The SUE System: Reprimand

This one’s short, and it’s not a fitting conclusion to the prequel campaign, but there you go. AF1 and 2 are hopefully going to continue the story, since they played through it. I didn’t past this point, and here’s why.

Shortly after the session in which last post’s mission came to a generally successful conclusion, our GM taps me on the shoulder and asks if I can hang around.

Now, I’ve done this as a GM, and I never like doing it, because I can never make it about anything good, but at least I try to make it fast – and if at all possible I do it in a private addendum to the post-session IM, since at least then they can get to it at their convenience. The GM, on the other hand, has never said anything of any consequence by IM (or at all), but he usually finds them insufficiently personal. He sits down behind his formidable DM screen, steeples his fingers, and looks at me in what he’s always thought of as an intimidating way.  The neckbeard rather spoils the effect, though.

I start, actually, with “Okay, clearly something’s happened here to piss you off. What do I need to change to make the game fun for you to GM again?”

After about a full minute of staring at me, he opens with “[your character] is dragged out of his room in the middle of the night and thrown into psychiatric prison.” Insert self-satisfied smirk.

Well. That escalated quickly. I ask if I get, say, a trial or something similar, and this is met with derisive laughter. Yeah, sure I get a trial. I’m dragged in chains before a “military court-martial”( as opposed to the vastly more common civilian types), and they’re very efficient: they open by finding me guilty. Apparently I’m guilty of high treason as well as criminal insanity and “countless lesser crimes”.

Me: “Oh, okay, so I’m overqualified. Jeez, guys, if you want me to take over just say so.”

This gets his blood up with impressive speed, and causes him, in the guise of whatever official is heading this thing, to launch into a tirade that took several minutes. Apparently I went badly off-mission, I have no respect for proper operating procedures, and I “made excessive use of excessive force”. My brain hurts. Now, quite which part is the treason and which part is the insanity, I was not at all sure, and the DM was happy to clarify.

Apparently, doing more than your mission brief is going off mission, and it shows a lack of respect for the M.I.C. hierarchy not to make use of your backup. I didn’t even know we had Blackhawk for backup, but apparently wasting that much of a senior agent’s time is bad; he was supposed to come in once we’d engaged all of our adversaries at once in a fair fight. The GM hadn’t even thought of the shield generators, but apparently he was going to take care of them too. “Moreover, it has a detrimental effect on morale to have such junior agents subvert the organizational hierarchy.” I love the logic here: how dare we do things! Our rank isn’t cleared for anything but massively sucking!

He goes on and on about this, with this weird mix of sanctimony and rage; the phrase “how dare you” shows up a lot. This was around the point where I lost the capacity to do anything but listen and be amused.

In the end, he wound down, and I asked what he intended to have happen now, exactly, since he’s gone to so much effort to educate me on what, exactly, I did wrong by inventively succeeding beyond our mission parameters and making everyone have fun.

Apparently my character is gone permanently; he’s in “crazy jail” for the rest of his life. “And you aren’t making another one like him. I can tell you that right now.” If I’m to come back into the campaign, I had to promise to quit the shenanigans and apologize for messing up his plot.

His face as I walked out was priceless. 

It would be a year until I’d join another campaign of his, and only after I’d heard great things about it – mostly from people with rather different standards than mine. In the intervening time, I leave you in the capable storytelling hands of AF1 and AF2, whenever they may see fit to post ; I’ve got a short backlog of things to get out before we get to the CT-like campaign that spawned this site.

And that’s the end of the Prologue.