[UA] Players screwed over

[Tim Toner]

 Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 11:11:10 -0700 (PDT)
From: Royal Minister of Stuff <yokeltania at yahoo.com>

> It doesn't make it any more tragic, but dooming my
> players to a cycle of unending double standards and
> crippling loses just reminds me too much of the life
> and times of planet Earth.

As an avowed player-screwer, I just have to say, "Different strokes for
different folks."  It's all in how it's handled.  The average PC can wipe
the floor with Man Off The Street, but that's not really who they're
struggling against, is it?  I inherited my group from a Champions game that
I ran the year before.  Never again will I play such a game with engineers,
accountants, and math majors.  The min-maxing that was going on was
_sickening,_ and the combats took hours to resolve.  I knew I was in trouble
when we ported over to Vampire, and the group's math miscreant proudly
announced that he was 76 experience points away from his perfect character.
I decided to nip that in the bud rather quickly by presenting him with
options that were just as tantalizing but slightly more out of reach (the
very root of tantalize).  Time and again, his character reached, only to
have it smacked back down.  The thing is--he could have had those things.
All he had to do was give in.  Conform.  Buy into the lie that keeps the
society stagnant.  The obstacles to his success were not some murky GM fiat
that was as inevitable as April 15.  He knew--as did I--that he could never
give in and take the easy way out of all of this.  All he had to do was say,
"Uncle," and everything would fall nicely into place, but he wanted his
character to do it on his own merits.  And then, one day, in the middle of
combat, he stared long and hard at his character sheet, and muttered, "Oh,
shit."  He handed the sheet to the player next to him, and retrieved an old
sheet that had buried itself in the back of an old folder.  He handed that
to his partner, and his partner started to giggle maniacally.  Everyone
wanted in on the joke, and so the two sheets were placed side by side.  Over
the course of that year and a half, the player had abandoned his scheme to
create UberPC when it seemed obvious that Timmy didn't play that game.  And
yet somehow, 18 months later, the character he had wanted and the character
he had received ended up being the exact same thing.  The difference,
though, was that one was hard fought, with each improvement born of
challenge and what seemed to be luck.  He smiled at my clever trick, and
sighed.  "Good job," he said.

"Good character," I replied.  I really didn't want to deny him his desires.
I just wanted there to be justifications for them, beyond, "I want five
attacks per round."

When I dick a character over, when I thwart a player's ambitions, I do so to
create a challenge that seems insurmountable, but really isn't.  I usually
leave some back door open for the players to find and exploit, but more
often than not, they make their own.  As the Walrus once said, "Life is what
happens when you're busy making other plans."


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