| From: | Gurth <gurth@******.NL> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Poor GM story (was Re: GM Munchkin?) |
| Date: | Thu, 10 Sep 1998 20:50:23 +0200 |
> Another bad sign...when the GM forces his character as an NPC into your team.
Yep, I had one of those... It was the first time this particular player
wanted to GM. He'd been playing SR for about half a year and assured us he
had a good adventure thought out, so we let him give it a try.
Turns out he sent our team to Madagascar, where we got involved in all
kinds of weird stuff but were mainly spectators looking on at what the
NPCs were doing around us. Anyway, he also tried to make us take his
character along, because IIRC he needed a troll in the party, and his was
the only troll PC.
My char beat up his troll early on in the adventure. Nothing personal
(well, that may not be _entirely_ true... :) but it was just that his
character was annoying to mine, and mine had this habit of punching people
who got on his nerves. I think that, and some OOC persuasion by all the
players, made him decide to leave the troll behind and adjust the
adventure a bit so we didn't need his character along.
However, the adventure got worse from there (this is't about the GM's PC
from here on, but about a pretty bad adventure and a poor GM. Anyone else
have a similar story to share?). We were constantly followed by this way-
too-powerful mage, who managed to be invisible just about everywhere we
went, even in our aircraft to Madagascar! He'd gotten aboard without us
noticing him, and only by the time we were abandonning it over Madagascar
due to anti-aircraft fire did he show himself. This is a pretty neat trick
if you can do that in an aircraft of C-130 size flying across the Pacific
and Indian oceans, IMHO...
We landed in the jungle by jumping out in an inflated life raft, and then
jumped from that by parachute. Immediately after landing we were in a
jungle and were surrounded by some critters and a woman-of-the-woods (as
per Paranormal Animals of North America). The GM showed us the picture and
said "She looks a bit like this"... *sigh*
We did a little trek through the jungle, spent the night in some kind of
aircaft hangar, had a fight with some security forces, all pretty standard
stuff. Then it started getting weird, and I lost track of who was who
pretty soon after. We ended up in a huge bunker complex, that miraculously
changed from 15 underground stories to only 5 and just as miraculously
lost its ICBMs after the players refused to believe something like that
would be in the Madagascarian (?) jungle, and which was apparently being
used as the command center in some kind of war between two groups.
The invisible mage (who I wanted to shoot on sight, but I never got the
chance) worked for one group, and that group had apparently hired us to
break into the bunker and steal some kind of item from the second group.
They captured us, and put all of us in a cellblock except for one PC --
who got asked to fight along with the peopel whose bunker we had just
tried to infiltrate! She even got given a suit of heavy military armor
with some kind of idiotic gun fixed to the shoulder...
Soon after the rest of us got put into those cells, the other group (the
one that had hired us) invaded the bunker complex, and we were released by
our captors if we promised to help fight them. Yes, this makes as much
sense to me as it does to you. We also somehow ended up in the control
room and talked to the head honchos, who I also wanted to shoot but again
didn't get the chance, and then went back up to help in the fight.
Then we prepared a good routine to leave the elevator without giving the
enemy a chance to attack us from behind (basically, we threw out some
grenades, and then half the team turned left and the other half right) but
the GM felt we were taking too long and blew us all away by having some
NPCs stand before the doors, guns ready. ("They had lots of time to get
there." In the middle of a firefight in the corridor? Yeah, right.)
After protests he wound back the clock and let us do our "exit elevator"
routine and succeed. The tide of the fighting had suddenly also turned
against the invaders, even though they had 90% of the complex a few
minutes earlier (according to some nifty mapping device the milspec armor
also came equipped with). Again, rather unbelievable IMHO but I decided
not to open my mouth about it to avoid dragging this adventure out longer
than absolutely necessary.
We then killed one of the leaders of the bunker-owning clan by slicing off
his legs with some monowire -- this was a cyberzombie troll who'd come
along with us to go and fight the invaders, but we had absolutely enough
of it and decided to side with whoever held the exits to the bunker :)
After it was all over, we got some kind of large payment from the bunker-
owners (who'd won the fight), and some of the PCs got to keep the stuff
they'd been loaned for the fight -- such as the milspec armor mentioned
above.
Then, when we got back home, the GM proceeded to hand out way too much
Karma for a run where we'd done just about nothing -- we had been
spectators while the action unfolded around us, but without being able to
do anything to influence that. The NPCs did everything worth doing,
basically.
Amazingly, we let the guy GM twice more, but only because he promised
these adventures would be better than the first one. They were. But only
just. (This is one of the reasons why I recommended to new GMs that they
run published adventures a couple of times before designing their own...)
--
Gurth@******.nl - http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/index.html
It may look to the untrained eye I'm sitting on my arse all day.
-> NERPS Project Leader * ShadowRN GridSec * Unofficial Shadowrun Guru <-
-> The Plastic Warriors Page: http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/plastic.html <-
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Incubated into the First Church of the Sqooshy Ball, 21-05-1998
