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Anonymous 09/01/09(Tue)07:03 No.5677063
I recall a group almost ten years ago where “THAT GUY” was a relatively new player to our group and we’d agreed the game was going to be about mid-high fantasy D&D heroics - So he shows up with this drunken old man lout of a fighter. Meanwhile we’re all playing young kind of weeaboo anime hero types.
We tolerated him and how often he’d talk about how drunk, smelly, and generally obnoxious his character was. He would use metagame knowledge to make fun of our characters in character, laughing at us when we’d get knocked out, calling us cowards when we failed our fear checks, and the DM would take pity on us and just kind of give us “let it slide” looks and let us take rerolls.
We’d bitch about it between sessions and we sort of grew to hate the guy as a player; His character would go into long diatribes about dungeons and gold and how useless we were and we’d get into hour long arguments where the DM would constantly have to remind us all to “keep it in IC.” Anyway this campaign goes on for at least a year, and the storyline is kind of climaxing and a DMNPC gets kidnapped, so after another argument session we get convinced by “THAT GUY” to take a suicide mission and storm a castle, and he’s basically yelling at us IRL we have to do it.
Anonymous 09/01/09(Tue)07:03 No.5677068
5677063
So when we agree, he leaves the room with the DM for a few minutes, and we assume this is all some metaplot how he’s going to fuck us over and steal our shit. They come back in as if nothing had happened. Session continues but we’re all on guard, assuming something is up. We storm the castle or whatever, and have a lot of fun, not really noticing that this guy has stopped being so obnoxious. He hasn’t once mentioned how his character reeks of whiskey or onions or whatever, though he wastes a good five minutes explaining how his character shaved his beard. Whatever, we just assume the DM talked to him about how it was annoying us. Epic battles ensue and Fast forward to face off with the BBEG, some Lich thing, and the fight isnt going so well.
We’re getting spanked, our Cleric is down, and Mr. Fighter has a haste and out of nowhere he goes, “I rush to Cedric (the Cleric) and slap him ‘GET UP YOU COWARD’.” At this point I groan but the DM is like “Cedric, you’re back up with XX HP.” Then Mr. “Fighter” goes, “I turn to the Lich and I smite him.” And suddenly it clicked for all of us.
Fucker had been playing a Paladin the entire time. His insults were his lay-on-hands and calling us out as cowards were his Anti-fear aura. He wasn’t “That Guy,” *we* were “that guy” and we’d just been absolutely out roleplayed for almost a year.
Personally, I always assume stories like this from 4chan are fake. I just read it as an amusing work of fiction.
That said, to take it seriously for a moment, I think that the specific way the guy went about this was absolutely an arsehole move. But I don’t think it’s because of the keeping secrets necessarily. I think keeping secrets like that can be excellent, and one of the greatest campaigns I’ve played in involved one of the other PCs being secretly evil and working against the party—something the rest of us only managed to work out about 2/3rds through the campaign after doing our own secret investigation after getting a hunch. When you’re playing with people that you trust IRL you can get away with a lot of stuff that would definitely make you “that guy” in a game with strangers.
In this story, I think the way it could have been handled better would be to be less “arsehole” and more just “gruff”. A character who obviously cares, but who is rather brusque and no-nonsense about it. I’m thinking Captain Price from the original Modern Warfare (2007) campaign. I definitely don’t like the active deception of involving the DM and pretending that it’s just the DM “letting us take rerolls”. Find some other way of explaining away the abilities, like maybe pretending it’s the Healer feat. Even better if you just hand-wave it by saying “it’s how I’ve built my character”.
They could be a sorcerer. Here’s a neat quote from the Forgotten Realms novel Brimstone Angels describing how a person in-world thinks about someone casting magic.
Farideh, for what it’s worth, is actually a warlock. The spell he’s just seen her cast is eldritch blast (not that it’s ever named as such in the book). In-world, the typical person probably has some basic knowledge of the types of classes that exist, but they probably also don’t know in great detail the precise abilities of each, and they probably have some misconceptions. That goes even more for a peasant or craftsperson than it does for an educated noble like Brin—the POV character in the scene quoted above.