Ravings of a Textual Deviant

So, in the midst of everything hitting the fan, I didn’t get to write about how cool Doug’s one-shot game was on Friday night. How cool was it? Let me recount the ways…

I knew the game was going to rock when Doug started describing the available characters. I simply had to have the practical-joking, drug-addicted, megalomaniacal, ex-Navy bomb-delivery dolphin. (Apparently, Doug and I are very sympatico on the topic of “Johnny Mnemonic”–the short story, not the movie.) The gay ex-Navy Seal (not the marine mammal) was the only other character that interested me, and that was a distant second. The Navy had named the dolphin Nietzsche, although she didn’t answer to it. (”How were they supposed to know you were female?” “They should’ve asked Jung.”) When else was I going to get the chance to call the other characters “speciesists,” and say things like “I’m sentient–I need a lawyer,” “How the monkeys ended up with the opposable thumbs is beyond me,” and my personal favorite, “I have a cousin who works at Sea World. Maybe he can get you tickets.”

The premise of the game was that the characters were all part of a top-notch civillian underwater salvage company (”We go deeper and longer”). The game started out with a (player character) Suit arriving via speedboat at the job site just as we were setting up. Being the practical joker that I am, I decided to have the dolphin pretend that she’d been run over by the speedboat. Doug, $DEITY bless him, let me go with it. The other players quickly got into the act, with the new-to-the-operation, PETA-member marine biologist throwing a hissy fit, the doctor hitting golf balls at me off the deck of the ship to “test the dolphin’s reflexes,” and the Suit immediately emailing headquarters’ legal department to absolve herself and the company of all liability.

That more or less set the tone for the evening.

We did manage to surprise the heck out of Doug by negotiating a solution without a single PC getting hurt, let alone killed. The sole casualty from our group was an underwater robot. (Not sentient, and therefore not in need of legal representation.) He, in return, left us with one of his trademark always-leave-’em-wanting-more endings. I’m not giving that up in case Doug ever decides to re-use the game, but I will say that at one crucial point near the end, several of the other players looked at me and said (player-to-player) “When someone asks you if you’re a god, you say yes.” Well, what do you think a megalomaniac is going to say?

This entry was posted on Monday, October 27th, 2003 at 6:18 am and is filed under Games & Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.