Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="RodneyThompson" data-source="post: 3403007" data-attributes="member: 3594">I had a relatively laid back group back in Tennessee who all got along really well and were friends in real life. The only awkward moments were, I'm a bit embarassed to say, caused by me. Well, not really me, but me + my brother.See, my brother and I are best friends even though he is four years younger than I am. We've grown up liking all the same things, playing all the same things, and (except for a 4-year gap while I was off in college) we lived together our whole lives until last month. We're pretty much clones of one another (we even look and sound a like) and have all the same friends. We're thick as thieves.The only problem is, we're so comfortable with one another that we can rant and rave at one another, yell and complain and gripe and argue, and then not think a thing of it and go about our business as though nothing had happened. Now, it didn't happen often, but every now and then we'd get into an argument that had us screaming at one another and then 30 seconds later we'd be laughing over beers.The problem came when I DMed and he played in my game. See, my brother knows the rules very, very well, probably pretty close to as well as I do. He's got a bit of an eye for game mechanic design, and unfortunately this lets him spot the flaws in systems. My brother then likes to figure out what *he* would do, even if he just isn't seeing one other tiny thing about the mechanic that changes everything about it. The real difficulty comes in that sometimes he confuses what *he* would do with the rule with what the actual rule is, and tried to argue with me as the DM when I make a call that doesn't go his (or the other players') way. Needless to say, there were more than a few sessions during our Shackled City and Age of Worms campaigns that featured him questioning a rules call I made, me responding with the actual rules, a brief argument breaking out, and then we'd move on as if nothing happened. The rest of the players definitely felt awkward a few times, but we just assured them that we weren't really mad at one another, we just weren't afraid to argue our points passionately because we knew we wouldn't offend one another.  Though it was mostly my brother's reaction to me as the DM, to be fair he also argued rules with another player to the point where the other player, possibly the most chilled out person I know, yelled at him and told him that he didn't want to hear my brother's rules lawyering ever again. That was a sobering moment.Oh yeah, I gotta tell this story, even though I wasn't there for it (though I did cause it to happen). See, one of the players in my game had a new girlfriend who was a total space cadet but wanted to learn how to play. We let her play for a bit, then I had to leave the game because of work commitments. She said she wanted to run a Star Wars game, and I suggested she do so. Big mistake. Though tales of how horrible this game were are legendary, apparently the heroes, in the course of a single session, learned that they were all clones who were only 9 years old (but looked fully grown), had chips implanted in them that would make them explode that had been in their bodies for at least 30 years, and when they faced off against the Hutt crime lord that had implanted these chips into them (as well as into every single person in the entire galaxy) he had them surrounded, in a two-story warehouse, by billions of stormtroopers. That is not a typo. They thought she was joking, but no; she was serious. At one point, one player who is normally mild as milk stood up, yelled "This is the most asinine spectacle I have ever been witness to" and went on a tirade about how brain-dead she was. Let me tell you, that girl was about as crazy as it gets.</blockquote>

Verification