Don't Eat the Evil Snow
Setting: Armageddon: The End Times RPG.
We're rebels against the evil Church of whatever the heck the evil church was. We found out that at Tunguska, in the former USSR, they'd done some crazy experiments. For reasons that escaped me, we headed there.
We found a lot of black snow that, for want of a better way to describe it, radiated evil. It was evil snow. We warned everyone off from touching it, did our investigations, and moved on.
But Tyler's guy, oh no, Tyler's guy wasn't done. Tyler's guy ate the evil snow. I'm not sure why, except this totally encapsulates what Tyler did every freaking game. Have a chance to do the right thing by the plot and the goals and your fellow PCs? Or eat the evil snow? You eat the evil snow. Tyler always ate the evil snow. He was a naughty paper man.
We eventually figured out that Tyler had eaten the evil snow.
Sigh.
Years on, I can't remember what eating the
He didn't make it.
Bota had his trusted aide-de-camp shoot him in the head with a Ruger P99 on the ride away from our current location.
That kind of thing needed doing to Tyler's guys.
My spouse came to talk to me during this post. I explained what I was writing and why - not something I do, normally, since my spouse isn't a gamer. I had to explain why I was sad my friend passed, yet my friend literally was the worst guy to having on your side in a game. The worst. No one was worse than Tyler. He'd sacrifice virgins and bathe in their blood for power. He'd sell out your secrets to the bad guys and rationalize why this was the right move for everyone. He'd steal from the group and explain why it helped. He was the worst. But we always let him play, because we liked Tyler.
One of my friends told a story about Vampire. He said something like, I did X, I did Y, and then I dominated Tyler into doing Z. I said, "I didn't think you had any dots in Dominate." "Oh, my PC didn't Dominate Tyler's PC. I dominated Tyler." Yeah, he was like that. Tyler had a stutter that came out when excited - like when he was explaining how selling everyone out was awesome - or under pressure, like when we'd all go "WHAT THE F---!" because, I don't know, maybe because he sold out everyone.
I'm going to miss Tyler. I'll missing playing with him, and not playing with him. I'd never invite him to game, and I sighed when he'd show up, but he was my friend and I don't regret the times I spent gaming with him. He was good people to be friends with even if he was the fly in the ointment every single actual game.
I'm hoping the others of the crew - Jon, Don, Ryan, Marco, Dok, and others - will chime in on the comments with more Tyler stories. He deserved to pass with a lot more regard from us than he got when he died a few months back. Hopefully we'll have a game memorial for him.
For what it's worth, remember everything is finite. You only have so many times with each person. Even one who's screwing over your paper man.
Tyler Part 1
ReplyDeleteI hear the frustration. I’d be lying if I didn’t feel it myself a couple dozen times over. In fact, in one of the more recent games I played with Tyler at the table, my Chaotic Goof Cleric ended up taking out Tyler’s character with a hammer blow to the skull. To be fair, it was well deserved and even Tyler acknowledged that he was proud of me for pulling the trigger so quickly.
Tyler was hands down my favorite person to play with. This is not a clap back or a counterpoint for arguments sake. I genuinely enjoyed the different perspective, energy and intelligence a Tyler brought to the game.
I came to gaming with Tyler at a later stage in life and I guess I came with a slightly different perspective of my own. I was tired of the run-of-the-mill dungeon, crawls and I was excited to find a group that was playing more nuanced and character driven games that reveled in unwinding the mystery as much as bathing in bloodshed.
When I first met Tyler at the gaming table, everyone warned me about him. They spun into a tale about a Vampire game that ended with Tyler killing everyone with a frying pan. Yes, a frying pan. I think the story was that everyone was stuck / transitioning in torpor, and Tyler, frustrated with the course events, took matters into his own hand with the flash of cast iron. Game over, Tyler won.
In that moment, I had never heard anything so ridiculous yet so powerful in a table top setting. In highschool I had played with my own eccentric crew, and while we all had our quirks, idiosyncrasies, and classic tabletop moments- nothing came close to death by frying pan.
Over the years, given the right GM, I enjoyed nothing more than having a side bar with Tyler to conspires, to plot, to come up with ways to take another angle. Our goal was never of course to derail the game, at least mine wasn’t, but to see what kind of new story we could push, what different angle we could take to make the game, interesting, different and most of all fun.
It was that aspect that I think I appreciated and will
miss the most about Tyler. Each game the GM would present a puzzle at the game at the table. Our role as players is to solve it, to find a solution, to solve the big riddle. Tyler took the opportunity to see his own puzzle and worked to flip the game until an alternate solution that was never initially planned, functionally possible and ultimately both frustrating and entertaining would emerge. (At least to me anyway).
Tyler Part 2
ReplyDeleteTyler was by far one of the most intelligent players I have had the privilege to game to with. His ability to see puzzles and situations differently, identify, weak points, slips and loopholes - not to necessarily destroy the game, but to twist it in a way that made a different kind of sense was something truly unique in my gaming experience.
The thing is, a story can never break - it just changes. It definitely took a whole lot of time, collective patience (and an experienced GM) to ride and survive the Tyler tid wave, but…. IF you could guide Tyler to a survivable outcome, the game was (almost) always an instant classic.
One of my last table top games with Tyler ended better for my paper man, but not for the game. After his neutral evil cleric deconsecrated the temple to my God we had just found, I took him out with my warhammer with a roll of 14 and 16 + modifiers. The damage was enough to crumple his character and quiet the table.
For his part, Tyler just shrugged his shoulders and began to roll up a new paper man. Yet the murmurs on the side continued… Good grief Tyler.
After the game, walking out to our cars, my buddy pulled me aside and reflected , “What did you expect, the DM allowed him to play a neutral evil character. Tyler was just playing what he was supposed to….” My fiend’s point - Just like you can’t be mad at a cat being a cat, you can’t be mad at Tyler for being, well, Tyler.
My buddy and I ended up playing a few more campaigns with Tyler in a separate group. The campaign stretched from table top to online as quarantine kicked in. I even got to experience a “worlds collide” moment when one of my high school buddies “who is his own engine of chaos) joined Tyler and I in one last campaign. True to form, we had to keep a sharp eye on Tyler who was constantly ready to sell us out to the mob, high wizard, or sphinx Goddess if we didn’t keep a tight hold on him. He pushed the boundaries and made us better players, well also bringing an insane angle to everything that we did.
Thanks Tyler for making it not normal and endlessly interesting.
Great stories. It was endlessly interesting with him, for sure. I'd sigh and face palm when he'd join a game, but I never regretted playing with him. He made gaming fun. I'll miss him.
DeletePeter, that was terrific and brought back a lot of Tyler memories. The Bota Khan/Rodger Hobbes story had me cracking up, as did the Vampire one.
ReplyDeleteIf I remember correctly, we were playing a campaign where the Sabbat was just forming and we were supposed to pave the way for our sires to step in to a power vacuum we orchestrated. Tyler had started to go rogue and an in-game meeting was called among our paper men to address the issue. After Tyler explained how completely going against our sires was what they _really_ wanted us to do my character passed his character a stake, point first, across the meeting table. I looked at Tyler out-of-game, mimed passing him a stake and he proceeded to do the honors. :-)
To really get a feel for playing with Tyler, you had to understand the dynamic of the people at the table. Many of us shared the responsibility of wrangling Tyler during a game. Bob usually took point, but Marco, Jon and I would often tag out to relieve each other.
When I ran an All Flesh Must Be Eaten game I factored in Tyler's playing style and build in "BALLZ" points. Players earned BALLZ which could then be spent to modify die rolls of themselves, enemies and allies. Technically, Tyler might fit into either or both of the last two categories!
I always enjoyed talking to Tyler about history, tech and politics. Occasionally he would show up with a new gadget or something odd that he obtained on his travels. The phone jammer and green mega-laser were my favorites. Tyler showed up at Hill House with what looked like an old police scanner with two big unlabeled knobs on the side and a battery compartment sealed in black electrical tape.
Good enough to dampen movie theatre he claimed.
As crazy and frustrating as it often was to have Tyler at a game, he was always interesting. I'll miss him.
Great stuff. Yes, very intelligent, a great guy to play with despite the frustation and craziness. Partly because of it.
DeleteAnd perhaps the best thing you can say about him - he never took in-game things personally. Probably also why he was willing to run counter to the party without hesitation - it was just a game and he wanted to do interesting things in the game. I've seen friendships end over game but you could cap Tyler's guy and he'd compliment you on the "to hit" roll and then go make a coffee/donuts run.
I'm happy to collect stories here but I'm sad we won't get to make any more of them with him.
I remember a 5e D&D game where our former military commander sent us on a mission to recover a "magic item" (read this as a "gun," but we didn't know that). Along the way lots of weird things happened and we discovered that our former commander might be the "bad guy". In the end we found the gun and went to return it to him. He gave us an explanation of what was going on and we stood around shocked about all the corruption (on all sides). No one acted though, in the end we gave him the gun and allowed him to continue on with his plans. On the way home that night Tyler said to me he was waiting for someone to essentially say "ham sandwiches" (or in other parlance, "get her Ray"), but no one ever did, so we never fought the big bad at the end.
ReplyDeleteFast-forward about 10 years and I was at a DragonQuest game last Sunday (if you don't know the system look it up, it is pretty old). I am new to the group so I am still learning the group dynamics and system itself. We ran into a big bad and one of the other players looked to be siding with him. Everything got muddled quickly, and there was real chance of a world ending event happening. Had it been GURPS I could have made a move because I know what I can do in that system. Had it been our old group I would have known the group dynamics and acted. In the end I did nothing and it all worked out ok, but throughout the tense session I was thinking about Tyler, and waiting for someone to say "HAM SADWICHES!!!"... and I was ready to act on it this time.