You Can Do Anything In A Game (But You Can’t Do That)

Last night, on Roll20, I was part of another one-shot playtest of Venger Satanis‘ Crimson Dragon Slayer system.

This one got… weird.

Now that, in itself, was not unexpected, but the way in which it got weird was interesting.

There was me, with a new character (Tak Laufer*, human mage, who collects keys as a hobby/obsession) Kaerdin a half-elf rogue who took knowledge of medicine as a special ability, and Luie Martell, a human fighter. Martell was new to gaming, but willing to learn and seemed to enjoy himself.

Then there was a halfling sorceress named Insigna Sparks, played by someone who wanted to import his character from another game and had to be told–repeatedly– that while the other character might be 5th level and have 9 hit points and so on, this character was first level and limited to the spells in the game.

And then there was Bob.

“he is actually bunch of spiders dressed as a man but nobody knows that”

That was one of the more rational things to come out of that player.

Sadly for me, that was our cleric. You see, in the CDS system magic spells cost hit points to cast, but clerics have multiple heals per day. My plan was to cast spells and have the cleric heal me back up to full. In theory, that would have let me be a formidable spellslinger. Once it became clear that the party’s healer was here on an expired visa from Planet Freakazoid, I had to cut down on the pyrotechnics.

I have to give Venger major props for working with a trouble player (two trouble players, actually, but one was far more of a problem than the other). He let Bob rant and kept things moving by ignoring anything that wasn’t a clear game action, while asking us what the sane members of the party were doing.

We didn’t get all that much accomplished under those circumstances, but we did get through one combat against a trio of cyborgs, and I was relatively effective with the Missile Command spell (which is basically Magic Missile with a random number of missiles instead of being dependent on the caster’s level.)

Bob did get himself killed eventually, after Venger gave him every possible chance to act rational. Then he wanted to haunt the party, which game rise to evocative phrase “ghost spider poetry”. I’m going to use that–I don’t know what for, yet, but it’s a great phrase.

I’m looking forward to the next game, which will be held at a random day and time to be announced later, in order to confuse the Illuminati.

*Extra special bonus geek points to anyone who can identify the source of that name.