Wow, look at that title. A year, a day, episode number, sub-episode number...it's a good thing that I'm doing this mostly for my own amusement and to develop better writing habits rather than for publication, because that's one whopper of a title.
Anyway, back to the matter at hand. When we left the story, I had completed my first year at the University of Illinois, and thanks to the romantic misadventures of Rob and Lucinda and Lucinda's New Boyfriend Whose Name I Have Long Since Forgotten, my U of I group was down to just three, me, Randy, and Paul. That would need rectification, but before that I had summer break. That meant going back home and back to Joel's game.
It occurs to me that I haven't really spoken as much as I should have about Joel's game, and how it ended. As I intimated last time, Joel was what we like to call a Dick DM. That is, he had a tendency to twist the rules in such a way as to benefit himself and against the players. That's bad enough when another player is doing that, but when the Dungeon Master, who is entrusted with enforcing the rules does that...well things can get bad. What really bothered me, however, wasn't that he bent the rules to make things harder on us as a group. No, what bothered me was the blatant favoritism he showed toward his best friend, Matt. When Matt's first character, an elven fighter/mage, died he was allowed to use some kind of home brewed point buy system to replace him. That let Matt make a character who had 18s in his physical stats and 8s in his mental ones. In a system where 18 is human maximum. That'd have been bullshit even now, but back in Second Edition where the bonuses to stats were weighted toward the high end of the chart, it made Matt's new character "Deltar the Destroyer" ridiculously powerful. Then Deltar got a Ring of Human Influence which gave him an 18 Charisma, giving him four 18s out of six stats. Meanwhile, my character who had been rolled under the official rules had been counted fortunate to have a single 17, with everything else much lower. Oddly enough all the best equipment happened to be just right for a human fighter, which was what Deltar happened to be. The NPC female human mage just happened to fall in love with Deltar. And so on and so forth.
This came to a head in January of 1993 where we were sent on a mission to save a deep gnome city from dark elves who were using some kind of huge lava creature to create earthquakes that would destroy it. So in we went and fond ourselves facing a bunch of dark elves backed up by a balor. A balor is a demon based on the Lord of the Rings' balrog. Deltar has a pair of flying boots on and as he flew into battle, the dark elf high priestess casts Dispel Magic on the boots and causes him to fall. How she could possibly know that it was the boots that was making him fly rather than his cloak, a ring, or just a Fly spell cast by our mage wasn't made clear, but that was just the kind of crap we'd come to expect from Joel. What we didn't expect was what happened next.
Deltar fell. He fell into a crevasse and got stuck there. Well, okay, no problem. Deltar's got maximum human strength, he can just climb out...
No, says Joel, it's too slippery.
Fine. We lower him a rope and....
No, says Joel, the rope isn't long enough.
Mage cast Fly on him? No, the winds are too strong. Winds? Underground? Winds are too strong. She casts Fly on one of us and we go get him? No, winds. Luke's cleric casts Stone Shape to give him some stairs to climb? No, it's magic stone warped by the earthquake monster. What about...
No, Joel says, there's nothing you can do to get Deltar out.
With every idea to save Deltar blocked, we tried to fight the mob of high level dark elves and the way out of our league balor and, surprise surprise, we get our clocks cleaned. TPK (Total Party Kill), except for Deltar in the crevasse. Joel doesn't seem surprised at all and says that everything's gong to make sense next session. So we show up for the next game and Joel has us roll up two new characters each. Ah ha, we reason, we're making a new team to rescue the old team! That's great!
Except that wasn't it at all.
No, it turned out that Joel had just gotten his hands on the Menzoberranzan boxed set and wanted to play in the city of the dark elves. Matt's new character was a dark elf, of course, and he had Deltar (who had been saved by the dark elves from the invinco-crevasse off screen) as his muscle. Our old characters were dead and could not be raised from the dead. Our new characters were Matt's dark elf's slaves, there to do his dirty work while Matt rose in rank as a dark elf noble. How dirty was discovered when Matt ordered the female characters in the group to prostitute themselves to a dark elf noble he was currying favor with...
That was the end. I never played another game with either Joel or Matt, and I can't look back at the game with anything but bitterness at the way that it ended. The universe had always been weighted in Matt's favor at the expense of the rest of the players, but this was just too much. I had thought that having played with Joel for nearly five years, all of it with the same character, would have earned me some respect. But when Joel assassinated our characters so he could play into Matt's power fantasies, I realized that "respect" wasn't involved at all. It was a lesson that every gamer has to learn eventually...a bad game is NOT better than no game at all.
So here's to Solban Hammergold, the first character I ever ran in a long campaign. You deserved to be in a better game.
Tomorrow, I'll take us back to the U of I where better things await us. (Sorry, Clay, I had to get this sordid tale off my chest first. Tomorrow.)
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