Game-induced psychoses...

[HellHound]

I fondly remember most of my weekends of game, where we gamed basically straight through the whole weekend, from the end of school on Friday night until everyone had to go home on Sunday night. Plus of course the semi-infamous "Seventy Two Hours of Game" that we did on a long weekend... yoinks.

But the uber game that I remember best was when we played Revised Recon (from Palladium) for the first and last time. We were playing in the small camping trailer, on the farm, in the middle of summer. Gabe and Luc, Kristin, Steve, Shawn and myself. It started out pretty good, running through the modules and scenarios provided in the book, and inserting some additional scenes out of various movies. We had an average of one dead character per two missions, and some gruesome injuries that involved humping the wounded soldiers through miles of jungles and swamps to get to an evac... The game got pretty intense after a while. We ended up going to sleep at 6am, after sunrise. We woke up around 9:30, and it was HOT and HUMID and the air was thick with bugs. It was perfect. We started again. By the time midnight rolled around on the second day, we were all wired on caffeine and sleep deprivation, and the scenes had gotten REALLY intense. Not just the characters, but the players started losing their cool when things got weird. By three AM, we had some serious problems. One player was hiding under the bed in the trailer, we all had cammo face paint on, and the crickets were very loud. The scene was right out of Apocalypse Now, we were getting too uptight, and shooting at anything, but were desperately low on ammo. The acting C.O. is whispering to everyone to hold fire, and confirm all targets before firing (we had just shot one of our own team about an hour earlier). Then the sniper player started firing at anything that moved. Not a "I shoot everything that moves" thing, but a "the tree down by the river sways in the breeze, the shadows are looking weird underneath it, could be someone moving from tree to tree" "I shoot"... "someone comes running out of the hut on the far side of the river at the sound of the shot" "I shoot". Then the acting C.O is trying to get the sniper under control, WITHOUT getting shot, and that's when they finally make contact with the Viet Cong. Well, sudenly Shawn jumps up from under the bed, with a marker in hand, is suddenly behind the player playing the sniper, draws a black line across his throat, and then runs away into the night. FOR REAL, NOT IN THE GAME. And everyone goes into full panic, with random gunfire, screaming and all the good stuff that spells the end of a jungle mission.

We never played the game again. I'm sure it could never actually compare to playing the games wired up on caffeine with only three hours and change of sleep. The most intense game of my life. Talk about role-playing.

I'm just glad Shawn didn't decide to slit my throat instead of Kristin's. The marker was QUITE indelible.

 

[RangerWickett]

The weirdest game experience I have involves staying up until 10am playing Battletech. I'd just introduced some friends to the game, and they were hooked. I was making up battles for them to do all night, and when the sun came up and Saturday morning cartoons started playing, we got a little loopy. I recall myself saying at one point, "Okay, okay. On a roll of twelve, the atmosphere disappears."

No 12, sadly.

I never had my throat slit, though. But, well, never game with a man who has taken wrestling classes and try to tell him that his choke hold won't work on the orc.

 

[Zappo]

That's more like sleep-deprivation-induced psychosis. After enough sleepless hours, anything is going to seem weird. The last time I pulled 48 hours at a con, I distinctly felt as if I were under the influence of a Slow spell or something. Everyone moving fast, the sun flying through the sky, clocks going faster than I remembered, that sort of stuff. I recall having a game of the Vampire CCG with another guy in the same condition, only the two of us, and a single game lasted something like four, five hours. Weird.

 

[Sniktch]

I played in a Vampire game once where I succeeded in freaking out all the other players. My character was quite psychotic, I was very into the game, and people started to look at me like I was the psycho, and not my character in the game.

A bit of advice: do NOT attempt to play a Malkavian (or probably any other vampire, but this was especially bad) when you are on real live hallucinogens!