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Message: <blockquote data-quote="lordbasl" data-source="post: 2319136" data-attributes="member: 10559">"PC, the Other White Meat"Waaaay back when I ran Traveller, I had a group of misbegotten rogues and reprobates for PCs who did not understand that when it came to things like, uhm fuel and supplies, that paying attention to them was as important as paying attention to the number of RAM grenades you can launch at your foes. In FRPGs, heroes forage. In war settings, an army pillages its eats. In space, nobody can hear you starve.Anyway, the heroes of this comedy of errors failed to stay on top of the maintenance of their ship, preferring instead to avail themselves of Startown's pox-ridden fleshpots and serial bar fights. The Chief Engineer was too drunk or stoned to stay on top of his maintenance . . . and I decided right then and there to beat a little prudence into the crew of the rustbucket free trader Freedom's Lady: a pirate attack they had to weather by surrendering . . .  or dying.Said ship ran into a pirate cruiser -- a ship both faster ans better armed then the Lady and close enough to engage before the Lady could activate the stardrive and jump out. The Captain of the Lady, outgunned and out-maneuvered,  refused to heave to and surrender. The pirate opened fire on the hapless free trader, and damaged the jump drive. The engineer sobered up and worked frantically to fix the drive while the Captain attempted the only escape maneuver he could think of -- initiating Jump within 100 planetary diameters of a gravity well (a bad thing in Trav that causes ships to misjump -- to make interstellar voyages of unpredictable length and direction). All this with a bad jump drive. OUCH.Even better, I thought. I rolled for misjump -- the ship misjumped. Six weeks of flight toward an enemy-held empire...and the ship had enough food and life-support supplies for two weeks, max. Not only that, they sold off their cryogenic berths for booze, floozies and gambling money, so no taking to the low berths until this blows over. They go on half rations, but you cannot half-ration air. The air aboard ship became hard to breathe as the environmental plant starts dying. Space suits do not provide enough endurance. One of my players blamed another for the mess and decided then and there to kill that character as messily as possible in order to save supplies. The target was a paranoid who went into the shower armed . . . and the ensuing firefight on the Lady's bridge managed to kill the assailant's character and badly wound the other one. The extremely hungry characters, told that it was eat PC flesh or die, ate Paul's character and survived the trip. Thus ended the Flight of the Donner Party.The episode has been  known since then as "PC, the Other White Meat." The tasteless, jokes continued for months. It almost ruined the flavor of the campaign. The PCs got the message that I would no longer spoon-feed them and got cooking on the maintenance and bookkeeping for the Lady.The phrase survives today to refer to times when iron rations run low in the current DnD party. The player whose character saved his fellows by serving as rations moved on to college shortly thereafter. He had a lot on his plate after that. I hoped he was not too badly scarred by the experience.Other ingroup expressions:Ding -- the EQ devotees say this when they level or refer to levelling: "3K XP till I ding!"Life Insurance -- buying the DM's snacks / soda / beer / gamebooksCluster Pun -- when punning (an actiuvity I encourage in moderation by rewarding with nominal amounts of XP) gets out of control and the XP rewards stop (20-200 per player per game)Misunderstood -- Taken from a cleric describing the party's evil wizard. Used as follows: "OK, you Detect Muisunderstanding followed up by Smite Misunderstanding, Mr. Paladin"</blockquote>

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