This post will be nerdy, so Fuck you Sideways with a Rusty Fence Post if you can’t take it.
I was playing Shadowrun with my usual group. It’s fine. We were a pretty strong team, including one Mystic Ninja (he did enhancement spells), one Physical Adept (known for super-speed and extreme toughness, not kung fu), one ex-SAS antiterror commando (good all around combat), one very powerful magician (dual-natured, which means he exists in both physical and magical dimensions). And me, the Tankity Tank.
We were basicaly forced into the Renraku Arcology scenario, only our Gm makes it much, much worse. He usually does; it’s his way of balancing things out high. We’re allowed to have ridiculous powers, but then he starts off throwing hordes of killer drones and insect spirits at us. Unfortunately, he’s terrible at actually balancing opposition, which leads to our usual method o acheiving victory.
The villain starts off with some awesome super-attack, or just one we can’t effectively counter. We get kicked around the curb. Eventual, the villain runs out of juice as we stand around throwing attacks back and forth, and goes down like a little bitch.
yay.
Dramatic, it ain’t. Sometimes, as a variant, he stops using attacks on the people it affects most in order to concentrate on those characters who haven’t been hurt yet, for no fucking reason. Thus, we rarely achieve victory by actually overcoming great opposition. Sometimes, he sends us against hordes upon hordes of enemies we can’t really hurt, and then the some NPC army or some shit, who refuses to ever help us out beforehand, comes in to save the day. Usually after we are forced to beg for help against the enemies who outnumber us 100 to 1.
When we do defeat some powerful villain, he kneecaps all the psychological pleasure we could get out of it as thoroughly as possible. He hands out money, gear, and goodies like candy on Halloween, which leads to them being utterly devalued. Most of the time, NPC’s shun us or ignore our successes.
In one campaign *(still ongoing), a character of mine came close to joining the side of Utter Evil because not one NPC in the entire damn game ever once said “Thank You.” After I repeatedly told the GM that was all I really wanted: a polite thanks. They could keep gifts, titles, and all that crap if only somebody thanked me. Fuckers.
The GM got around that by making the evil not so much evil as just a fucking jerkass dick. Who then turned on me and threw my (still living) character into Hell when I offered to give him everything he ever wanted and more. My character is currently pissed, as all the mighty Gods and Demons are basically nuisances with superpowers, or irritating children.
In any case, he generally makes our villains so utterly blank that we get no satisfaction from defeating them. Computers blindly following programming, vast dimensional entities that can hardly perceive us, madmen meaning well as they utterly rape and ravage the world and everything in it: they usually manage to have no personality whatsoever. They would also be completely harmless except that they happen to be utterly immune to reason or logic or sanity. Fuckers.
Back to Shadowrun. Renraku Arcology.
He tossed us a time limit on this one, which forced us to work fast. I’d rather have gone on to deal with one of the other dozen major disasters. His usual method of GM’ing is to throw 600 major crises at once, and no one else bothers to deal with them. Usually, we eventually start to forget some of the terrible troubles which have occurred because we can’t keep track.
So fine, we went in. I got us in a very good, sneaky method which mgiht get us access to the whole bilding via the elevators.
Weeelp, that was too good for the Magician. Player decided to go watch the evil killer robots running around by just turning invisible. Problem? The robots have ultrasound sensors, which ignore invisibility! Yes, the player had been warned. At least twice. Then he turned into a bird in front of them, which apprently triggered the kill-on-sight protocol.
yay. Thank you risking us all to satisfy your pathetic passing curiosity.
But fine, no disaster yet, right? We manage to get away, steal some stuff even, and escape into the next level up. We move across the (very large) building and even get some valuable information. Alright, we can do this.
We sneak our way all the way to the power plant level. Well, one team member gets a loud mouth and fucks everything up by yelling at another player (in-character) that he, the second, should tell the NPC security guard what we were doing. Note: despite being a Tankity Tank, I was was not suspected of anything and even intervened sorta-subtley to give them nmore time. Of course, they completely botch it up and a mass security alert is sounded. They now have us in their cameras and can track us easily.
But OK, fine.
Well, one player (the Ninja) said he couldn’t be there next week.
OK, geez, fine. We came up with a side mission his character can have done.
Then the Magician’s player simply doesn’t show, and the Physical Adept is very late. Leaving me with the Commando.
Ok, FINE! I come up with something for us to do in the meantime.
Five minutes later, at the first sign of trouble, the Commando bails on me. His character escapes in a way I can’t, and leaves me to be blown away by twenty drones each almost as tough as I am and each deadlier than my character is. The Commando didn’t want to fight them, so when I played for time and came up with a way of getting around them, he just ran.
FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING LITTLE BITCH!
You couldn’t think your way out of a wet paper bag! You were in the fucking Army and have less command of miitary strategy than most teenybopper Pokemon fans! I’ve seen ants display better tactics!
Incidentally, he ran off and looted an abandoned area after leaving me to die, enrichng himself by letting me distract the guards while he made off with stolen goods.
Well, that pretty much left me to talk my way out of it or die, since the Commando had a disproportionate share our firepower. The Physical Adept player showed up, and upon being told his character had wandered off to trigger alarms immediately looked at the GM like he [the GM] was crazy. His statement was basically, “I’m sorry, do I look like I’m a moron with a deathwish?” But there was no way for us to get in contact, because all our cellphone or radio tranmissions were blocked.
In an Arcology.
Which is a mile wide, a mile long, and has well over 50 floors (If you are a Shadowrun player, that is much smaller than the Official Arcology. This is because the official arcology had so few people that you could literally have whole lost tribes on some levels, they would be so empty.)
Ok, fine, I was basically forced to surrender. It was now the optimal path.
My GM apparently decided to be funny about it. I did get to talk to the Security Chief, who was a braindead dumbass blindly doing whatever orders popped up on his computer screen. This was after I had to convince a braindead dumbass security guard to let me talk to someone. These people barely qualified as “bored, stupid bureaucrat.”
FINE!!
I tlked to the head of magic reasearch. Utterly divorced fro reality and quite apathetic about anything outside his department. I talked to the Arcology director’s secretary. I talked to the Assistant Director. He didn’t know or care about any damn thing at all.
The GM made me roleplay every damn miunte of it. I started getting pissed at the stupid. He continued, because he apparently though it was funny.
Jackass.
Finally, I got through with the Arcology Director, whom I knew was not available and was not in communicaiton. I quickly figured out it was a signal from inside the Arcology, which was a ridiculously easy fucking thing to figure out, because the actual man was in Japan and this dude had not nearly enough signal delay, which any non-dumbass should have realized, because they only have conferences with Japan on a DAILY FUCKING BASIS!
Then, I discover it’s an AI, the Arcology Management Program. It’s a smart slave AI, just doing its job.
Apparently, whomever wrote the risk profile module was an idiot, because a possible “complete destruction risk” at some point in the future caused the Arcology to lock itself in now, and turn the Arcology into a military fortress and start psychotropic condition and risk several other disasters.
OK! FINE YOU COCK-ASSED MOTHER FUCKER!
I don’t care!
Just bribe me and I will walk away. I don’t really care. I offered to bring you evidence and resources on hwo to manage the threat, and that it’
s farily minimal, and to shbow that you’re basically shooting yourself in the foot, but you refused. In fact, you just ignored me and kept talking.
Oh, wait, that’s not good enough. Apparently the Arcology decided it doesn’t want to let one (relatively small) secret out on the off-chance that someone could find a weakness in their nigh-impregnable magic shield within the next four months, when probably noone on the planet even has the capacity to reproduce the effect within that time.
So they did something physically impossible and had about 50 people hack into my cybersystems, get the codes to shutdown all my cyber body parts, and you are now threatening to kill me or lock me inside my own nonfunctioning body until you feel “safe”. Yeah, I just didn’t notice the bandwidth from 50 poeple hacking into my computer simultaneously. Oh, wait, maybe it was the 50 magicians all using spells which they probably don’t have and probably couldn’t use on me at range and probably couldn’t do what you claim anyway.
Yeah, you’ve given me the choice of being locked in a cell, or having my body shut down, or being fitted with a nice “lockdown program” so the Arcology Program can fuck with me whenever it wants to.
Well, FUCK YOU!
Yeah, I started yelling. Because you’re being a dick, and being fundamentally unfair, changing the rules, and then you have the fucking audacity to imply it’s my fault for not using player knowledge the character doesn’t have. And tell me a “Faraday Cage” will keep me safe.
:rolleyes:
Yeah. An impromptu Faraday Cage will keep me safe. Yeah, because farday Cages are really good at keeping radio signals generated from god-knows how many radio generators from reaching my Death Switch, when even one will do me in.
Just… fuck you.
Fuck you.
FUCK you,
FuuuUUuuuUUUUUuuuUUUUUuUuuuuck… you.