Fundamentalist fearmongering video: This dungeon “master” is given complete control and “players” must do whatever dark things are demanded of them.
Real DM: Please, just cross the river. You’ve all tried to seduce the catfish and it didn’t work. I’m begging you.
jack chick tract: your character is DEAD cindy, that means you have to die in real life!!!
real player: uhhh that’s another crit fail
real dm, head in hands: as you put your chopsticks up your nose and make walrus noises to amuse the peasants, you trip and fall, driving the chopsticks into your brain. you are killed instantly. congratulations, you’ve managed to die from a botched perform check.
real player, pumping fist in the air: YES!
@jumpingjacktrash I’m gonna need a elboration because this sounds amazing.
OH BOY HERE WE GO
so, this is not dnd specifically, it’s actually vampire the masquerade. but the players were playing it like it was dnd, right down to the “i waste ‘em with my crossbow!” attitude. the game master was a friend of mine who owned a game store, and ran a weekly game in the back room. his players were completely stuck and running in circles, and he was starting to get brain rot trying to deal with it. we’ll call him GM.
since he didn’t want to alienate his best paying customers by knocking their heads together, GM asked me if i’d be up to cameo one of my old characters in their game and set them straight.
“bring katie stone out of retirement for one night to slap some sense into these dumb motherfuckers,” was how he put it.
“i retired her because she was hilariously overpowered,” i reminded him. she was a vampire saint. she had more faith than the pope. she could turn vampires to ash with a prayer. “won’t they feel like i’m taking them to kiddie school?”
“you won’t have to fight or anything,” he said, poor optimistic soul. “just give them some advice, explain how the city’s power structure works, that kind of thing.”
i shrugged and agreed. i didn’t have anything better to do. besides, one of the players was a genuine friend of ours and was not, in fact, a dumb motherfucker for real, but only played one in social situations to mess with people, and i was looking forward to seeing what kind of crazy shit he’d pull. we’ll call him Original Prankster, or OP for short.
game starts. everyone settles in with their caffeinated beverages; Original Prankster adds vodka to his, not even bothering to do so under the table. GM asks them to introduce their characters for me, then has to ride herd on a solid 40 minutes of weapon specs and leather trenchcoats. basically every single one of them is cable, except OP, who’s deadpool. but, you know, vampires. they were supposed to go meet my character somewhere, but it becomes clear they’re going to go pick a fight in canadian tire or something instead of going to the meeting, so i just have her show up.
i start describing her. “she’s an average looking woman in a severe business suit, bags of charisma, looks like a news anchor or a homicide detective.”
“i seduce her,” one of the cables says.
“no you don’t,” i say firmly, because i was expecting this, “she’s not an npc, she’s my character and she is not –”
“i have appearance of 6!” another interrupts. “i’m the sexiest thing you’ve ever seen!”
“if you need to take a wank break at the image of a business skirt and sensible heels i can go out for a smoke, i remember what it was like to be twelve.” i am a bit annoyed; dude’s not twelve. he looks thirty.
OP grins. “i grab her booty,” he says, in the hillbilly drawl i damn well know is half faked.
GM: “her holy aura burns your hand, take one wound level.”
OP: “oh, you were ready for that.”
me: “you ain’t a mystery, OP.”
eventually they were all persuaded that any further attempts to grab or fondle the average looking businesswoman would result in horrific skin lesions, and ms stone finally got to make her speech about how she was here to keep them from shattering the city’s fragile peace, help them on their journey, etc. etc., but it ended up being a lot less ‘let me mentor you’ and a lot more ‘how do we get you to leave’ than i originally planned.
fast-forward through something like four hours of these brain heroes managing to get into a fight with basically everyone they encountered, and ms stone hauling them out by their ears, using her overwhelming power to keep them alive as they dived face-first into all the danger they could find. until, at long last, they reached the destination where they were supposed to goddamn meet stone in the first place.
this is the posh crypt of an ancient elder vampire. i’ve done my best to impart to them the idea that they are here to TALK NOT FIGHT and that they will get what they want if they can simply BE POLITE and TELL THE NICE MAN THE THING THEY CAME TO SAY.
you know what they fucking did instead.
now, here, i made a mistake. i thought things could still be salvaged somehow. i had stone try to keep the peace by weakening people’s powers and generally chilling everything down. but this weakened the ancient elder more than it weakened the leather trenchcoat club, and they managed to kill him, though they lost half the party in the process.
me: “ms stone shakes her head, seeming genuinely grieved about this. ‘i can’t help you now,’ she says to those still standing. ‘after this, the most i can give you is an hour to leave town. run.’ she clicks a button on her watch. the ticking seems loud in the –”
OP: “I kick her in the cooter.”
a single round later, katie stone stood alone in a room full of ashes, the brain heroes were stammering incredulously at GM, and OP literally fell off his chair laughing, to lie on the floor drinking vodka directly from the bottle.
reader, i joined him.
