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2006

#blood meridian #blood meridian band #alt country #sepiachord #lp #vinyl #kick up the dust

What's the worst RPG you've ever played?

I’m going to break this down into 2 parts: Worst RPG System ever played and Worst Session/Gaming Experience.

Of all the systems on my shelf that I’ve played, There is only one that made me say “Never again.“ Savage Worlds. I don’t know that I can point to a specific point where the system led me astray, or it might have been how much my playgroup liked arguing over things, or the fact that I was a crappy GM at the time. Maybe something will come up and I’ll try it again and I’ll like it.

My worst gaming experience was probably a Big Eyes Small Mouth campaign run by a friend of mine. All of the characters were some kind of magic user, so I built my character to be a technomancer, and the GM decided to hose me at every turn. It never felt like a deliberate hosing, but we were on very different pages about what my character could do and what the game was about. (Me and this GM are still pretty good friends. I just haven’t gamed with him since this campaign)

I wanted to be the clever solutions guy. I took an ability that let me control machines, which I thought was a cool “use a keyboard or open an electronic lock without touching it“ sort of move. But the GM thought that technological magic could only interface with magical technology. The first time I try to use my power, I crack my knuckles like “I got this“ and then the GM says, “Um, no.“

I only bought one combat ability that was largely defensive. An electrostatic shield that resisted damage and shocked anyone who came close enough to attack me. But we got in enough fights that it became my character’s primary schtick. The GM even gave me a spiked chain so I could charge it up with my shield and effectively turned it into something I could attack with.

Then there was my car. As a tech guy, I had to have a cool car. And since it was a somewhat magical setting, I wanted it to do some slightly off-the-wall stuff. The main thing it had at creation was an N-dimensional glove-box. It could hold a bunch of stuff as long as you could get it into the opening.

The party went on a mission to the one country in this world that denied all technology. So my character is driving the party to the mission until we cross the border, at which point my car starts falling apart. We’re able to make it the rest of the way on foot.

For those who’ve never played Big Eyes Small Mouth, major pieces of equipment are not bought with some separate equipment budget, but with the same character points you use to buy all of your other abilities. So the car was a piece of my character that we basically had to bury for a certain stretch of the game. Just like that machine control ability, sitting useless on my character sheet.

My character finally died in a way that is very emblematic of this game. We were exploring a science lab where all the doors were unlabeled, so we had to explore and map everything because we had so few points of reference (The GM actually said later that we were supposed to skip over the unlabeled stuff because that’s not where the thing we were looking for was). I think it actually took us a couple of sessions to explore everything.

We finally made it to the top floor of the building, meticulously mapping. We find a small squad of powered armor guys that are there to fight us. We had fought some other small stuff before and I was down a few hit points. One of the other party members was an alchemist baker who brought along magical healing cookies. Maybe I was stupid, but it didn’t feel right to me to take them.

My friend had pitched this as an anime game, and BESM was marketed as an anime system, but the campaign we were playing felt like a console game, with limited interaction options and regular random battles. The notion that there were health potions hanging around just heightened that feeling, so I avoided them.

But yeah, powered armor guys. We had fought these guys before and I had found the eject button on the suit. So I charge in, low on hp, and try to aim for the eject button on one of the suits. That‘s when the GM decides that BESM has attacks of opportunity and a couple of the other PA guys attack me. It drops me to negative hp, but I do some page flipping in the book and figure out that I’m not quite dead. The GM, however, insists that my character is dead because “the bullet is this big.“

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