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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wik" data-source="post: 4215124" data-attributes="member: 40177">(Quick note:  All of the names here are fictitious.)You know, I couldn't think of my worst RP experience when this thread first came up.  I had bad RP experiences, to be sure - the time I was stuck with a bunch of hardcore gamer nerds who were REALLY involved in the game, the GM who felt it was his goal to "win" and laughed at our group when our three 4th level characters couldn't defeat three 3rd level ogres, and the slightly psychotic GM who had many awful house rules and would "punish" us if we tried to play a thief or bard.  But none of them really seemed all that bad;  unpleasant, yes, but nothing to compare with Brazilian Death Squads or most of the things here. But then I remembered an incident from years ago, when I was around sixteen or seventeen, and fond of using a hodge-podge of second edition D&D kits and the Skills and Powers book.  Anyways, here's the tale:I used to live in a small town called Sooke.  Like many small towns in the "wilderness" of B.C., Sooke is filled with drinking and drugs.  Growing up in Sooke requires a certain familiarity with both;  there really isn't much else to do.  We had an arcade with a billiards table for all of six months, and I know of at least three guys (myself included) who have passed out, totally drunk, on that table before the arcade was closed.I hung out with the stoners, despite the fact that I have never touched the stuff myself.  I've never done acid, or mushrooms (though I have PICKED mushrooms - in Sooke, you jump at any chance to do something new, and picking mushrooms with friends is fun.  And, also, it's technically not illegal, which is always a good thing for teens).  But I did game.My group of friends were all pretty closeknit, and we got into gaming together.  At one point, I was running a fairly heavily modified Forgotten Realms 2e campaign, set in the Dalelands.  I had taken the name "Feather Falls", and turned it into a locale that was much cooler in my mind than the paragraph or two in the book.  We would game at my friend Y's house every week, the five or so of us.Y got into D&D because her deceased father used to be heavily into it in the early 80s, and she wanted to "connect" with him somehow, since she had been really young when he passed away.  She was also a huge fantasy reader, and had written many "fantasy novels" of the typical feminist slant.  I should also mention that her name actually was taken from J.R.R. Tolkiens Silmarillion.  She was pretty hardcore.Now, Y's mom was a hippy, as could be expected (it is Sooke, after all).  And all of my friends were stoners, except myself.  While we had many games where everyone would "toke up" before play, it really just helped to settle people down and get them into the mood.  So I never discouraged it.But then my genius buddy James decided that it'd be fun to game on acid, or mushrooms.  I can't remember which drug they were on, some years later, but I do know we had done a lot of mushroom picking that summer, so it was probably Shrooms.Anyways, everyone in the group beyond myself took those shrooms, and we started playing.  At first, the adventure was running fairly smoothly.  While Y would occasionally get a little too fascinated on local flora and fauna ("The bunny looked at me?  Whoa..."), really, I thought the game was going well.  I knew they were distracted, and so I made sure my adventure would be easy to follow, and things were going okay.Then came the ogre.I don't remember how they got there, but I do remember describing the ogre in a bit of detail.  It had a foul reek to it, and stood well over even the tallest character's head.  It had a necklace of human-sized skulls, and held a tree as a club in one hand.  The lair was littered with bones and debris, and the very earth was stained with blood."Time to die, fleshbags!" It roared out.  I felt I was doing great as a GM, and I was really getting into things.  Then I looked up.Jim had a deathgrip on one of Y's pillows, and was completely white-faced.  Roy just had his jaw open.  Winona was laughing hysterically, with a tinge of panic in her voice.  Noam, the only who was still in "reality", was looking at everyone else with a touch of fear.And then Y started shrieking.  Loud, ear-piercing shrieks of pure terror.  She started grabbing her dice, and throwing them at me with such force that I was using my GM screen to deflect them, ricocheting the projectiles with a bullet's velocity into glass, ceramics, and the wall.  Two picture frames were shattered by errant d20s."Get away from me!  You won't eat me!  You won't eat me!" She screamed over and over again, weeping.    She then grabbed a large ceramic unicorn (I think it was a unicorn, at least) and started swinging it in wide, violent arcs at me.The group scattered in every direction.  Jim ran into a corner, and Roy dashed out into the attached basement and out the door to the farm fields outside.  Noam and Winona started shouting "Y, calm down!  It's okay!""Get her away from me, man!" I kept saying, trying to stay out of the reach of that ceramic unicorn - she got damned close to hitting me a few times.  Eventually, between the three of us, we were able to calm her down to the point where she was merely hyperventilating.  But the rest of the night she was having a "bad trip" - Roy was too, though only Jim knew about it at the time (Roy had dashed into the bushes after the ogre encounter, and Jim followed him to look out for his friend).  When Y's mother the hippy got home, she was able to help her daughter through the trip, having gone through it herself.  Funny thing was, she wasn't angry with anyone about it.  She understood what D&D was about, and told us later it was a pretty stupid idea to mix hallucinogenics with it (I agree).  But she laughed it off, and told us not to mix those two things again.  Since then, I have a rule at my games - no drinking, no drugs, and if you're going to toke, you have to do it before the game.</blockquote>

Verification