though, as far as I know. I would guess that my character finally ragequit and went back to gathering plant samples.

[jewelfox]

That sounds like a win for all concerned!