Chronotor
2008-10-11, 11:20 PM
My friends are idiots.
The position of party leader has more potential for creating conflict between egos than almost any other element of tabletop gaming. This particularly true in my gaming group, which has two players very similar in mindset (who also frequent these forums) constantly butting heads to prove their superiority. It's usually far more amusing than it sounds.
Before I move on to the crux of the story, consider what usually settles the issue of party leadership in a sane group. A coin toss, a quick comparison of charisma scores, or a speedy vote. It's usually that simple. Keep this in mind throughout the tale.
I run a homebrew d20 superhero humor campaign. A semi-competent team of the 4 pcs and several npcs had functioned together as a dysfunctional supergroup for several meetings now. It’s probably the second funnest thing our group has running right now. Or at least it was.
You see, an argument arose between “Pain Boy” and “Stopwatch” over a pretty basic issue of superheroics: do we capture bad guys or shoot them and dump napalm over the corpses, followed by shooting them into space. Pain Boy, being old-school wanted to dump villains in jail and go back to grabbing kittens from trees. Stopwatch, noticing the seven minutes it takes to break out of jail when you can shoot lasers from your hind quarters, favored a more permanent solution.
It might help to know a bit about these characters temperaments. Pain-boy is an idealist, who models himself off of childhood super heroic icons to the point of excess, often leading to many sharp things entering his spinal column. He’s quite unlucky. Stopwatch….is a drunken frat boy. With an inflated view of his humor and a penchant for violence and misogyny. To his credit, he gets fewer sharp objects in his spine.
The pair had already been at odds after…well…Stopwatch threw a soul-eating psychic child off of a skyscraper. After…saying he had no soul. Yeah.
Pain Boy put him on probation. The issue came up of who was team leader, ie whether or not Stopwatch could be put on probation by pain boy. The issue came to a head after the team hit “The Muskrat” (intentionally lame villain) with an SUV. There was a divide that was theoretically about killing villains, but more about who had a bigger genitalia. It came down to a vote.
Pain boy came out slightly ahead, losing votes for a teammate whose kneecaps he’d busted (long story) and a black-ops operative the team literally picked off of the street one day. Stopwatch lost the votes of a ninja heroine he’d routinely sexually harassed, one pcs atypical stoic mute loner, the pc of his own little brother, and some others.
Because democracy doesn’t work when the opposition can leave at any moment, Stopwatch ran off with his sub faction, who he called the Justiciars. I saw an opportunity for a corny Civil War parody, so I let him run with it. I figured they’d both spew some rhetoric, have a typical climactic battle, and reunite in the classic fashion when I brought in a sizeable enough supervillain. Essentially, I expected them to be reasonable.
This was a mistake.
Within moments, the Stopwatch’s justiciars had hijacked an apache helicopter and sent anyone with the misfortune to be in a mob boss’ home an express ticket to hell. At the same time, Pain Boy put together media and governmental paranoia into a set of policies that made Civil War Iron Man look like the leader of ACLU.
This wasn’t the worst part.
For reasons that still don’t make sense to me, Stopwatch left the city that had held the entire campaign thus far (think Marvel New York, Metropolis, and Gotham in a blender) and went to - take a quick guess - Africa.
It gets worse.
This was somehow supposed to be a response to Pain Boy ordering the creation of a super-prison for all the city’s criminals and supervillains to be put inside of. Somehow this makes him right. If this sounds like a bad idea to you, it’s because you have a brain.
We haven’t gotten to the worst part.
After creating (relative) order in Zimbabwe, Stopwatch decides to prove he’s right. By having his teammate destroy the prison. Causing massive riots. Then NUKING that section of the city.
I’ll let that sink in.
Naturally, this doesn’t bloody work. The major hole in his scheme, other than the ethical and logical ones, is that the teammate he asks to procure a nuke is the aforementioned US Black Ops npc. Naturally, he’s a bit peeved about a plot to destroy an American city. Stopwatch is taken down rather unceremoniously (it was getting late, and I was tired of dealing with this. Unfortunately, this doesn’t prevent the prison riot. People die.
DM’s everywhere: this is what happens when you stop railroading them for five minutes. Never again.
When the smoke and dust cleared, Stopwatch was sentenced to a quadrillion hours of community service with the party’s superteam by a UN tribunal (this is a comedy campaign, remember). To lighten his sentencing, Stopwatch cut a deal to go through a week of Chinese prison.
At some point, we’d forgotten what the original debate was even over. Pain Boy, the one who’d won the original vote, was declared Party leader. In a dispute over who gets to shout the catchphrase, the party was split, several malcontents were killed, civil rights were trampled, an African nation was put through violent upheaval and a city almost got nuked.
I recommend you flip a coin.
The position of party leader has more potential for creating conflict between egos than almost any other element of tabletop gaming. This particularly true in my gaming group, which has two players very similar in mindset (who also frequent these forums) constantly butting heads to prove their superiority. It's usually far more amusing than it sounds.
Before I move on to the crux of the story, consider what usually settles the issue of party leadership in a sane group. A coin toss, a quick comparison of charisma scores, or a speedy vote. It's usually that simple. Keep this in mind throughout the tale.
I run a homebrew d20 superhero humor campaign. A semi-competent team of the 4 pcs and several npcs had functioned together as a dysfunctional supergroup for several meetings now. It’s probably the second funnest thing our group has running right now. Or at least it was.
You see, an argument arose between “Pain Boy” and “Stopwatch” over a pretty basic issue of superheroics: do we capture bad guys or shoot them and dump napalm over the corpses, followed by shooting them into space. Pain Boy, being old-school wanted to dump villains in jail and go back to grabbing kittens from trees. Stopwatch, noticing the seven minutes it takes to break out of jail when you can shoot lasers from your hind quarters, favored a more permanent solution.
It might help to know a bit about these characters temperaments. Pain-boy is an idealist, who models himself off of childhood super heroic icons to the point of excess, often leading to many sharp things entering his spinal column. He’s quite unlucky. Stopwatch….is a drunken frat boy. With an inflated view of his humor and a penchant for violence and misogyny. To his credit, he gets fewer sharp objects in his spine.
The pair had already been at odds after…well…Stopwatch threw a soul-eating psychic child off of a skyscraper. After…saying he had no soul. Yeah.
Pain Boy put him on probation. The issue came up of who was team leader, ie whether or not Stopwatch could be put on probation by pain boy. The issue came to a head after the team hit “The Muskrat” (intentionally lame villain) with an SUV. There was a divide that was theoretically about killing villains, but more about who had a bigger genitalia. It came down to a vote.
Pain boy came out slightly ahead, losing votes for a teammate whose kneecaps he’d busted (long story) and a black-ops operative the team literally picked off of the street one day. Stopwatch lost the votes of a ninja heroine he’d routinely sexually harassed, one pcs atypical stoic mute loner, the pc of his own little brother, and some others.
Because democracy doesn’t work when the opposition can leave at any moment, Stopwatch ran off with his sub faction, who he called the Justiciars. I saw an opportunity for a corny Civil War parody, so I let him run with it. I figured they’d both spew some rhetoric, have a typical climactic battle, and reunite in the classic fashion when I brought in a sizeable enough supervillain. Essentially, I expected them to be reasonable.
This was a mistake.
Within moments, the Stopwatch’s justiciars had hijacked an apache helicopter and sent anyone with the misfortune to be in a mob boss’ home an express ticket to hell. At the same time, Pain Boy put together media and governmental paranoia into a set of policies that made Civil War Iron Man look like the leader of ACLU.
This wasn’t the worst part.
For reasons that still don’t make sense to me, Stopwatch left the city that had held the entire campaign thus far (think Marvel New York, Metropolis, and Gotham in a blender) and went to - take a quick guess - Africa.
It gets worse.
This was somehow supposed to be a response to Pain Boy ordering the creation of a super-prison for all the city’s criminals and supervillains to be put inside of. Somehow this makes him right. If this sounds like a bad idea to you, it’s because you have a brain.
We haven’t gotten to the worst part.
After creating (relative) order in Zimbabwe, Stopwatch decides to prove he’s right. By having his teammate destroy the prison. Causing massive riots. Then NUKING that section of the city.
I’ll let that sink in.
Naturally, this doesn’t bloody work. The major hole in his scheme, other than the ethical and logical ones, is that the teammate he asks to procure a nuke is the aforementioned US Black Ops npc. Naturally, he’s a bit peeved about a plot to destroy an American city. Stopwatch is taken down rather unceremoniously (it was getting late, and I was tired of dealing with this. Unfortunately, this doesn’t prevent the prison riot. People die.
DM’s everywhere: this is what happens when you stop railroading them for five minutes. Never again.
When the smoke and dust cleared, Stopwatch was sentenced to a quadrillion hours of community service with the party’s superteam by a UN tribunal (this is a comedy campaign, remember). To lighten his sentencing, Stopwatch cut a deal to go through a week of Chinese prison.
At some point, we’d forgotten what the original debate was even over. Pain Boy, the one who’d won the original vote, was declared Party leader. In a dispute over who gets to shout the catchphrase, the party was split, several malcontents were killed, civil rights were trampled, an African nation was put through violent upheaval and a city almost got nuked.
I recommend you flip a coin.