The SUE System: The Summer of “Science”

When last we left off, our party of one Krieger expatriate and one Alex Mercer expy were sitting slightly dazed on a fairly sizeable prairie in the middle of nowhere, having just had Marty rip them out of everything they’ve ever known and kick them into exile on…wherever this is.

In truth, it’s one of GM!Marty’s “original” settings. If you thought the SUE System was Yet Another Fantasy Heartbreaker, this will sound like some sort of horrible D&D closed beta; it’s later revealed that most if not all races work exactly according to stereotype. We’ve got ambitious humans (the “best” of whom are a horribly inept aping of feudal Japan), eccentric gnomes, treehugging elves, dwarves played exactly to type. The gang, so to speak, is all here; we’ve even got a couple of dragons guarding the macGuffin, in this case the portal home. The prophecy they’re working on is that the portal home is “on the mountain of despair guarded by the dragons of eternity, past the river of fire”, which is funny, because that’s an awfully long time to be guarding something before Marty in Vampiric Leather Pants (on his Head) shows up with his magical portal pyramid/squirrel and gives you something to guard. I like to think they were originally guarding a large digital timer labelled “ETA to Deus Ex Marty”.

Skipping forward in time, these dragons turn out to be one of his favorite things in the whole setting, which means he will shoehorn them in whenever a dragon is even mentioned. I…may have made joking references to certain TVTropes pages before figuring this out. From what I can tell from his long exposition to me on how to create settings, they’re “the best kind of dragon”: tortured, angsty, and utterly unbeatable except by special ritual, so “they have a built-in quest”. Silly me, I’ve been operating on RPG logic this entire time: when you see an unfriendly dragon, the built-in quest is to fight and kill the dragon. But no, no, we have to go find whatever wise old bastard is championing Marty’s views today, listen to an hour-long speech about the essential nature of existence, and THEN get the Instructable to jailbreak the palantir or whatever the hell jumps the party through the next plot hoop to drop the dragon’s unbreakable shield. It’s like playing Bureaucracy by tapdancing in Morse code: what you’re actually doing has so little relevance to what you’re trying to achieve it’s very easy to get lost, and what you’re trying to achieve makes no sense anyway.

But I digress. The party hasn’t been sufficiently informed to reach that stage yet; they’re still on the “plains” with nothing at all useful, no clue where they are, and no idea what to do.

Without really knowing it, though, the guy playing the Krieger is RPing almost perfectly. He is, to GM!Marty’s mind, insultingly unfazed by the latest turn of events. From a logical perspective, his situation has not much changed: he’s still being outmaneuvered by a better-equipped, worse-led foe in unknown terrain with insufficient supplies and poorly trained troops. The terrain’s just more solid now.

I come in shortly thereafter, as he’s working through the summer on a reasonably logical short/mid-term survival scheme. Apparently I’m a good sounding board for ideas for some reason—in my defense, until a few weeks into on-and-off questioning, I assumed it was for one of his military fanfics, and then the “suppose you can’t” chains started.

For example, suppose you’re stuck on a steppe (closest to the terrain I can get based on “flat, coldish, and full of grass”), forest in the distance, and need to build shelters with relatively simple tools, ideally something that can move.

Fine, I say, how about a yurt or a ger?

No animals, wrong kind of grasses, not one of 150 engineers knows what a yurt is.

Wattle and daub panels, maybe?

Nope. Wrong kind of dirt.

Lean-to?

Wrong kind of branches, no one knows how to make it.

And so it went, until I finally asked who the hell these incompetents were that couldn’t figure out a lean-to, and I was brought up to speed. And I was intrigued; it looked to me like an interesting challenge, assuming there was some underlying logic to no one knowing anything.

Naturally, Marty refused to tell me anything, so I contented myself with answering Krieger player’s questions and trying to follow along with his general strategy, which seemed to be to establish a defensive position and then use the fighters for reconnaissance, assuming I recall his priority order correctly. Elements of it changed frequently.

At any rate, eventually a city was spotted in the distance, so they went to investigate that, and from there began the wandering. No one I talk to remembers this part very well; it was more or less an uneventful hemorrhaging of people and resources as they trudged through nothingness to nowhere, stopping to talk to people who don’t say anything important. The Mercer expy got bored of this and would make unauthorized excursions to hunt things for fun. Sentient things, like hobgoblins. This comes to a head when a couple of gnolls bar the party’s passage over some border or other. Reasonable tolls are paid, and then the expy goes and bloodily reclaims them (citing a perceived insult), and this leads to much inter-party conflict.

I think most GMs would have recognized that this isn’t actually players disagreeing over anything material. It’s one guy goofing off because he’s bored and another guy taking it too seriously; the problem is external to the conflict. Just give them something to do that isn’t random goofiness. But no, GM!Marty has to deal with it by suggesting that the expy’s personality “isn’t suited to the adventure” or something. So the party is temporarily down to one. In everyone’s defense, the player wasn’t having fun either, so it was time to switch characters. It just seems needlessly punitive.

Then again, so is the whole thing. Once they actually got to whatever port they were heading for, the question arose of what to do with themselves, and here Marty took a firm, unbending, ludicrously whiny stance: his setting is perfect and there’s no room for meddling players.

For example, one of the first ideas we came up with was some sort of shipping service. The fuel-free starfighters they had were multiple orders of magnitude faster than anything else in the setting; build a fluyt or something around one of them and start shipping perishable goods around. Maybe look into piracy, or smuggling, given your speed advantage; come to think of it, sealing over the top and operating as a u-boat might be cool.  We’d got as far as deciding that, yes, playing 20,000 leagues under the pirates of the Caribbean would be pretty fun when the answer came down.

No. The seas are full of horrible monsters and anyway no one smuggles anything because there are no tariffs. (What.) None of the engineers can figure out a submersible vessel made of wood and iron, and no they’ve never heard of the Hunley, and anyway merchant ships are very heavily armed etc. Apparently they’re also immune to having holes poked in their hulls from underwater...despite being vulnerable to sea monsters that do exactly that.

Likewise, there’s no hope of a messaging service. Yes, everyone with them has an implant that lets them communicate instantaneously over any distance and these still work, but for some reason no one cares to send messages long-distance “except for a few postcards”, and they have the mail for that. Because who needs unbreakably encrypted, absolutely reliable, instant communication when you can wait for days for some guy with a horse? And what’s military intelligence? Incidentally, no one can build a printing press, so there’s no hope of a news service.

Weirdly, that last is what made me finally snap and ask what the hell these engineers were engineers in if they couldn’t build anything. I’d understand if a chemical engineer couldn’t design a submersible boat, for example, but no, they’re from all conceivable fields. Apparently they’re just too technologically advanced, too used to working with “advanced composites” and “modern manufacturing” to work with wood and hand tools; they “focused more on what was actually their job” than “fooling around with block type and sails”. And somehow these paragons of magical and mundane engineering can’t figure out “buy winemaking press, modify for even pressure across the platen, add plates”. I’d love to find the aeronautical engineer who can’t even make a stab at a hot air balloon because (s)he’s too used to jet engines—or rather I would if he weren’t GMing this game.

(Admittedly, the metallurgy behind movable type is fairly ingenious, but it’s not like no other alloy will do.)

Pressing on, we considered all sorts of things. The gnomes pop up frequently; any time we commit the cardinal sin of trying to out-technology anyone, they’ve beaten us to it, don’t make their technology available to anyone else, and satisfy the needs of everyone in the setting handily. Quite how that works, I don’t know, but it’s something he’ll keep doing: the existence of whatever we’re trying is enough to render our efforts totally unwanted, regardless of whether it’s available to our target market. Remember that the next time you want something: you know it exists, so clearly you don’t actually want it.

I know that, normally, players trying to forge space shuttles at the local blacksmith are being both silly and disruptive. Here, though, it sounds like a perfect set-up; he’s got all the technical knowledge he could ever want (in theory), and a world stuck in heavily anachronistic sort-of-medieval high fantasy. Then, too, the GM was actively encouraging “doing whatever you want”; you’d think, given the players’ and characters’ skillset, this would have something to do with exploiting their tremendous knowledge advantage.

That, unfortunately, would involve changing the almighty status quo, and the GM’s even less willing than usual to allow it. See, not only is this setting one of his favorites, he’s going to run another campaign in continuity with this one, and he needs the setting preserved for that. He’d like to railroad the players, but railroading is of course bad, so he wants the players to freely choose to advance the plot. I can’t help but think this process would go more smoothly if he told the players how to advance the plot, but no, they have to try and fail until they stumble on the right way forward by guesswork.

This takes some time, largely because his players are stubborn: they want to use their skills and resources to change the world, and he doesn’t want to admit that they can’t do that. Eventually they find the one guy who’s heard of the one library containing the one explanation of the prophecy. One guy, in a city of millions. Not even a noticeable guy, really, just one of a horde of archivists not even known for knowing about libraries in secret magocracies composed of insular undead. I have no idea how he expected this to work, other than poorly, but it’s far from the worst instance of this sort of thing.

And yes, he’s got a civilization of peaceful undead lead by liches. Not an awful idea, but in execution it’s just another load of Mary Sues indistinguishable from any other. The PCs, of course, aren’t told they’re friendly, and they want to use one of their starfighters as a pseudo-orbital bombardment platform to clear the area around the library so they can get in, get the books, and get out.

Naturally, the omniscient demiliches detect this via unblockable divination, and rather than, say, warning the PCs off, simply flood them with invisible monsters and earthquakes until they lose their starfighter. This is in line with GM!Marty’s usual lunacy; he “[doesn’t] believe in shielding players from their own stupidity. If they want to break their valuable objects, [he] will let them do that.” This would be great if he warned the players, but he doesn’t; he just semi-randomly breaks your character’s gear in response to unknown stimuli. It’s like Peewee’s Playhouse as run by vengeful poltergeists: “You said the secret word! Your sword shatters!” This does not apply to plot trinkets, but of course their things are useful and so fair game.

That’s all I’ve got; the whole summer-and-next-few-sessions were rather dull slogging through the setting.

Money! Science! Musing! A bit of SUE!

This won’t be a full post; it’s more of a musing.

“It’s my money, and how I spend it is my business”

To his credit, GM!Marty has never said this in defense of his own decisions. It is, however, the first defense of any of his characters, and the funny thing is he actually believes in it. Once he’s said that, any criticism of the actions of his (N)PCs is utter folly, and the NPC in question will usually set the hounds on anyone too persistent.

See, GM!Marty is like a lot of people up here, in that, in short, money is the center of their moral code, kind of like a religion. I’m not about to start flipping money-changers’ tables over, here; I don’t mean they’re profaning any sacred anything. I just mean they tend to operate on the idea that anything they can buy, they should be allowed to have, because blah blah free market; there’s a sort of sanctity of money at the core of their ethos, stretching from beyond "do not tell me how to spend my money" to "anything I spend money on is morally unimpeachable". They brazenly buy essays, pay people to take tests for them, bribe anyone who will take the money, and that’s just what they do in school. I hesitate to guess what they do in their home lives. GM!Marty, to his credit, has not bought any grades that I know of. He’s more of a fanboy, defending the plutocrats on the above logic largely because he’s convinced he will one day own at least as much.

This leaks into his gaming in a big, bad way. His rich people are invariably eccentric to the point of insanity, and the PCs are, as often as not, hired to see to it that they get what they want; the assumption is always that if they fail, there’s always more people willing to take the proferred reward or less, so they’d better not negotiate—and if they try anything, there’s always the funds to buy assassins pointed at them. They’re neither amoral nor immoral: they’re wealthy, which means they speak…slowly and make…the rules.

This reacts very poorly with his players. We’re fairly normal products of our generation; in general, our opinion of the upper classes of any given setting varies from wordless, choked-off cursing to punching a hole through the nearest wall. I’ve learned to use that to get money to the PCs; the more ludicrously childish and insane I make my wealthy, the more they believe them and the more energy they’ll put into taking them down. The worst risk I run is them forgetting the actual theft and going directly to horrifyingly imaginative violence, but that’s what their private police are for: mooks! I use the rich like WH40k uses orks: an endless source of violence, comic relief, and swag. By and large my players seem to like it.

But then there’s my own Mary Sue archetype. I generally employ technical people in the same light Marty employs the super-wealthy; they’re generally right within their areas of expertise, they tend to float rather than freeze, and my players frequently come to depend on them for missions – even if their boss is someone else entirely. I blame my own thought process for this. It’s just easier to explain what the PCs are doing, especially in an investigation-type game, as some sort of experiment. Here’s what we know, here’s what we need to find out (and what we think it might be), here’s the minimum definitive set of data to determine that, so please go find it. (A similar thought process works synthetically.) It flows more naturally from my coroners and my mad scientists than my chiefs of police and generals, I suppose; I try to structure things so that coming out of the investigative phase they’re largely self-motivating. Still, it's a typecasting, and I keep finding myself making all of my intelligent villians take after Ozymandias.

That’s all I really have for this one. I’m curious, though, if anyone else out there has NPC types they tend to associate with being fairly hoopy froods by default, and how well the association is received by their players.

The Beer Mug Paladin

We have our first guest story! I'm excited! Behold, anonymous' tale of the Beer Mug Paladin:

This was back when D&D 3.0 was in its heyday, with entire libraries of first and third party splatbooks and campaign settings. Though some of the frustration with the 3.0 rules as they were written lead to the widespread use of house rules. This DM, who we'll call "Leo," had his share but we'll get to those. Nearly all DMs wrote their own campaign setting as well, Leo did so as well. The players were sent to an island as enforcers and peace-keepers by the king. This island turned out to have things like undead and demons living there, in addition to a rampaging horde of barbarians... Maybe colonizing this place was ill-advised?

Now a brief rundown of the players:

Hector played the group's fighter, Leo told him to optimize and Hector was never good at that so he just built a really weird character that used a double-sword.

Harris played the group's paladin, Harris had something of a long-standing reputation as a really goofy player. So obviously being a paladin seemed like a weird choice for him.

Finally, Max who played the PC villain barbarian leader. Now, I'm generally of the opinion that PC villains are a bad idea anyway but Leo had an... odd relationship with Max. Leo was very macho and competitive, and Max was very good at exploiting rules in D&D and was an accomplished martial artist as well. That aside, people admired and looked up to him. It seemed to me that Leo always wanted to impress Max. It was probably a bad idea for any of us to enter the game knowing that the DM clearly favored one player over everyone else, but obviously we did anyway.

There were other players too, which included a wizard, a rogue, and a druid. The only reason why I chose to focus on Hector, Harris and Max is that they were easily the source of the most personality conflicts in the group.

The first session introduced us to Leo's house rules:

1.) In ordinary D&D 3.0 Armor Class is is calculated like as 10 + Dex mod + Armor + Shield + Misc. In Leo's D&D it is calculated as D20 roll+ Dex mod + Armor + Shield + Misc.

2.) In ordinary D&D 3.0 Initiative determines the order in which players act for the combat. In Leo's D&D Initiative is re-rolled at the start of every round, so order of player actions changed frequently.

3.) Skills like "Spot" and "Listen" represent your character's ability to notice something. In Leo's D&D you must declare that you wish to make these checks, it's not the DM's responsibility to tell the players when they may attempt them.

The latter rule was met with some confusion, the way were introduced to it didn't help. As our band of adventurers moseyed to our next destination Leo informed us that, "Since none of you declared making a Spot check you are taken by surprise."

Afterward we were jumped by a Bodak and a Succubus, the latter of whom managed to summon a Hezrou. We were able to survive and defeat the monsters, though afterward there was a debate on why Spot now worked the way it did. Now, one could be forgiven for thinking that you were supposed to guess when Leo expected you to make a Spot check but it apparently does not work that way. As Leo explained he would always, "Look at what was in a room before entering it."

Harris was the one to point out that the party was not entering a room, there was no change in scenery to prompt making the check. Harris then asked rhetorically, "Am I supposed to roll a Spot check each time I take a step?"

Leo did not even flinch or pause when he replied, "Yes."

The few sessions that followed are something of a blur but there were two major highlights. The first was the first and only time I had seen a DM chew out a player for missing a session. Hector had a special lady-friend that he spent the evening with instead, he was also good enough to have Harris tell Leo that he couldn't make it. Leo did not like this one bit.

The next time Hector showed up Leo told Hector that he couldn't just skip out like that because it was irresponsible. Hector reminded Leo that he did have Harris give him the message, which was the surest way to keep Leo informed. Leo retorted, "It's not Harris's responsibility, it's yours!"

To hear Leo go on you'd think that Hector had skipped a day of work or something, even worse is that Hector just stood there and took it.

The second major highlight was the introduction of our DMPC, a cleric whose name I forget but "Mary Sue" seems as good a name as any. Later we found out through Max that Leo had made her some levels higher than the PCs. I can't remember how many but I do recall that Mary could cast better healing spells than the druid and was a better melee-fighter than either the fighter or the paladin. It's also worth noting that Mary Sue was completely immune to the kinds of misfortunes that befell the party and unlike the rest of us she always knew when it was appropriate to roll Spot checks. Of course she always made them too. Now I don't think DMPCs are necessarily bad ideas, I do resent being made to play second fiddle to an NPC though. In my opinion if the PCs aren't the main heroes of a campaign, then they should be the main villains. In Leo's campaign it was clear that we were the mooks.

The final session is when the group came up against Max's band of barbarians raiding a village and occupying part of it. The party determined that the thing to do was to get the villagers to safety so the druid offered to turn into a hawk and scout the area. Now, the druid's player was always a very level-headed sort of player and probably our group's greatest asset. His plan really should have worked too but... well, it went like this:

Leo: "Max, you see a bird flying over your camp."

Max: "I have my archers shoot it down!"

and shoot it down they did. I think Harris even said, "Oh, come on! How many birds fly over that camp every day?"

The rogue, wizard and fighter started to evacuate the villagers to the best of their ability. I think. I know that's what they said they were doing, but nothing Leo said in response suggested that their efforts were successful. He was too busy having Mary Sue engage Max's barbarian in direct combat to the point of ignoring the other players. At one point somebody asked about where everyone was, Leo determined that the rogue, wizard and fighter are all close to the combat and unsure where Harris's paladin was said, "He's in a bar or something."

Harris had pretty much had enough by this point so he just said, "OK, if you want me to be in a bar, I guess I'm in a bar."

Armed with this new information Hector started asking if he could roll for initiative and getting flat out ignored. Perish the thought that anything interrupt Mary Sue's epic showdown with Max's barbarian! Anything except Harris of course, who declared what actions he was taking in the bar such as, "I find the deadly nightshade behind the bar and drink it because it looks good."

This actually got Leo attention enough to pause his encounter to explain that this village was built by a Lawful Good society and would certainly not have nightshade behind the bar. Leo then resumed to ignore the other players, Hector continued to ask if he could roll initiative to no answer. This continued until the combat no longer favored Mary Sue, it was around this point that Leo became outright mean. He bemoaned that it wasn't his fault that the players didn't know when to make their spot checks. Hector took this to be a hint to roll one and asked, "Does a Spot check of 5 notice the battle in front of me?"

Leo then shouted, "What do you think?" as though Hector had asked the dumbest question in the world

As Hector sat uncomprehendingly he was treated to an explanation of exactly why he couldn't not notice the battle in front of his face. Hector then asked if that was the case, could he roll initiative to which Leo responded with an exasperated "Yes!"

Hector's initiative wasn't good and he would not be able to participate in combat until the next round. This meant that Mary Sue might not survive, (oh no.) Leo then asked Harris why he wasn't trying to participate in combat, Harris told him that he was in a bar and probably couldn't see or hear what was outside. Leo was furious and demanded, "How could you go to a bar at a time like this?"

Harris reminded Leo, "You said that I was in a bar so that's where I am."

This frustrated Leo to the point that he declared Harris's god teleported him out of the bar into the middle of the combat and told him to get his act together.

Harris got a much better initiative result and got a chance to hit Max's barbarian, though I suspected that he'd rather mess with Leo because it was the only way left to have any fun so he noted that his attack had a penalty because he was not proficient with a beer mug as a weapon. What followed went something like this:

Leo: "Why would you use a beer mug? You have a Holy Avenger!"

Harris: "I set it down in the bar when I got a drink. The beer mug was in my hand when I teleported into the combat so I'll use that."

Leo: "You set down your Holy Avenger? That's the dumbest thing I've heard! If I had a Holy Avenger I'd never take it off for any reason!

Harris: "Even in the shower?"

Leo: "Yes! I'd bring it with me in the shower!"

I can't even comment on that. Max killed Mary Sue and Hector's character and Harris's blase reaction to all of this caused him to fall. The game and the group mercifully broke up after this and Harris was something of a blacklisted player afterwards. Even so, the beer mug shenanigans at the end are what most people involved remember. That's why when they talk about this campaign they usually call it "Beer Mug Paladin.”

The SUE System: Charge of the Derp Brigade

And now, the war.

I’m deviating a bit from script here, since this part was mostly non-interactive. Partly (mostly) this is because I’m still recovering files from my decrepit laptop’s latest hard drive explosion, but there was a lot of the war that the players did not see. I, on the other hand, got to have the whole sodding war explained to me bit by bit, before and after it took place around the players, because I was a handy target for unwanted exposition.

He built his campaign around Space Empires V. Specifically, a spare copy of SEV I had lying around. He subsequently “patched it up” and added a boatload of “purely aesthetic” mods, hypocrisy be darned, before playing it more than most WoW addicts. Not with other people; according to him his modifications meant he couldn’t use multiplayer. He also didn’t like the AI, because it kept beating him; he’d either play with the AI at a significant disadvantage or just iterate through the sides in hotseat mode, ostensibly because the AI didn’t play the empires he’d made up “correctly” and so was suitable only for generic enemies.

Admittedly, I’ve played strategy games against myself before; it’s the only way to explore the mechanics under controlled conditions, and I don’t know any other way to figure out the basics of Dominions 3. I don’t, however, think that bears any resemblance to an actual strategy, and this is where Marty and I differ. Efficiency has never been a concern of his, given he has all the time he wants, and so obviously the biggest guns are the best ones; given SEV’s rather simple weapon mechanics, this applied physically as well as economically. Then, too, he’d learned to avoid extraneous components, because he was exclusively firing guns so ludicrously enormous that armor couldn’t mass-effectively soak the burst damage. (Multiply redundant) shields could, but they consume Supply, which means every time he recharges his shields he’s losing gunshots. His ideal, then, was as many of the biggest gun he could come up with, welded onto the biggest hull he could get, and as little else as possible. Turtle up, race up the technology tree, and build them in huge hordes to be flung at the enemy en masse.

Enter Star Wars.

By any measure, its technology is laughably advanced; their civilian propulsion systems can drive them at several million c. Setting aside magic hyperdrives, they have twelve meter long starships that can accelerate at 37,000 m/s² (survivably!) while firing terajoule lasers indefinitely. Now, I look at this and call it magic. Chief looks at this and decides clearly it’s better technology than anything else out there and is therefore the logical choice. Oh, but not the starfighters. They are tiny and carry tiny guns. No, he needs the Eclipse. Quick Star Wars primer: The Eclipse-class Super Star Destroyer is a Star Destroyer scaled up by about a factor of ten with a miniature version of the Death Star superlaser mounted axially. (Yo, dawg, we embedded an enormous cylindrical cannon in your ludicrously huge pointy spaceship so you can overcompensate recursively.) Building one of these monstrosities is an exercise in painful stupidity. Building a second one after the first is the textbook definition of insanity.

Marty, last I asked him, figured on needing “at least a hundred thousand, to start with”. The existing Imperial Navy was apparently intended to be a feint while his REAL firepower was under construction. Admittedly, even with the “extra Kuats” he intended to put in place, this was a tall order, and he intended to economize by removing “extraneous components” like the fighter bays, point-defense gun emplacements, most of the armor, and a good deal of the life support.

“Using SEV as an estimate, I can get them to only cost a third as much to build and take a tenth of the crew.”

Oh, yes, that’s much more economical. Now each one only needs seventy thousand people willing to board the SSD Freudian Nightmare II and be flung into the far corners of the multiverse to die. See, he had a very short list of possible fates for his ships, most of which involved a ship that could no longer shoot ramming into either its targets or anything handy; he’d learned from SEV that extra ammo bays were a waste of space, because none of his ships lived long enough to run out.

I did try to explain that presenting this as a fait accompli was begging for disaster. I even rebuilt his ships in my copy of SEV, set them up, and showed how badly he lost at force projection to even my amateurish parodies of carrier battle groups. He always had one of two responses: “I’d have more ships than that” (a 5:1 resource advantage wasn’t enough, apparently) or “I see I won all the actual battles”. See, he counted a battle won if he had more ships surviving than his opponent did, but I counted the victor in terms of the relative industrial output expended. (Too simple, I know, but I was bad at strategy back then.) In short, if two of my ships and one of his mutually annihilated each other, but mine are produced more than twice as quickly, we’d both call the same engagement a win. So that was a waste of time.

He did, however, come up with a  third answer: Thrawn and Lelouch. He’d bought fully into the idea of the military genius with the single perfect plan, and that was what he intended his chosen generals to provide. Of course, given his ego, he really expected them simply to implement his own plan, as defined by his completely inflexible, one-unit military structure—but still relied on them for the kind of impossible victories they’d pulled off in the source fiction. He more or less halved his own losses down from what his chosen simulator indicated “because of the generals”.

He defined a strategic plan, too, although he never flatly admitted to implementing it: fly the fleet through the portals to simultaneously reach every inhabited point in the target reality, blast randomly selected planets to shards, then issue his standard join-me-or-die ultimatum. I can’t help feeling the sequence of events is suboptimal here. At any rate, he’d just wreck one planet every [unit of time] until they complied, and he’d go back to doing that at the first sign of noncompliance. Quite how he expected a military genius to implement that intelligently is beyond me; it’s not really the kind of plan you can optimize without chucking it entirely. Oh, but he had a propaganda department to deal with the backlash!

In sum: he intended to steamroll everyone with an immense fleet of thousands of ludicrously oversized disposable starships, relying on a cadre of “military geniuses” to optimally implement his planned heavy-handed omnicidal terrorism according to a plan devised by playing a completely unrelated videogame against himself for weeks. 

To be fair, this is his plan as he explained it to me; the PCs didn’t deal with most of it, even tangentially, and what they DID see was slightly different. Remember, they were members of the MIC, so for most of the initial war they saw very little. From the accounts I’ve gotten, they had a bunch of agents die and a bunch of realities drop off the grid before actually getting to respond.

Then Marty showed up, and Rick decided not to give up instantly, which was a problem. Naturally, Marty’s immune to everything, not that Rick doesn’t iterate through everything in his arsenal—including a hug while wearing half a dozen thermal detonators. These were psychically deactivated, then Marty decided to ignore him, walk into the MIC’s vault of reality-ending superweapons, take everything vaguely useful, and leave.

I have to give him an atom of credit here. The ensuing space battle saw them win, although from what I can tell it was against an insignificant fraction of Marty’s navy. That said, the GM was quick to point out that Marty’s forces were infinite, while the MIC’s were not, and so they were doomed no matter what they did.

A lot of silliness ensued with superweapons, propaganda-induced mass defection, and MIC-approved FLEIJA deployment out of Code Geass into critical Star Wars facilities including the Maw Installation…where they met clones of Marty taking the place of both the scientists and the guards. Because, you know, Marty’s the best they’ve got, and the whole galaxywide proscription on human cloning is just a technicality. Stormtroopers show up and are incredibly accurate (which I could see) and impenetrably well-armored (which I can’t). Seriously, they’re apparently almost immune to blasters, no matter what the movies show. Still, they pull it off…although the GM is quick to note Marty has built a backup Maw. Not a backup Maw Installation; he’s replicated the black hole cluster around it, too. It’s like a deranged cooking show: “and here’s an impossible gravitational anomaly we assembled earlier”. Anything to make the players’ actions irrelevant.

Oh, and Rick killed Darth Vader with a crapload of explosives, because Marty didn’t care enough to save someone so whiny. As the GM later explained to me, this was wholly intentional—Vader was too unstable to use and this was the most convenient way  to have him removed.

Then came the final battle, explicitly brought on by the players’ “terrorism”. Marty “himself” showed up, kicked the crap out of the base, and fought Rick one-on-one while the GM was constantly laughing about how easy he was going on the players. Of course, Marty’s still totally immune to everything up to and including a turbolaser, and he’s instantly healing any incidental damage. One would think someone would point Blackhawk at him and they’d ineffectually flail at each other for eternity, but Blackhawk’s long since disappeared. The players were simply told he’d disappeared before every mission they’d sent any agent on had failed; as per normal, it was exposited to me that he had in fact switched sides at the earliest opportunity. In his absence, there was only Rick, who kept firing until Marty once more got bored and gave everyone five minutes to leave via the newly constructed portal to who knows where before the entire base was annihilated. In his infinite mercy, the remaining MIC personnel could take anything they liked except for an immense list of things, and five minutes later the party was sitting in a field somewhere with two starfighters, assorted hand weapons, a hundred and fifty engineers and precisely nothing else.

And that was how he ended that semester of the campaign.

The SUE Files: Succession

All right. It looks like we’re not going to be able to get our missing writer back, so it falls to us to pick apart what the heck happened during the interim period between when I left the campaign and when I started hanging out with the actual players at the request of the DM. Since these are so fragmented, I’m going to blow through the points I can elaborate on; I’ll try to indicate elapsed times when I can, but for the most part these are just events.

So here’s the short version of Marty Stu’s rise to power: it starts with “politely” asking Emperor Palpatine for the Empire—and getting it after five minutes’ conversation. The central tenet of his argument was, to judge from the emergency speech the Emperor gave announcing the immediate transfer of power, that he’s clearly a much better person than Palpy so he “deserves” the empire.

The logistics of this are immensely amusing to me. He put this event in his timeline around Return of the Jedi, so he’s simply walking into the tower of the Second Death Star and the Emperor is so “intrigued by his audacity” that he waves off the Royal Guards—because clearly a sense of self-preservation is not a prerequisite for running a galaxy-spanning polity with an iron fist. Genre savvy? What’s that? At any rate, Marty points out that Palpatine is a speciesist and this means he’s dismissing potentially useful officers. This revelation has him running to the nearest communications terminal to ad-lib the formal transfer of power over the Galactic Empire to a total stranger. The whole process takes less time than the speech itself.

And it works flawlessly. Now, I admittedly don’t know everything I should about Star Wars, but I’m fairly sure the protocol for succession, if there even is one, is a bit more complicated than just saying “obey him as you would me” and changing the name on the office door. It seems like the kind of thing you might want to call a meeting about, for example, just to defray suspicion that someone had stolen the Emperor’s cell holophone and was having a laugh. It might also be a good idea to talk the new Emperor over the mechanics of running a very centralized Empire—especially when many elements under his direct control, like the Emperor’s Hands, depend on Force sensitivity the new guy does not possess. That, however, would take too long; Palpatine simply throws Marty the keys to the Death Star, hops in a shuttle, and happily retires. Total elapsed time is somewhere around ten minutes.

Even weirder, everyone just goes along with it. Given the type of person serving in the upper echelons of the Imperial Navy, I have to think they’d react to news this sudden rather differently. Less “oh goody, new management” and more “welp, the Emperor’s gone full-on Caligula. How much of the Empire can I grab?” It happened after Endor, did it not?

According to the GM, no it did not. You see, our GM has always had a tumultuous relationship with the idea of canonicity. For most works, he rules like this: if it’s not part of the show in the format of the show, whatever the show might be, it’s not canon. Star Trek’s canon is exclusively the movies and the TV series, for example, and not any of the books. Star Wars is a special case: he allows Zahn’s Heir to the Empire series and everything else is not canon. Functionally, this means very little: later on, when I suggest to the players that they go grab some of the superweapons scattered around the ROTJ-era galaxy, the immediate and slightly frightened response from the GM will be “EU is not canon”…right before he starts gushing about Thrawn again.

(To be fair, this is my fault. You see, he had gotten into the habit of giving me unsolicited descriptions of the considerable body of RPG material he created alone in his dorm. One of them was an insectoid race with a bunch of varying phenotypes that bore an uncanny resemblance to the Killiks, and I made the mistake of pointing that out. His vehement if intermittent insistence that everything he writes is wholly original led him to decide that the Killiks were “not really part of Star Wars”, for whatever good that was supposed to do him, and that snowballed into a small part of his present madness. It was only after this, for example, that he decided that any modifications to a video game by anyone other than the original publisher make it “not really the same game”, based on which he has insisted he’s the only one of us who’s ever really played the Elder Scrolls series. He’s also decided that modding itself is a form of plagiarism, somehow, although that’s nothing compared to the vitriol he reserves for indie devs and “their toxic effect on the sales of real [AAA] games”. )

That’s the closest explanation I’ve ever gotten from him on the matter of canonicity: it’s not what’s written, it’s the net worth of the writer. This will come up repeatedly in future setting hops, especially where WH40k is concerned: he’ll use The Black Library’s licensing mechanics to deny the remaining players access to Lord Castellan Creed, for one.

But in the present, the players are watching the speech in which control of the Galactic Empire is ceded to a total unknown, followed by the departure of the Imperial Fleet through inter-universe portals to conquer foreign lands. The whole fleet. Fans of the EU (I used to be; I kinda got tired of it, but I recall much useless data) might recall that the Navy’s critically shorthanded for most of the war, trying keep about a million old tensions from flaring back up into two- and three-system wars against a backdrop of piracy. This is of course lost on Marty, who apparently thinks the whole fleet sits around playing lawn darts with Star Destroyers when they aren’t invading Hoth.

Admittedly, he does explicitly leave behind all the support and logistical vessels that don’t have nice big guns on them so he can move their crews onto more Star Destroyers. This, too, will be a fixture of this “war”: military hardware, regardless of era, will effortlessly maintain itself against anything but deliberate enemy action. If, say, an aircraft carrier holds fifty aircraft, all fifty of them can be endlessly deployed simultaneously for as long as possible, because all you need to do is land them, refuel them, rearm them, and relaunch them, right? Not only that, it can do all that with a fraction of its crew complement, because it is itself a magical self-repairing wonder. The GM’s military is essentially a very efficient reactor: it takes in bullets and fuel, and only bullets and fuel, and spits out victory. The concept of regular wear and tear has never sunk in with him, nor the idea that a two-kilometer ship exposed to the vacuum of space will essentially be halfway broken all the time, which is why it needs a small army of engineers. No, in the GM’s world, the entire manufacturing capacity of the galaxy can be switched over to brand-new Eclipse-class SSDs with no real problems, because Marty wants his big guns. I mention this because one of the remaining players was a bit of a military nut, and would attempt a preemptive strike against the Navy’s supply lines only to be told “what supply lines? You haven’t fought them yet so they don’t need refills.” Followed shortly by  “what spare parts?” Ladies and gentlemen, Marty Tzu!

So that’s the start of the war: Marty takes over his favorite setting by asking nicely and fires its navy across the cosmos to murder everything. Next time, I can get into the mechanics of the war, which provides a handy explanation for why it’s his favorite.