I squirreled again. Evokes the image of the dog in UP! for thy viewing pleasure.
Alright, so I’m bored of Ye Typical Role-Player. That much is evident in my previous entry, but there’s always a why, isn’t there?
Because everyone plays a homicidal, suicidal maniac — also known as a psychopath — and thinks it’s cool. It’s so cool, indiscriminately destroying thinking and feeling creatures who just happen to be in your way. All to achieve some fake goal that is totally possible, such as world domination.
Some time ago, I bought Ragnarok: The Animation (back when it was much harder to find anime and one had to buy it instead of purchasing a monthly Crunchy Roll subscription.) I found myself yelling at Yuffa to heal the dude she was in the dungeon with, but she’d forgotten she could heal because she was kind of new at it. I was like, whoa, how… normal. I’m going to use that!
So I rolled up a healer class human or elf or something for a campaign beginning shortly thereafter. I decided to be the same character, since the chances of anyone else having watched the show were next to nil anyway and even if they had, it still amused me to rise to the challenge. This was in 2005, if you wondered.
The game master – I think his name was Nick but now I’m not sure anymore – created a Sliders-esque campaign setting so he could have endless worlds at his fingertips. There was a bazaar we’d slide into maybe every 10 times we portaled between dimensions, but we were never guaranteed to return anywhere we went to other than there. There were three players I’d never met before and my boyfriend in the group. One of the three other players I actually liked role-playing with while the other two were hack and slashers.
You got to re-roll anything you wanted to whenever you got your character killed. The two hack and slashers died repeatedly throughout this campaign and one person even rolled up a copy of The Evil Dead guy played by Bruce Campbell at some point… but I never died. That’s because I never entered combat if I didn’t have to and instead spent all my magic points healing the people that the hack and slashers hurt. They were innocent bystanders, after all, being attacked by bloodthirsty hooligans that the healer was stuck with via a cursed amulet. Thus, Yuffa — and I did totally name her that — was able to circumvent most tragedy while the hack and slashers went through character after character. They re-rolled at least five times that campaign.
The game master found out that the healer class got a celestial unicorn animal companion around level 7 or 8 and decided he needed to kill me. I’d mentioned it out loud because I was unaware of this when I created the character and we’d reached level 5. I’d patterned my character after a different “game” so to speak, after all, so I never truly looked into what was special about the class. I chose it because it seemed more Yuffa than a mere cleric and I believe my ex-husband might’ve suggested it to me, as well.
I’m not sure why the game master almost always comes to the conclusion to kill me, but every campaign I’ve ever been in has been this way barring one… and in that game, the other player characters wanted to kill me instead.
This started even before I decided to be an evil twat to every G.M. ever. In fact, this particular campaign started it all. This is where I decided it was me versus the game master and it was my job to make their brains implode at some point during the campaign. It wasn’t meant to be sinister; I was challenging them to grow. This was my fifth or sixth gaming group (as a completely different set of human beings were in it) already and it was a very clear pattern after The Most Epic Game Ever(TM).
By the time Nick decided to kill me, he decided that the new P.C. had to be someone from around where the player character died. He reasoned that a local would put on the glowing necklace of the dead party member and cement themselves as part of this group. Thus, he killed all hope of me actually creating something I wanted to be. He was railroading me into misery. EVERY G.M. DOES THIS… I have proof… just keep reading. It might take two months for me to finish giving it, but I have it.
So, he asked my ex-husband to guest G.M. a few sessions so he can play his stoner N.P.C. and be part of the party. We killed his campaign because the healer died in a manner the main game master could not control and instead I was given the character my ex-husband loved to pieces: a catfolk thief.
My ex-husband introduced her as having a logical argument with a black dragon inside a dungeon you cannot escape from. This is my character to a T, that’s why he loved her. Everyone loves her, eventually, and I’m loathe to divulge her name because she’s a bit of a legend at this point. Everyone but a certain captain of a certain air ship. (I wish I could remember the name of Jackson’s character in that campaign. Sorry, Jackson — I didn’t actually want to do all that to you. I’m not really into causing massive party dissension.)
My catfolk thief was trying to convince the dragon that it would be better to serve the greater good rather than the self. They’d been having this conversation for weeks, for they were locked in a dungeon of boringness. (Don’t ask me how they sustain themselves foodwise and all, that was never approached.)
I murdered Yuffa to become Crystak for the third or fourth time. My ex-husband had decided the cat girl was blessed by a deity to be reincarnated again and again during the last iteration of this character’s existence in his game that happened before this, thus she became cursed to roam endlessly by the god of traveling. Because of this, she’s been played at least twelve different times and she absolutely antagonizes most G.M.s everywhere at some point because I can’t quit being me, I guess. He also saw what Nick intended: to railroad me into being a goblin or something I’d never roll up against my will. Ant was totally not cool with that, so we plotted together to overthrow Nick and his tyranny, which was not taken lightly.
I could have played that kind of character — a goblin fighter or a troll barbarian or whatever he had in mind to give me. I would have killed the game again by playing it just like the hack and slashers and doing it with more finesse than they could ever have because I’m a strategician(TM). The problem wasn’t exactly that the G.M. intended to pick for me… The problem is that it’s a bid for control. He was going to assign me and only me a class and species. How is that even fair when these psycho assholes kept re-rolling endlessly to be whatever they wanted to be? He absolutely was not trying to stop them. It was all to target me. He got much more than he asked for… but possibly not enough to be completely brought to justice.
He could have just said that whomever cursed our amulets wanted Yuffa to go a different way and asked me to re-roll before he started putting in restrictions. I hate these wars for control. In fact, I hate him for not realizing the one time he could have just killed my P.C. for standing alone, waiting for the party to get themselves killed because I was basically being Gandhi, he forgot. Maybe he didn’t want me to be a lizard man, then. Maybe he hadn’t decided to railroad people into what he desired to have played just yet.
I guarantee you right now this is what I would have done being handed a basal race with low intelligence, high might, and a class to suit: I WOULD HAVE MURDERED THE WHOLE PARTY AND SUICIDED ON SOMETHING. Game over, man. GAME OVER. I know I would have done this because I did it to Chris once and I liked Chris a hell of a lot more than I ever liked Nick (although I didn’t dislike this Nick guy either.) Give me a troll barbarian and I will bash your brains in for causing trouble for me. Give me a goblin fighter and I’d rush into the thick of a battle that could not be won, then run right back to the party, trailing my “adds.” Give me a neanderthal and I will play a neanderthal. This is something every G.M. would regret, I assure you, because I would kill other party members. You wanna make me a brute, let me show you exactly how brutes work. I should know, I’m related to a few.
How did Yuffa die in this scenario? While the party had discussed killing the black dragon from behind a dungeon door, the dragon heard every word and decided to act first in self-preservation. Yuffa, who wanted to befriend the dragon or at least get on the other side of it before it ate her party, waltzed in first, which she’d never done previously, but presumably the dragon was peaceful if Crystak was talking sense to it and not dying.
However, because the dragon heard all about how the player party wanted to kill it, it turned its breath weapon at Yuffa upon entry. I actually thought it would go much differently because my ex-husband didn’t exactly coordinate any of this with me. He put Crystak in the room with the dragon. It was a dangling carrot and I acknowledge that. And, most likely, the G.M. thought that Ant was going to give me the black dragon instead.
It was my choice to try to murder Yuffa, which I wanted to as soon as a fan favorite character was part of the equation instead of a lowly neanderthal type. It was out of character for Yuffa to go in first, I do admit that… but since the G.M. had it out for me, what was there to do? Become a goblin fighter or some other class and race combination that I would ultimately still break his game with?
Would you be okay being railroaded into playing a character sheet you didn’t even make yourself, that is guaranteed to be disadvantaged because the G.M. decided to hate on you?
Yuffa was being Lawful Good, which most people consider boring. Especially next to chaotic evil characters. If turning Yuffa to any other alignment was a goal of his, it was never going to happen. Not without tailoring the entire campaign to that goal. He was going to have to get into my character’s head, figure out what was important to her, undermine her completely, use negativity and brutality to break her, and then put her back together again as a fucking monster. I don’t think he was psychologically equipped to do that, honestly. Most people aren’t. Psychopaths are pretty much the only ones who do know how… and are willing to do it for funsies.
In addition to tabletop games, Crystak has at least another dozen iterations over various MMOs and MUDs. Any time I can make a cat girl, I make a cat girl named Crystak. Occasionally I use her name on non-cat girls, but generally speaking, she’s always been a catfolk because she’s based on yet another character of mine that was nicknamed Malice (and before that, held the much less impressive moniker of “Tropicana”) who was mutated into an orange monkey cat.
As it turns out, there are no monkey cats to be seen anywhere. And I made her silver because at the time I didn’t like orange as much. Maybe I would have appreciated City of Heroes more with an orange cat, considering I got bored of all the vast amounts of cement grey as a hero. The villains side was much more starkly contrasted, which was a pleasant change of pace and made the game new all over again… only to be utterly killed via Mission Architect, sadly.
Invariably, I tire of playing her, but only because everyone wants to kill her.
I’ve often wondered why everyone wants to kill me. I’m a nice person! I have the answer, but you’re not going to like it. Not one bit, nope: I’m too intelligent and/or wise. Additionally, my charisma (non-physical) is stellar because I’ve honed an intentionally wonderful personality to perfection… and then I decided to become that person.
Let me tell you what happens in the tabletop R.P.G.s and in reality based on this:
When it comes to role-playing, people I’m aligned with are generally happy to have me as part of the gang. Once in a great while, a party member is pissed off they’re not the spotlight of the group (even though I’m not trying to be in the lime light) and wants to one-up me… which I just give it to them. I just stand aside and let them take over until they fail. This does not piss them off, as you’d imagine. They eventually turn to Crystak and ask for help once they figure out they’re not figuring it out by themselves. Every problem has at least two solutions: the one involving a steel blade and the one involving a sharp tongue.
The game master, on the other hand, gets blatantly pissed off at me every time. I’m too competent, too logical, too capable, too friendly, too outgoing, too ___whatever they’re on the rag about this time___ and therefore they must destroy this player character so that I am forced to make a new one. (I often don’t even begin with Crystak when it’s a new G.M. by the way. I try to be something new as often as possible. I don’t even usually play a thief anymore, it’s generally a bard instead — that is, if I play D & D at all.)
Unfortunately for them, I am cautious with Crystak. The character is a paranoid assassin thief sort of character, expecting to be backstabbed at any moment despite her gregarious demeanor. The difference between her and most thieves is that she has a code of honor. Sometimes I violate that (at the game master’s request) and I always regret it, as it created a distrust and distaste another party member. In fact, thinking back, Anthony really invited me to be as much of an asshole as I could muster being. (I don’t like being an asshole at all, so I wasn’t very much of an asshole.)
This resulted in becoming a stow away on an air ship and later, once they tried to abandon that character to continue on, getting a fucking magical dice roll to pole vault back onto the air ship while they were leaving the port, and, of course, stealing an intelligent talking artifact from another party member. Crystak is more of a lock pick kind of thief rather than a take-your-stuff kind of thief. She revels in the art of the combat-related backstab rather than the robbing people blind thing.
I don’t know why I agreed to do N.P.C. sort of actions as a player character, but I did, and I don’t like it. I retired Crystak for a while after that one because my ex-husband had perverted her entirely with that campaign. It wasn’t until City of Heroes that I used her concept again, becoming a reflexes scrapper. I guess I was the first one; I recall my ex-husband raving about it on the forums because I could dodge-tank an E.V. by myself for most of the fight. (This is how I do, folks. I pick what speaks to me, like a ghost in the machine, and suddenly I am “the winner” of something that seems broken as all get out. Really, I just wanted something fun to play.)
There was another campaign much later in a land far away that had the Zelda temples in it (I can’t remember if it was tied to a specific game.) It was the party’s job to save the entire universe from destruction. Each party member was summoned to a temple and some disembodied god voice told them the stakes. Crystak didn’t care, having lived her nine lives, and argued with the gods instead of simply obeying, which had the G.M. cracking up. She told the gods to save the universe themselves if it’s so fucking important.
It’s really hard to make a cat do what you want when the cat doesn’t trust you, you know.
And of course the Sliders-esque game died because Anthony pissed the regular G.M. off by plotting my healer’s demise to become the character he preferred most due to role-playing with me online before we met. I’d created her in two MUDs after her original debut as MALICE in the Robotech campaign of Epicness, and that’s actually how he and I met.
I wish I could say that is the end to the Crystak saga, but it is most definitely not. She’s probably in someone’s fictional story somewhere by now, as well. And if not, WELL WHY THE FUCK NOT?!
Being a wily free-spirited feline, Crystak established an anti-monarchy party within a MUD without the permission of the staff, which got me banned multiple times. #JealousPeopleSuck.
I believe each and every one of these assholes who has thwarted my role-play in one way or another is a narcissistic bitch. They play G.M. because they desire power and attention that comes from wielding power. I empower myself, doing things within the confines of the rules but not always following the unwritten rules. (You want your rules followed? WRITE THEM DOWN.)
So how does this translate in reality? How does being kind yet mischievous work in the real world? How does breaking unwritten rules change the game? What does a ridiculously high personality charisma score do for you? What does almost perfect A.I. level logic do for you in the real(TM)?
Ridicule. Jealous rants and ravaging beasts. People try to control you. People try to make you act like they do because they believe you are fake. You’re phoney bologna. They think you are gaming them because you are obviously intelligent and you’re not using it to deceive them or trick them? HOW CAN THIS BE?!?!?!?!?!
You. are. totally. not. what. you. present. yourself. to. be. — This is the message I receive all around me, all the time, except in the work place ever since I became an I.T. girl.
I am exactly who I present to be, though. These assholes push me to try to be a monster and merely expose their own inner monstrosity. Because there is nothing for me to budge from, to fall down to, to be reduced to, they continuously one-up themselves in tomfoolery. Negging escalates. Insults begin to fly over time. Anger becomes rage. Why? Because I am exactly what I advertise myself to be and it’s too perfect. And how dare I make you fall in love with me while being a fat whore bitch skank ass HO! </psychopath>
First, my weight is a medical issue from a rare digestive disorder. I’ve tried every single diet there is, following it to the letter. I even ate 1200 calories six days a week, fasting the 7th day of the week. Results were never what one would dream about. Especially not after Anthony put 115 pounds on me and then abandoned me because he was no longer attracted to me and ran straight into the arms of our chiropractor, who is a flirtatious whore that sleeps with all her ex-lovers and keeps a relationship of great standing with them. I admired her once for this quality, thinking I should do the same, it’s more loving than dumping them and abandoning them… then she turned around and became everything Anthony allowed his family to accuse me of after he tricked me into divorcing his childish bullshit just to move forward in life with an even keel once again. In two words: FUCK YOU.
I’ve been born over 1,000 times as a role-player. I have died at the end of a sword, at the other end of a treant, on pit traps, from poison, from curses, deadly magics, from everything you can fucking imagine. I am a katana, forged in the fires of ENDLESS role-playing games because that’s all we could afford to do as children. This is how you hone superior logic. This is how you gain wisdom well beyond your years. This is how you become a psychologist and architect accidentally. Becoming so bored with what you are forced to do from lack of funds that you start making it a game about observing the people all around you rather than the characters they play. It’s zooming out, seeing the bigger picture. God is a G.M., essentially, playing us like puppets while we play puppets in a fictitious and imaginary setting of our choosing.
When every penny counts because you’re under the poverty level, $50.00 to entertain three children for two decades (and counting) is a sound investment. Even now, one of my brothers is running campaigns weekly, which I disinvited myself to because he keeps murdering everyone instead of trying to weave a tale or a story. I don’t want to endlessly roll dice and try to min-max a bunch of skills.
I made a bard named Bapoto, which I was patterning after African tribal knowledge that I have. Her instrument was the drum and I even found a nice MP3 of some epic drumming that the rest of the party loved during combat. We were doing something epic cuz that’s how it always be, am I right?
Bapoto didn’t even talk all that much. I was playing Crystak a different night of the week in a different campaign — a D & D campaign — because I told the G.M. to his face I wasn’t rolling up a character so he created the one he knew I’d play. I will never roll up another D & D character after the summer of 1999. That was the end of me wanting to play D & D. And Vampire: The Masquerade, as well.
That game died because I proposed to another party member, who had become central to the role-play story Ken had created finally, and we were ghosted. I thought for sure that asshole felt the same in return but after a while, and after embarrassingly insisting he’d come around, I just gave up and went completely and utterly fucking insane. I threw my job away, packed my shit up, drove home with FOUR dislocated limbs in a 14 hour car ride, crashed on the fucking floor for six weeks before my parents bought a shitty second-hand bed (which was better than the floor, might I add, but not by much), losing every belonging between me and the friend moving back with me, was too sick to handle anything at all, getting sicker by the minute because I didn’t realize I AM ALLERGIC TO MOTHERFUCKING DAIRY and my father (who was obviously suffering greatly from consuming it) would not stop purchasing 1-2 gallons of milk a week and two tubs of ice cream a month. Perhaps you don’t know anything about allergens, so let me illuminate your life: there were molecules of dairy spread around counter tops and on refrigerator handles and so on and so forth. To touch my mouth or eat with my hands meant ingesting dairy, whether I actually put it in a vessel to consume from or not. If you are living with someone who has an allergen or extreme intolerance and you do not cease eating what they cannot consume from this point forward, you are a motherfucking psychopath and I hope you die in a fucking fire.
This twat named Arron made it miserable to be part of the group in 1999, so I dropped out and stopped role-playing. I stayed home and read or something. I can’t even remember what I opted to do instead of R.P.. Maybe I was drawing more then, as well, but I definitely fractured off the group. Before we had ramped up role-playing with our own friends, my younger brother and I were forced to tag along with my older brother once a week to a group with teenagers. I don’t really know what my parents were thinking when they did this, honestly. Free babysitting, I guess. I tried to stay quiet so I wouldn’t antagonize anyone because I knew we weren’t truly invited. Tom’s group were forced to accept us and that was that. I can read undercurrents like nobody’s business.
Instead I got drawn into a campaign many miles away from that twat (Arron) and that’s where Crystak was actually born: Malice, the orange monkey cat, originally a human demolitions expert (from BTS or Rifts book, I think, rather than the Robotech book. As I recall, we were all dual-classed so we could be an espionage team in addition to a group of mecha pilots.)
Tropicana was up to 98% in demolitions disposal because I literally specialized in it for no clear reason I can recall other than it was “cool.” This decision ended up making her indispensable to the party. It was a mecha sort of game, being a Robotech universe, so she opted for using a katana when she wasn’t engaged in mecha combat, which worked better than it ought to when paired with grenades.
Malice didn’t even own a gun and somehow survived many a gun fight. I had named her Ami because I had a serious obsession with Sailor Mercury and made her a bit like that character at the time, but of course she grew well beyond that in very psychopathic ways thanks to the fact that our party was murderous scumbags (but then again, so are the Zentradi.) She kept the calculated and cool part of Sailor Mercury but was a martial arts bad ass with a thousand fold katana otherwise. This is when I decided it’s easy to create something new based on two disparate ideas and it could actually work.
She was nicknamed Malice because my favorite thing to do was stab people and then… instead of withdrawing the blade and starting over… twisting it to deliver maximum ongoing damage. This made her incredibly formidable and didn’t rely on another swing or stabbing motion, which is probably partly why she didn’t expire as quickly as she could have. (Or perhaps should have… but then again, about half our core party had existed since the get-go because the G.M. wasn’t intent on killing us. Sean was intent on telling a story. And another Aaron altogether.)
In this very same campaign, my younger brother constantly tried to kill me until Dead Meat expired. The same one who kills me as often as possible in every campaign by using invisible rules against me without explaining them. It’s an incredibly high learning curve and is probably responsible for most of my quick thinking in general. I do admit, I stabbed him first in this campaign for disobeying a direct order from our captain. I saw it as treason and decided to kill him for it.
My character had been rescued by the captain (who had the handle Outlaw) in some way, shape, or form, or we’d been hired for our loyalty. I can’t recall which. Either way, we were on a mission and being paid. My character was very serious about the job because that’s how all Japanese are (at least in the stereotypes I know and this one is actually a nice one, so I was using it.) Extremely serious and loyal to their work. I think this might have created our life long role-playing animosity, but I was never asked to explain my actions, not even by our captain, so he’d never know that.
BRO, STOP COMMITTING TREASON!
Anyway… we had the Firefly “Wash” ending in that campaign. Our space ship crashed hard into a planet, turning us all into members of the pink mist society. Our ship had an A.I. named Miranda (which turned us all giddy in the theater when we watched Serenity together, might I add) and all kinds of strangeness that I wish I could say I’d never forget, but I did forget. I forgot almost my entire life when I died; it is God telling you these specifics, at the end of the day. (Did I mention I’ve gone crazy?)
This campaign will forever be my benchmark for EPIC. This 18 month long Robotech campaign with over 20 players total. We had so many people in our group we had to have two G.M.s and they traded who was in charge every now and again, sometimes the two of them controlling the game at once.
And just in case you were wondering: NO, I didn’t cheat. But I am bad at math and everything has modifiers, so I may well have fucked up my numbers once in a while. I have dyscalculia, which is like Dracula but with numbers. I mean dyslexia. If I rolled a botch, I fucking told you I rolled a botch. There was once or twice the die went flying out of control and landed in a crevice so no number was rolled at all, but I learned to accept my lickings. After all, I could always RE-ROLL!
Angel-Sansara 